The book’s title caught my eye instantly.  ”Visual Literacy”  Intriguing.  I took it home, and over the next few days, I learned just how blind I was to the art of visual communication. Completely illiterate.

The book begins with exercises: “By using four black squares of the same dimension, create a graphic image that best expresses the meanings of each of the following words:

order

increase

bold

congested

tension

playful

I gave it my best shot and then flipped the page, revealing sample answers from students at New York’s School of Visual Arts. Suddenly I realized just how illiterate I was.

I’ve since appreciated design more.  To further explore the importance of graphic design and visual communications, I dug up a few Exit Strategy NYC graphics.  I show our initial design attempts (done by yours truly).  At heart I’m a science/tech geek, so I’ll explain my inherently scientific thought process.  And then I show how a professional designer approached the same problem.

Exit Strategy Fans: enjoy this behind the scenes look!

Train Illustration.  How I approached the problem: Exit Strategy NYC shows subway riders which train door to use.  So each door needs an ‘on’ or ‘off’ state.  The MTA’s trains can be 10 cars, with 4 doors in each car.  That means 40 doors in a train.  We want the train to run vertically on the iPhone screen which is 460px high (it’s 480px minus 20px used by the time/battery/service strip at the top).  So dividing 460px by 40 doors means each door gets about 11px of space to indicate on or off.  With padding, there’s probably 5px of height for each door and 5px in between the doors.

Where I got stuck: 5px for a door isn’t large enough to stand out, even if it’s red and a few extra pixels wide.

How a graphic designer solved it: By making the train have a ‘slant’ to the side which increased the swatch of the door, allowing the red color to ‘pop’.  Also she made it 3D and beautiful.

Splash screen.  How I approached the problem: We wanted to communicate subway transit combined with the notion of exiting quickly. Inspired by an ‘exit’ sign, I attempted to overlay a transit like system on top of it. It’s hideous.

Where I got stuck: Everywhere! How could we possibly communicate something as intangible as “Which is the correct train door?” while keeping a transit theme.  Time to call in an expert.

How a graphic designer solved it: Sheer brilliance.  The zig-zag of the colored lines communicates subway lines.  These lines dump out at a subway door.  The ‘correct’ door is open with a silhouette of a running guy.  An arrow helps indicate that this is the right door. The entire image is done with bright and bold colors.

So if you’re wondering whether you really *need* that graphic designer — always lean towards ‘yes.’  They’ll bring a perspective to the product and the messaging that will pay for itself many times over.

Readers — have any embarrassing early design of your products you wish to share?

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Many of you might have received an email about a birthday party scheduled for tonight.  Hopefully you’re not planning on coming because the party isn’t mine — it’s actually a humorous misunderstanding caused by an overly aggressive planning web service.

Perhaps you’re familiar with Plancast.com – ’foursquare for the future.’  Well, last week I received a facebook invite to my friend Madeline’s birthday party. The event was titled “My Birthday Extravaganza (i.e. Maddy boops is an old lady).”

When I RSVP’d for the event, Plancast scraped the event and added it to my profile.

Then it e-mail blasted this to all of my friends:

And at some point Plancast also announced the event from my twitter account.

Five different friends emailed me to ask about the event. Some were disappointed they weren’t explicitly invited (“no party invite? i’m hurt”)  Other expressed their regrets that they couldn’t make it.  And some were just confused (“I completely got all the way to adding the party to my calendar in outlook, when i finally realized that it wasn’t your birthday party and you’ve never once been called maddy boops or whatever in my hearing”).

This is partially a result of the confusing name of the event.  But it also caused by Plancast’s lack of focus around who actually planned the event.  In fact, on my Plancast profile page it proudly announced “You planned this!”  This isn’t an issue for large scale public events where the host doesn’t matter, but for private events the system is a little bit broken.

Regardless, I’ll be sure to let you all know when I have my own birthday extravaganza!

(P.S.  Did you notice the awesome picture at the top?  They’re binary candlesticks!! “The only birthday candle you’ll ever need. One candle with 7 wicks that you light depending on your age. Works for birthdays 1 through 127.”)

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It’s been over six years since I graduated from FCS, a small and intimate Quaker high school near Philadelphia’s Main Line.  In that time, the country has been through several presidents, wars, terrorist attacks, and a recession.  In the technology world, dozens of startups have grown from idea to multi-million dollar acquisitions, and thousands of others have faded into obscurity.  In my own life, I’ve moved to NYC where I started and finished college, I’ve met thousands of people, cycled through different apartments, jobs, and friends.  My world view has changed radically.  But somehow FCS hasn’t changed a bit.

In a world where two years is considered a ‘long’ time to hold a job, FCS seems like an anomaly.  The place seems ageless.  The same faculty has been there for decades.  The same photographs, plaques and decorations are on the walls.  The classrooms look the same — the chairs and desks are in the same arrangements as the day I left.

In a world that seems to move a mile a minute, it’s nice to know that some things never change.

Happy Thanksgiving.

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Research In Motion’s new mobile application store will launch tomorrow at the CTIA Wireless trade show.  RIM’s Blackberry devices have twice the market share of Apple’s iPhone (19.5% versus 10.7%), so this is an exciting and potentially lucrative new distribution channel for app developers.

RIM will enforce a $3 minimum price point for paid apps, which is controversial given that many iPhone apps retail for $1.99 or $0.99.  Most of the media has taken this as a sign that RIM is trying to discourage “dumb apps” (fart apps, yo mama joke apps, trivial games) and instead encouraging more serious productivity apps targeted at Blackberry’s business-focused customer base.

A simple prediction: fart apps and its kind will still exist in paid form for the blackberry.  But they won’t be sold for $3.  Instead, we’re going to see the advent of packaged software bundles.  Small apps will become bundled together and the blackberry user will spend $3 and get a package of 5-10 dumb apps which would have cost 99c each on the iPhone.  An aggregation company will emerges, not unlike what Zepfrog is doing for the investment newsletter market.  This aggregation company will form relationships with individual programmers and merge their software while taking a health cut off the top.  (Anyone want to start this company with me?)

The other trend is that competing app stores without minimum prices will grow in popularity, like BerryStore.

Looking forward to your comments and thoughts.

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If you could see the difference, you’d see soap leaves an invisible layer of scum on your skin… Dove leaves no soap scum

Then, the scene suddenly switches to ultraviolet-murder-scene-lighting to reveals a woman covered with soap scum.  The ad labels it as an “artistic dramatization.”

Ok fine, so the election advertising has turned ugly lately but when did fear mongering become an acceptable tactic to sell soap?!

Martin Bishop points out that the ad is dramatically different from Dove’s earlier Campaign for Real Beauty and the jarring disconnect between messages may weaken the brand.  Personally, I can’t help but associate the ad (and the brand) with the frightening shower scene from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in which a beautiful woman suddenly changes into a hideous creature (see photo on left).

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Watch the Dove commercial below:

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