It’s been a while since I took photos of anything worth while. I’m glad these turned out OK. Taken with Nikon D90, Sigma 70-300mm. My fingers are very numb still, from standing outside for about an hour. Tonight I found out how fast the Moon moves. Shots that were longer than 4 second exposure were blurred.

By now you have probably seen the new iTunes 10 icon revealed by Steve Jobs during the Keynotes yesterday. As he explained, the reason for the icon redesign is to lose the compact disc concept in the old version. Since the reveal, I noticed several of my designer friends weren’t too thrilled with the new icon. I don’t hate it myself, but I’m also not too impressed with it. The music note is too large for the icon as a whole, and it feels awkwardly forced onto the background. It doesn’t have that consistent “breathing room” found in the other OSX round icons. See Dashboard, Time Machine, Safari etc.

My Take

I feel the single 8th note looks better than the current beamed notes because the curves look more harmonious with the circular icon shape. Of course this deviates from the original icon. For branding consistency it may not be a good choice on my part. I also ditched the blues. There are way too many blue icons out there already. To me, music should be more energizing and more lively. I went with a subtle rainbow palette in the center and an orange as the base color.

I can’t say my version is better, since I totally ignored the branding concerns. But I’ll be using this version on my desktop.

Update

I found some great iTunes 10 icons created by other talent designers. Check out Chris Carlozzi and Angela.

I love macro photography. It makes me more aware of the texture, curve, and shape of individual pieces of a greater whole. Then when I move my eyes from the view finder I realize how all these small details share the same design elements. I become more appreciative of the designer who made these things.

That quote by _why is probably the best design advice out there today. No amount of reading inspirational design quotes, surfing design galleries, writing about other people’s work or attending conferences mean anything if I’m not creating. This post is a gentle reminder for myself that I am designer. I design. I’m not a curator, a marketer or a design pundit.

I think with the vastly available blogging tools and community sharing, it’s so easy to be allured by the idea of talking about design, instead of actually creating things. There was a time when great designers were celebrated by their actual work, not by their writings on design, or their tastes. When I look at some popular web design celebrities’ sites, I rarely see any body of work but a mountain of writing on design and meta posts. I’m very guilty of this too.

It’s easy to create a facade of what a great designer you are these days. It’s easy to write about the ideas you have, rather than seeing those ideas become fruition. It’s easy to justify your good tastes by showing others the type of stuff you like, instead of stuff you make. It’s easy to be a critic than a doer.

This isn’t a jab at those who write design blogs. There are several whom I have great respect for. Writing is an important skill for a designer to have and blogging is the perfect platform to enhance that skill. However, let’s not forget why we are in this profession in the first place. We’re designers, we create stuff.

The culture must satisfy tribal instincts. If a culture exists, it must have a reason for existing. The only valid reason for a particular culture is that it provides a value for its members perceived by them to be greater than that offered by any other culture. It must differentiate in some manner. If a member of a culture is not loyal to that culture, he should move to a culture in which he is comfortable or abandon all culture. Remaining in a culture (or being allowed to do so) while antagonistic to it is not acceptable in any culture. If many members rebel, the culture collapses, as can be seen in the American culture today. The only successful cultures in America today (if there are any) are the subcultures. Only there can the tribal instincts be served.

A History of Human Culture

It’s been fourteen months since I switched to Mac, after being a PC user for almost two decades. I’ve been keeping track of how long it’s been since I made the switch because I had planned to write this big glorious post on the one year mark. It’d be a post about how much I love my iMac. Not just iMac, but also how much I love my iPhone, iPad, Macbook Pro and the wonderful UI/Marketing Apple creates. It’d be a post that would generate tons positive comments from other Mac users, and a few anti-Apple ones from PC users. There would be a big flame war in the comment section and I eventually have to turn commenting off.

In other words, it’d be a post just like thousands of others out there, and one that has very little value.

I think it’s more interesting to make observations about the culture instead. Not just the Apple culture, but sub-cultures in general. Over the year I’ve heard, read and participated in many debates on “X vs. Y.” In most cases the debate got to the religious level, and at the end they were no longer about objective views. Is our association with a product, a tool, or a piece of clothing a symbol of individuality or a mere tribal mark? Is it ever about if tribe X is better than tribe Y? Maybe our caveman instinct tells us to grow bigger as a collective group so we can feel safer about ourselves?

We tried making our software available as a hosted white label product called Stack Exchange. We thought that other people would create awesome sites on every imaginable topic. Some people did (yay!), but it wasn’t the flood of high quality sites we were hoping for.

Essentially, we decided that Stack Exchange was failing because:

• Only people with money to burn or a business plan could create sites.
• Those people didn’t necessarily have the ability to bring an audience.

In other words, it was simultaneously too easy and too hard to create a new, working Stack Exchange site.

If you are the type who keeps up with tech news, you probably heard that back in May StackOverflow raised six million dollars from a group of VC investors. This funding not only allowed the company to provide the service for free, but also to set up a filtering system for quality Q&A site proposals to be launched. You can read Joel’s post on how the new Stack Exchange system works.

Area51

A few months ago while I still worked at my old job at the FCC, I started to become more involved in my freelance work for Jeff. One night, he sent me a URL to a development server and told me to take a look at it. Below is what I saw (note: at the time the content was different).

“What is this… Area51?” I asked. Jeff told me it’s the staging site where people can propose new Stack Exchange 2.0 Q&A ideas. If the proposals gain enough audience and support, then they’ll be launched as beta sites. “We took care of the back-end functionalities. Can you design a new look for it? And design it fast.” Jeff stressed the “fast” part.

Design Process

I spent the next 30 minutes staring at the existing design. Jeff told me Joel had commissioned the talented illustrator Terry Colon for the art work on the site. I never designed a site based on someone else’s art work before. This was a first for me. Looking at the whimsical nature of Terry’s art, I quickly got the message that Joel wanted the site to have a light hearted feel. It made sense to me since the new site should appeal to all audiences, not just techies. However designing the rest of the site around the two banners was a challenge. For one, I’m not a great illustrator. I can’t add much new graphic art that matches Terry’s style. Secondly, the banners themselves already drew way too much attention, and were dominating the rest of the site. Also, I felt they looked more like Ad banners the way they were positioned.

Instead of designing around the banners, I decided to make the entire site have the feeling that was contained within the banners. This way, I could break up the individual aliens and spaceships and use them throughout the site. The idea the banners conveyed was ships being launched, a metaphor for launching new sites. I decided to take the metaphor further: how about we launch to the moon? Terry already had a starry night sky in his art work. I felt it was the perfect background to use for the site. So the header would be the moonlit sky, the footer area the ground and everything in-between the site content. Not only this would serve the theme of the site, but also the design elements would gently fade in the background instead of being obtrusive.

I always pick the color palette first before I start designing the specifics. To me colors are the most important elements because they’re what the brain interprets first. The appropriate colors are responsible for the type of emotion you want to evoke. Luckily for me, I didn’t have to spend too much effort picking the right colors. I used the colors from Terry’s artwork.

For the typeface choice, I wanted something bold and loud for the proposal titles on the homepage because they’re the most important text. Also such a typeface would provide a balance to the “cuteness” of the graphical arts. After a few tries, I decided to go with the web-safe font Impact. iPad doesn’t support Impact, so I used “Futura-CondensedExtraBold” for fallback.

Result

After a few hours of pixel pushing, I was pleased with the overall look. I felt the design accomplished the goal of providing a whimsical mood and emphasized the right elements. In the next few days I collaborated with David and Emmett, the super talented Stack Overflow NYC programmers to implement the design. Area51 was launched in early June.

The screenshots above are taken from the live site. Since the first draft of the initial design, we have tweaked a lot of the UI elements. Not just how they look, but also how they behave.

Since the site went live, about 1,000 proposals have been created by the public and the site itself has been well received. Many of the proposals have been launched as beta sites. Area51 is one of the most fun and rewarding sites I’ve worked on. Design-wise it was a challenge since this kind of design isn’t my typical style. I’m very thrilled the site is being used by 12,000 registered users to create useful Q&A sites. You can see all the new beta sites at Stackexchange.com.

Here are some of my favorite Q&A sites, check them out!

• Gaming
• Food and Cooking
• Photography and Photographic Editing
• English Language and Usage
• User Interface

Blooper

Here’s one of the initial design concepts I canned. As you can see, it suffered from “over design.”

I absolutely love the Hirshhorn Museum in DC. I’ve visited the museum a few more times since I last posted about it. Below, you’ll find some selected shots I took over the past few months.

Many exhibits have come and gone. I find myself more in love with the museum itself, rather than the artwork it displays. I love the spatial arrangement inside and the overall architecture. There’s something about it that’s very soothing to me. Maybe it’s because of its round shape, or the openness I feel as I linger inside.

When I redesigned this blog, I mentioned that the Hirshhorn Museum was a big inspiration. I hope I have captured its tranquility.

If you’re ever in DC area, you should definitely check it out.

Some stats: Exposure: 10s, Aperture: f/11, Focal Length: 24mm, ISO Speed: 400. Cropped and resized in Photoshop.

If you like her, you may also enjoy some of my other favorite tracks by various artists:

• Caramel by Suzanne Vega
• Bad Wisdom by Suzanne Vega
• Pink Champagne by Venus Hum
• Trigger Happy Jack by Poe
• Trouble with a Friend by Lenka
• Lonely by Yael Naim
• Creep by Scala & Kolacny Brothers

Have a good weekend.