Links of the week #5

Timeline

Another approach to news, which aims to give you the context behind the headlines. Timeline presents the events behind a current news topic, you guessed it, in a timeline. There’s much to be said for the timeline approach in displaying relevant, related content to give greater understanding to a topic. Lots of sites are using elements of it (for example, The Verge’s ’story stream’). I’ll be interested to see how successful a standalone app does.

Watch the promo video here.

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“There is a small but growing group of designers that have a passion for designing business”

– Design and the Corporation: A reply from Darrel Rhea

Links of the week #4

Where I Went Right

The Guardian’s been busy working with the brilliant Sennep on an interactive series of videos of innovators, including Sir Tim Berners Lee, Maggie Aderin-Pockock, Ranulph Fiennes and Alice Roberts.

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The year in graphics

I know it’s mid(end) of January, but have just stumbled across the Washington Post’s round-up of their digital graphics from 2014, all in one, handy place.

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Archive and Estate is a divinely beautiful set of photographs.

Links of the week #3

Choose your own (Twitter) adventure

Start here

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HTML ads by Monotype

I’m a little behind the times on this one – Monotype are injecting a bit of much needed attention into the responsive ad challenge. It’s clear the ad industry isn’t going to go responsive over night. The onus is going to be on publishers to demonstrate the value of going responsive in order to prove to brands that the extra effort and cost in creating HTML ads will deliver a better return.

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18th century books looked like smartphone screens

Lovely musings on the similarities between 18th century octavo books and smartphone screen design today. Some delicious typographical references in Conjectures on Original Composition.

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“The genius was completely in its presentation; rather than reporting the public results of a data set, the Times turned it into an interactive quiz, making every reader a lab rat.”

—The Upshot: Where the New York Times is re-designing the news

Links of the week #2

Studio Kallborm

Re-discovered the brilliant, Swedish based Studio Kallborm. The forces behind one of my favourite apps, Artsy.

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NYT’s The Dawn Wall

The hyper-realness of this isn’t to my taste, but the rendering and performance of the experience is pretty amazing.

Links of the week #1

Atterwasch

A beast of an interactive documentary, which beautifully combines cinematic panning techniques with illustration.

With interactive documentaries becoming increasingly ambitious, they have a challenge to provide an enhanced experience to that of a video documentary. A lot of interactive documentaries around are a scroll-a-thon through what is effectively a long video. Personally, if the interactivity isn’t adding to the experience, I would rather watch a film and let someone else control the pace for me.

 

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Mike Will Made-It

Yet another winner from OK FOCUS. Hitting keyboard keys plays film snippets interspersed by some random dotted line patterns.

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Berrie

Some fabulously fun image transitions going on at weareberrie.com

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Longer reads

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The New Yorker: The Virologist – How a young entrepreneur built an empire by repackaging memes

 

Victory Journal

Victory Journal is, and continues to be, one of the best executed magazine sites around. Whilst simple in construction, it makes stunning use of photography, illustration and typography to bring stories to life, particularly on some of it’s longer features, such as this one, about former MLB pitcher Orlando Hernandez’s escape from Cuba.

Material Interaction

A strong demonstration of some of Material Design’s animation and interaction principles from Jongmin Kim. It shows how the key interaction principles founded in dimensionality and tactility lay the foundations for some really satisfying interactions.

www.material.cmiscm.com/

Vine shifts from comedy clips to valid journalistic tool

“Just as the tweet is the boiled-down version of the blog post, which is the boiled-down version of the essay, a Vine is the boiled-down version of a TV package, which is a boiled-down version of a documentary,” says Marc Blank-Settle

Vine shifts from comedy clips to valid journalistic tool, via The Guardian

Illustration in product design

via subtraction.com

Illustration has suffered greatly since the start of visual media, but the incorporation of illustration by Google in their new Android Calendar app shows what a strong visual asset it can be. Whilst the style itself is a little twee for my tastes, it brings a degree of warmth to the experience that vectors struggle to attain.

Apple’s new typeface, San Francisco

Apple very quietly have released their new custom typeface, San Francisco, within a bundle of developer tools called ‘Watchkit’. Contained within a folder sat 23 variations of the new Apple system font.

From the looks of it, it has been inspired by Helvetica and FF Din, and works well on smaller displays. It remains to be seen as to whether it will be rolled out to the rest of Apple’s products.

You can download the fonts here.