Another thing I’ve been up to in the last few weeks, some new signage for the front door of the office.

For the last week or so I’ve been working on some graphics for the inside of the new MOO office. Our meeting rooms are now Cyan, Magenta and Yellow (not my decision), so we have some lovely panels on the window of each room.

We also have new signage on the front door, but I will post pictures of that when I take a good camera in to work.

In case you haven’t seen the update on my site, on Monday this week I started work at MOO, as Web / Graphic Designer. I’m very, very excited about this and very proud to be a part of it all. Why not go and order yourselves some MiniCards if you’ve read this, they’re very good indeed. Jack joined us in the studio this evening for a quick game of Guitar (or is that Banjo) Hero. 

One of the reasons I traded in my P1i for the N95 was that the interface left me unsatisfied. Even a simple action like answering a call became quite a dull task, I didn’t feel rewarded in any way by the whole experience. There’s a certain sense of satisfaction associated with pressing a button to do something - even moreso when the button itself is ’satisfying’ to press.

With the iPhone setting standards in terms of interface design and user interaction (for phones, anyway), it seems quite sad to me that we appear to be nearing an era where phone buttons probably won’t exist. Buttons obviously have major restrictions - in that they’re only made to produce an on/off effect or in some examples a pressure sensitive effect. For me, touching a flat screen - even if it launches an amazing sequence of digital trickery and movement - is a very, very dull experience. You may be interacting with the media inside the phone, but you’re interacting with it on a very non-personal level, and the screen doesn’t give you anything back in return.

So is there any scope for having a next generation phone ‘interact’ with you, like the click back of a button when it’s pressed? It’s something I’d like to put to some people, to see if it’s just me with these crazy thoughts. Maybe the next step from a fully interactive, multi touch screen is a screen that somehow makes your content ‘touchable’, like braille. Imagine if a set of buttons raised from the screen when you wanted to make a call, and fell back when you’d finished dialling.

I haven’t posted anything on here for a while, so here goes with what I’m up to at the moment.I’m currently working on some web concepts for Ireland based Creative consultancy Greenhouse. More on that as the project progresses during the next few weeks, but it’s looking to be quite exciting, and could possibly involved some ‘3D’ icons (something I never thought I’d take an interest in… but thanks to Jack and James I now have a fascination for).

I’m also in talks with a company in the US about doing some work on an interface for a mobile application, which I am very, very excited about. My wandering thoughts on this blog were picked up a few weeks ago, it’s really nice that this is being read and people are understanding what I’m trying to get across.

I also did a bit of work for the Westway Arts project, doing some illustrator templates for some decorated utility boxes that should be appearing in West London in the next few weeks.

Finally… I am doing some graphics and promotional stuff for pinkdoodle.com, a kind of ‘creative persons’ eBay, started by a graduate from CSM last year. More on that as and when it happens.

Although I suppose technically I’m a designer, as you may gather from my blog I’ve got quite an interest in mobile technology and interfaces. Having used Nokia phones for years, and specifically ones running the Symbian OS, I’ve found that although the technology within the device is constantly developing and changing, the operating system has remained more or less the same for the last 4 or 5 years. I’ve changed to UIQ 3 on a Sony Ericsson P1i to see what the deal is, and after a week and a bit of use it seems to be more than user friendly and a nice step up from the limitations of S60.

Since the launch of the iPhone I think a new benchmark has been set in terms of interface design on phones, especially the way that applications work and interact with each other. There are probably hundreds of reviews on the net of the iPhone UI from people much more qualified than myself, so I won’t go into that.

Symbian recently previewed ‘Symbian Touch’, a touch screen version of their standard UI used on N series phones. I’ll let people make up their own minds, but I still think there’s a lot of developments that could have been made to the aesthetics of the interface - without directly copying the iPhone. Now phones have been opened up - the screen is now pretty much the size of the device - companies have almost infinite play over the way they use the screen as a canvas.

The development of the touch screen interface is probably as significant as the change from B+W LCD to colour screens, I think we’re yet to see the real ‘next generation’ mobile phone.

Got a few things coming up so decided to do myself some new business cards. 60 variations of various pictures I’ve taken - either of work, general stuff, or just plain interesting stuff.

I spent yesterday taking pictures for the annual Future Foundation conference ‘State of the Nation’, at the British Museum. The graphics worked on for the conference were used throughout the day. Some pics to follow.

Oh how I wish I’d have known about this a year ago. Some really nice ideas here, and some not so nice ones.

http://www.gadgetcentre.com/news/article/mps/UAN/614/v/1/sp/

The icons I worked on for Paul Clarke of the Helen Hamlyn Centre at the RCA are now being exhibited at the RCA, as part of the Vital Signs exhibition. It is on until the 4th October, go and have a look if you can make it.

 http://www.hhrc.rca.ac.uk/ne/ra_symp_07.html

I’ve done a bit of scribbling today trying to get my head around what it is I want to achieve. Not particularly successful, but I can see some signs of a definate movement.

My thinking at present is to create a dynamic set of icons that change based on the current position within the menu. For example, the transition from ‘messaging’ to ‘create message’ to ’send’ would be an experience, and you could visibly see the transition between each sub-menu. I hope that makes sense. It would allow the user to move between bits of the menu quickly and easily, and obviously be aesthetically pleasing. I’m quite into changing the whole ‘menu’ thing entirely and making navigation a completely different experience, but it’s going to take a bit of work and I still don’t really know the path I’m taking.

I’m planning to write myself a brief tomorrow to get my ideas in check, and go from there.

Well, I’ve started to have a think about my own little project on mobile interfaces. This is quite a task - I’m no interface designer, and already I can see that this is a well examined subject with probably some pretty concrete solutions already.

What I’m debating over with myself at the moment is whether to investigate the actual iconography that could potentially be used within the OS of a phone, or the physical menu structure that is used within the phone and how to make that more appealing.

I have an N73 as my current phone, and my used theme is currently this:

… Psiloc Redium. I was amazed when I saw this because there are so many horrible themes for Symbian based phones that not only look garish, but slow the phone down a lot. The main reason I use this theme is to keep my phone running well, as it’s vector based.

But… (and there is a but), the icons are pretty non-descript. I tend to find myself reading the text next to the icon rather than looking at the actual icon to find my way around - in fact thinking about it now, if someone asked me to draw the icon for ’settings’ there’s no way I could do it. Iconography for phones is stereotypically very samey, nothing stands out for me here.

My initial thought is to try and create something in between the glossy drop-shadowed world of the iPhone and the solid, stereotypical, helvetica man icons. I’m also going to try and get some funtionality in there, or some kind of visual device that shows progression of menus so you instantly know where you are in the menu system of the phone with one glance. If I could create some kind of visual reference for a tree-structure style menu in the icon, that would be great.

I’m going to carry on scribbling and thinking, but this is my first blog-rambling to get my thoughts in sync.

I’ve got a week or so free, so I’m planning on beginning my own investigation into mobile interfaces. I should hopefully be updating the blog day by day with some visual references, sketches, or anything I find. I’m starting off by reading an investigation called ‘Cultural Difference and Mobile Phone Interface Design: Icon Recognition According to Level of Abstraction’ to lay some foundations. Have a search on Google if you want to have a read. I’m planning on designing some icons to work with the interface, how successful it will be - well, we shall see.

This is going to be my first real investigation on my blog. I came across this link while browsing Flickr today at work.

Mike Rohde has ‘hacked’ a Moleskine plain note pad to become an organiser, to replace his usual PDA. Interesting concept in itself, but it leads to a more complicated argument - in the world of syncing PDAs, mobiles, iPods and the like to a fully functional iCal / similar piece of software that allows multi-calendars, email and visual notifications and the like, why would anyone want to turn back time and create the ‘ultimate’ manual diary?

I, like many others, use iCal regularly, even daily. It provides me with an easy to use and functional way of managing myself (which I couldn’t do without), and also allows me to sync with my Nokia so I know what I’m meant to be doing ‘on-the-go’. For quite an un-organised person, iCal makes me quite organised. But, why would someone want to go back to paper after the rise of accessibility of programs such as iCal in the last few years?

I have loads of old sketchbooks sitting around, both in London and at my parents’ house. These are full of doodles, scribbles, note taking, things to do, and a lot of other stuff. I rarely look back at sketchbooks once I’ve made notes, in fact hardly ever. Most of the pages in my books are probably never re-visited. But the reason I have so many old sketchbooks is simply this - there is nothing more satisfying than starting writing in a new, crisp sketch book or diary. Whether it’s going to make me more organised or not, writing in the book makes me think that I’m putting some order into my life, that every mark I make on the page is done for a reason and that each mark will be beneficial to me as an organised person.

What iCal is lacking, is the ability to scribble, to sketch, to create completely unique references that work for each specific individual and not making them work with a formula common to everyone with a Mac. In this sense iCal is relatively uniform and unflexible, it allows no personalisation. I still have two sketchbooks in my bag even though I run everything I need to do through iCal, because I like writing stuff. I still write things I need to do in my sketchbooks rather than noting them down on stickies or another digital form - a) because it’s more accessible, and b), because of the satisfaction factor.

This leads to a possible investigation looking at organisation software and personalisation. If someone could strike a balance between ease of use and synchronisation, and personalisation, you could have a winning piece of software on your hands. I’m not talking just using a graphics tablet to allow scribbling - I mean full scale personalisation in terms of keys, legends, colours, tables, graphs - whatever.

I may look in to this further when I have a spare few days, it is a very interesting topic though.

This man has turned 2 etch-a-sketch units into a set of digital decks, controlling individual sound tracks.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/petehindle/sets/1585642/