Delightful New R160A Trains

New York subway have finally made its step forward to the 1990's with a new set of trains, and I'm very pleased with them. It features a few good designs that are unique to the New York subway system. Here is my brief photo encounter:

 
As there are way too many stations in the New York subway, it is impossible to fit the whole subway map on the display. As a result, only stations on a single line are displayed. The use of a completely electronic display allows trains to be coordinated to run on other lines for peak hours. There is also a LCD monitor on the far left to allow display of various subway promotions.

This is a nice flushed detail for accommodating the altering roof heights. The black plexiglass blends in with the LCD display very well. Commuters are amazed by this detail as they ride to the Hipster Capital.

 
There are external speakers on every train. This is necessary for New York subway because it is almost impossible for MTA to install a speaker system on its 500+ platforms. Putting speakers on the train ensures that stations are announced properly instead of the train operator speaking gibberish.

Oh my, My Apple Genius!

The song and music video, conceived by my talented activist great friend Miss Lauren Larken, criticizes the veil between a person being truly personal and a technical support acting personal for your services, while suggests that a corporate love is perhaps possible as well as we break our preconceptions and let our imagination go wild.

The kids staged a few improv dances inside and outside Apple Stores around Manhattan a couple weeks ago. I was in the dance, too, making fun of the Apple products that I love and hate, while handing out heart-shaped balloons that resemble their oh-so-glorious logo.

The video was released on Valentines' Day, and a few performances followed.

On the back side of the project, I also designed the animation for the opening and the karaoke session. Everything was done in Adobe AfterEffects and Illustrator, the same tool I used for the over-the-top Trillian Astra preview movie. (Watch it over and over again while it's still up!)

Faking the space with some simple polar distortion. Well, not so good.

Simple 3D layers and motion paths were used, plus a few custom space-y background effects inspired by tutorials of Andrew Kramer. His tutorials are intuitive and helpful, and I would recommend everyone to watch them if you are interested in animation effects more advanced than Flash.

"Subtle arrogance" through font weight: Notice how there is hardly a U, there is only i.

Imitating Apple is always educational, as you learn how to restrain yourself from using way to many effects while giving the products a nice professional finish. Just having a few pixels or centimeters off will ruin your composition, while picking the wrong highlights and shadows will end up looking like a fake. However, make sure you don't end up ripping off the whole design!

"A Good Skin"

Not exactly a feat in design, but a feat in code optimization.

This skin was made as a proof of concept long time ago, when I designed the Custom Windows feature. As skins get more and more complex (Trillian Cordonata is 700+KB of hand code), the goal is to create a new subsystem that allows creation of skin in the least amount of code possible.

The solution is to have a base skin that encompasses everything that needs to be skinned, and to allow major parts of the skin (e.g. Contact List, Chat Windows) to be swap-able. It is unprecedented in any skinning engines in the world, as Trillian slowly becomes highly intricate and increasingly complex.

Originally based on Stixe, Custom Windows allow creation of skins that is semi-dependent on the base skin. The result is the ability for users to mix and match bits and parts of a skin, and the ability for skinners to easily create a skin as a weekend project.

"A Good Skin" contains around 20 lines of code, and only take an hour to bash out the graphics and codes.

Comparing the months and years spent on Trillian Cordonata, this is quite a feat.

You can download the skin here for a test drive.

An Icon for a Group of Chat Rooms

Another day, another incremental build forward for Trillian Astra. As the new build 77 features a new Chat Room Browser UI design, I designed a few new icons to accompany it.

The main problem of a "Chat Room" icon is that there is hardly ever a general icon designed for it. A search on Google Images for idea reveals nothing particularly interesting:

Most designs retreats to the method used by Chinese characters as concepts get more and more complicated, i.e. 3 chat bubbles imply that it is not 1-to-1 conversation, thus a chat room or a conference:

This design would work, but, until the concept of "Chat Room Groups" come up in the Yahoo! Chat Browser. And very soon we would find ourselves drowning in the vortex of the most complicated Chinese character if we put forward such logic:

The solution is to replace the icon with a new concept. In this case, I drew a little House with a chat bubble blowing through its chimney to represent a Chat Room. As users learn that a house represents a Chat Room, they will also understand that a few houses represents a group of Chat Rooms. (Let's see how many other chat clients and chat sites would rip this idea off.)

I know, this is pretty minute, but it saves you from a bubble bath in the Chat Room Browser. :)

The Best House Ever

Somewhere in East Hampton, architects (and artists, or poets) Madeline Gins and Arakawa had built a house that defies death. (NYTimes interview)

It's an adventurous sandbox enclosed within the protective shelter of a box. That's what fending off bears in wild nature cannot give you. The green ceiling reminds you that you are protected in the grace of architecture.

While adults put expensive toys (e.g. stereo, cars, gym equipment) inside their house, in this case, all those expensive toys happened to be a playful (and challenging) landscape.

This is like playing in a MMORPG/Second Life sandbox in your Xbox or Playstation, but now magnified to reality... but what isn't?

You can climb around the landscape the house, and reach the orange electric socket on the ceiling.

The artists declared that the design of the house is not to make you accept reality, but to defy it.

It's the best house ever, yet.