I love NYC Subway signage so much I even based part of my architecture thesis project on it. The signage system is not one man’s effort, but a collaboration of designers and workers (and committee members) over time.

I was at the lecture last night, on “Unimark International and the New York Subway System”, which talked about the signage system and how it came along.

Out of the whole panel, Massimo Vignelli, one of the designers of Unimark International back in the 1960s who designed the signage system, is the sharpest critic of them all. Their research was extensive and very innovative by the 1960’s standards, for there was hardly any signage system of such scale back in the days, besides highway signs.

Paul Shaw, an art historian who extensively researched the signage system of the subway, also knows what he is talking about, and he talked us through the history of the new modernized signs in the past 50 years. You can read more about his research in his excellent book, “Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The True (Maybe) Story”.

They talked about the difficulties of implementing the system. One was funding, and the other was bureaucracy. The aesthetics part was easy, but the implementation was difficult. And as a result, a whole signage manual was created to ensure the process. However, the signage system did not get implemented systemwide until 1980s, when corporate culture came around and NYCTA understood the need to unify their image.

Implementation was the hard part, as Michael Hertz, one of the people responsible for the 1979 subway map, pointed out. I applaud his team for not being a theorist and doing the grunt work, but am disappointed by the fact that NYCTA did re-hire Vignelli for signage systems. The fact that the new designers did not defend for simplicity further decays the usefulness of the map and signs, by clogging them with less direct and less useful information. I call that a feature creep.

When asked about the new electronic signs lacking color, which is extremely important to differentiating between subway lines, the future designers of signage system offered no solutions, but instead over-optimistically hoping future electronic signs will have colors. They also pointed out that electronic signs require coordination between more departments, such as people responsible for building trains. Well, if that’s the case, I believe they should be more proactive in defending their signage system, and not just lament about it.

Most surprisingly, while the panel complained and was perplexed by why and when the signs were changed from black on white to white on black, an employee from the sign shop, John, stood up and defended for the team. He stated a very good reason for such change: dirt. All in a sudden, the pragmatism of cleaning triumphs aesthetics and cleaning. In dirt we trust!

It was funny because all the graphic designers on stage blamed how the people at the sign shop did not fully understand the system they devised, but it was exactly the people at the sign shop who actually understood all the nuances that required all the exceptions of the Manual (or ‘bible’) to be made. Talk about the gap between experts who would not touch a dirty tool and workers who do things hands on.

I learnt a lot from what Vignelli had said about his signage design, and it helps me justify the new icon system I am going to implement for Trillian. Unified signage clarifies the system and reduces the need for redundancy, and also helps user to learn the system in long run.

At the end of the lecture, I told Massimo that I am a big fan of his work. He replied, “I’m a big fan of your hair, too!” Funny man.

Today’s blog blitz came as a surprise to me as I have not even completed the Harlequin Project yet, but it’s all over the news already. I do see the appeal of working with dual screens, and the potential UIs that can be productive and futuristic, though I didn’t realize the urge is this great.  As a UX designer, I’m still trying to sort this out.

Microsoft nailed the idea with Courier, and I hope they do come out with something soon, or people like me or other companies will start ‘borrowing’ it for their own.

As a record for myself, here’s a list of blogs that mentioned the project:

• Engadget: Modder creates dual-screen Courier from Dell Mini 9, calls it Harlequin, Joker unavailable for comment – I will definitely look for Joker in my next update. Again, thanks Mr. Tim Robbins for the post!
• Gizmodo: DIY Courier Is Both Sad and Ingenious (10000 views, great! And thanks to commenters defending for Giz’s unnecessary harshness. Also on Reddit.) – Giz, I’m very happy and Ima let you finish, but Engadget is
• Liliputing: DIY Courier tablet consists of Dell Mini 9 + 2 touchscreens
• Thanks to Netbooked for unearthing the news, and Slashgear for spreading it!
• Also on: New Netbook Reviews, Slashgear, GottabeMobile, EEEPC – Blog, Ubergizmo, Mobile Computer Magazine (UK), Netbook Choice, Gadget Venue and Génération Tactile (France).

I had been working hard on the House of Yes Christmas Spectacular for the past few weeks, so I haven’t worked much on the tablet, except I took apart everything even more. It’s time to go back to the lab more!

Thanks a lot again, Internet!

On another note, I just won a Woot! Bag of Crap.

Massimo Vignelli seems to have an unusually high optimism for the Modern age, as he thinks that change is inevitable every 10 years. Nevertheless, this is an interesting analysis showing the progressions or cycles in styles in design (or mostly graphic design). Since Vignelli had already filled in 60’s to 80’s, so let’s fill in 90’s and 2000’s!

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This concept was done a while ago, but I was too lazy to blog about it. It’s a little too late since voting has already ended… but anyway, since you are reading this page, you wouldn’t mind seeing something new, right?

I had been designing user interfaces for various software for a long time. Most of my work is realized in Trillian Astra, of course. Though I had already reserved all my ideas related to chat and social messaging to Trillian, there are still plenty of stray ideas left on the cutting table. I figured it will be nice to contribute some to the future of the web, like this particular contest from Mozilla Labs Concept Series. The challenge of the Summer contest is to design a replacement for tabs in a web browser.

The concept here I had designed is called “Browspace”. The general idea is to create usable tabs by employing web page rendering technologies we had discovered in developing mobile browsers into the desktop.

By converging desktop and mobile browser technologies, we will able to generate a fluid environment where as much content as pleased can be fitted to the limited, yet ever-increasing, desktop real estate.

There are more and more people with monitors of high screen resolutions, and as we know, web pages are facing a design problem of whether or not to support screens of such sizes while neglecting people with small screens.

I’m pretty sure we had seen people with a monitor with 1600×1200 resolution, to have a browser window maximized, but the web pages are dangling in the middle with huge areas left on the sides. Likewise, we had also seen people with still 800×600 monitors (and increasing so with the advent of MIDs), hopelessly trying to scroll left and right, back and forth!

There must be a better solution to optimize web pages to screen sizes, and I think mobile browsers did a great job… despite to the horror of web designers, those browsers sliced and diced the pages to readable bits that distort the proportions of the site completely…

…which reminds me at the end of the day, content is king. It is much more important to be able to read every bit of information, than to be able to see the web site rendered pixel perfect. Therefore, when pages and tab thumbnails are displayed with such limited space, I will propose that meaningful content – where the page will be scaled down only to the point the text is legible enough – should be displayed, instead of simply having an arbitrary thumbnail of the whole site.

The result, as simplistic as it may seem, is a proposal for a better way to render site thumbnails for tabs.

For example, a tab with an RSS feed will be rendered as a list of news items, and a tab for a normal page will be rendered as an excerpt of the paragraph you were reading.

For further reading, the full proposal is now posted at: http://www.arkidect.com/project/browspace/

It is also accompanied with a short video demo: http://vimeo.com/5273372

If you are interested in the concept, or if you are a developer interested in taking the concept to reality, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Thanks!

I have to take back my criticisms a couple weeks ago on these fine music folks.

Marvelous Flickr photoset of tonight by zimbablade

I first saw the Decemberists by recommendation with a group of friends. I did not know any of their songs but still managed to have a great time, because their frontman, Colin Meloy, is an expert in interacting with the crowd. Besides talking a lot (really a lot) between songs, he has lots of stage antics that sets the band apart from the rest. For example, he would divide the crowd in half, and conduct them to sing along in an extended chorus, or invite people from the floor to replace the guitarists for a fake jam, and so on. I enjoyed the show a lot, and soon the songs were catchy enough they ended up in my record collection.

They did none of that tonight.

At least before encore. Instead of going for their usual stunts, they went for the extraordinary: The gutsy band dared to play their new album in its entirety. Their new album, "The Hazards of Love", does not sound exactly outstanding on record and received mixed reviews, but that is because we will not understand it until we see it performed live in its entirety: It is really meant to be a rock opera.

A non-stop, intense ride of music telling a tragic love story with precise and pristine musical sensibility, the show is a blend of genres from the last whole century: folk, bluegrass, metal and rock all melt into one album. And unlike most records, the album is arranged to be playable live, thus the lack of strange sound samples or hooks. Despite the fact, they still manage to create great aural textures with a combination of many instruments, from chime to mandolin, a harpischord as well as a grand bass viola.

Colin Meloy does not exactly have the best voice (he sometimes cannot hit certain pitches), but that’s ok, he has great energy and emotion. Meanwhile, the female vocals were also highlight tonight. I love the commanding voice of Sarah Worden from My Brightest Diamond especially. I might check out their albums in the mean time.

Here is one of the highlights, “The Rake’s Song” (plus free download), a twisted wicked tale of a mass murderer who killed all of his sons and daughters, featuring 4 sets of drums playing simultaneously! Amazing! Enjoy!

As discussed with my circus friends, there are four types of circus, c, q, k and x:

1. Circus, with a ‘c’: Family circus. Happy frowns, dancing clowns, screaming sounds, flying hounds. Examples: Big Apple Circus, or clowns that visit your school.
2. Cirque, with a ‘q’: Artsy circus. Costumee di elaborato, musique de fancie, dancez with Buton, and no animal cruelty. Examples: Cirque du Soleil, Spiegeltent, cabarets.
3. Cirkus, with a ‘k’: Freak circus. Nails through the nose, swords through the throat, fire strikes the pose, pinbed without clothese. Examples: Coney Island Sideshow, 999 Eyes.
4. Circux, with an ‘x’: Adult circus. Ooo, it’s a pole. There, it’s a hole. Aaah, it’s a whip. Yeaaah, it’s a nip. Examples: The Moulin Rouge (back in the days), or pole dancers in your New Orleans neighborhood speakeasy.

I watched quite a few this year. I played in one. Here are my short reviews.

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My current (temporary) table is composed of two sawhorses and an Ikea PRONOMEN countertop, 8 feet long and 3 feet deep.

In response to the question on Unplgged:

Survey: Is Bigger Always Better?

It has to do with how often you want to return things back to their original place.

There is a sweet spot where it is neither too redundant to clean all the time, nor too much a burden to clean a lot of things at once, and that largely depends on your work. A writer who only uses a computer may still need a whole table of reference materials to map the brain, while an apparel designer will need a large table to lay all the fabric as well.

While I’m in a flow, returning tools, books or paper back to their drawers and shelves interrupts the workflow, thus counterproductive.

When I’m done with a project, I’ll return (and sometimes clean) the materials back to their position and state. Everything starts with a clean slate again.

But if I forget to do this step, that is where clutter begins: objects lost their original position and were placed arbitrarily on the desk. The key is to always find where these objects should belong… which unfortunately always ended up in the Miscellaneous box.

I find that there is nothing wrong to be embarrassed about a table with many many open files. It shows that I’m working, and not a neat freak that spends half my work time cleaning. I find people with clean tables all the time are a little OCD!

32×32 is slowly becoming the new 16×16.

16×16 was born

First of all, let’s go down the memory lane.

“Icons” were one of the most important part of GUIs (Graphical User Interface), and surely one that sets it apart from CLI (Command Line Interface). In the very beginning, there was only 32×32. The earliest graphical operating systems, e.g. Mac System 1.0, spotted only 32×32 icons.

Why 32×32, not 30×30, or even better, 1cm by 1cm? The size of the icon, using my educated guess, is due to the need to pack the files tightly inside a cluster in the file system. The first icons are monochrome, which consist of just 0s or 1s. 32×32 would mean 1024 bits = 128 bytes, which can be packed snuggly into clusters. The size was the compromise between system limitations and ergonomics. 32×32 would be about 24mm by 24mm in a normal 13” monitor back then.

While icons smaller than 32×32 were sometimes used in toolbars or file managers, it did not come to the front stage until Mac System 4, where smaller 16×16 icons are used in its Application Menu. Windows 95 later took this step forward to create a complete and colored Start Menu.

During the 1990s, we slowly transcended from 72dpi CRTs to the first 96dpi LCDs. By the first years of 2000s, we all had around 96dpi for our monitors. At this point, a 16×16 icon measures about 5mm x 5mm. (Try that on your monitor.)

16×16 is odd

We had the leisure of translating our system icons from jagged 2D to fully anti-aliased 3D, as system capabilities advanced.

However, it is not easy for the human eye to recognize a 3D icon clearly when the icon is so small. All the perspective illusion begins to fail, the pixels are squished together to become one blurry image, due to the limit of these 256 pixels, and that our eyes just cannot see that well (would be nice if someone can give me more citation on that).

As icons are pictograms of the software they are representing, they are pragmatic by nature. While aesthetics is helpful for daily usage, a strong correlation between the graphic and its text is more important.

To rectify the problem, 16×16 usually gets a special treatment: They are drawn in flat 2D as if they were graphical symbols to keep them easily recognizable with a good level of detail, for example:

32×32 joins the family

In the latest build 7048 of Windows 7, we see a new shift: The team drew some new 32×32 icons, in 2D.

As people have higher and higher pixel density for their monitors, it will be appropriate to have the 32×32 to be included as part of the ‘mini’ mode. In a couple years, 144dpi monitors will become the norm (e.g. your iPhone or G1 are already 144dpi). By then, a 32×32 icon will measure only a measly 5.5mm x 5.5mm – right back where 16×16 used to be.

 
Before and After from New York Times

Since some blogger generalized and predicted by authority that other bloggers are going to blog about it, I’m going to blog about it, just so you know.

After the fire, everyone forgot how mesmerized yet anxious (or indifferent) they were. And since there was no massive loss or death (1 firefighter dead though), everyone joined in to the great game of denial: blaming and human flaming.

And as usual, the biggest target that won’t even know you are attacking is the easiest to hit. Therefore, everyone starts attacking the titans like bacteria attacking a human being. The titans also learnt to be immune to your voices.

Architects hate themselves, so they pick on the architect of the building. Poor Rem Koolhaas. What has all these to do with the design of the building anyway? The fire sprinkler system was not even on yet.

Chinese also hate themselves, so they pick on their leaders for all kinds of conspiracies, while at the same time the Chinese media hates themselves as well. The more controversial the more outlandish the conspiracy is, the louder and faster it travels. (Update: Though it is indeed some colossal idiots from CCTV itself firing some fireworks. I wonder if the insurance would pay.)

Bloggers hate themselves, too, so they pick on whatever bigger blog there is talking about the news. This is when I read too many comments on blogs.

The Internet hates everybody, as they dream up sad migrant workers got lit up in flames.

This is what happens when something that is jaded by nature to be destroyed. Like a supermodel killed by anorexia, nobody cares about the lady but the sensation around it.

So what the **** can you do with a totally burnt building… but not burnt enough to collapse?

Perhaps the question is too predictable. Nobody bothered to answer. I guess they can replace all those expensive titanium with simple cheap corrugated steel. Nothing is impossible to fix. Fixing the building can just as well be part of the economy stimulus plan.

Well, this is a little too many simple tutorials here. But I figured this is itching me, so this may be itching you.

1. Click the arrow next to “Create Playlist” on the toolbar of Windows Media Player.
    
2. Select “Create Auto Playlist”.
   
3. Fill in the details as follows.
   
4. Done! You may want to sort the list by “Album” to make things easier to browse.

It’s very simple. Perhaps because how simple it is Microsoft decided to remove this from the standard feature set of WMP12 in W7.