Microsoft Surface - User Interface in Mauve.

When it comes to choosing colors for the web... there is still a universal liking for shades of blue, but i always wonder is blue the only color which is easy on eyes... I do keep experimenting on different shades. But today i hit upon one on microsoft's product venture 'Microsoft Surface' - An interactive Table, What they claim the product can do is, you can actually grab virtual data like photos, videos, games with your hands and move information between objects like 2 mobile phones with natural gesture and touch.

Here's a color which I have always felt as a shade very heavy - Mauve




Haven't thought of using this color in my designs even in wildest of my dreams... But the designers have dared to use it as their base color with a very interesting gradient mix up with prussian blue, tinge of orange and black. The logo was even more interesting... Its is obvious that they have tried to create an abstract representation of touches, stretches and spin... which again is a mauve and orange. The logo and the color, to me has a very good scope for branding and extending unique identity to other medias like print as well.


Click on the image to enlarge

The product capabilities and the rich interactive experience show cased in their site leaves you with a WOW feeling. It definitely cutoff my mind set for Mauve which I had right from college days.

You can check out the colors and read more about the product at: http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Country where Designers are Rockstars!

I'm a frequenter to Coroflot - The online design portfolio management site where designers can post and view great work. If you are creative contributor I strongly recommend coroflot.

Designers - rockstar survey - Coroflot took the average salaries of the top 14 countries in the recent survey and ran them through The Economist's Big Mac Index. "Rock-osity - is the Units in which a designer value is measured( In some countries designers are simply hotter commodities - and as is the case with rockstars, demand turns into dollar$$$. And this is why they measure the degree of this demand in units of "rock-osity")

Here's the resuts (courtesy http://www.coroflot.com/community/salary_survey.asp). A bar graph or rather the rock graph which indicates the value for designer in each country...

Hongkong I guess is the place to be followed by India.

Loading... (an interesting representation)

The topic says it all... I happened to bump over the IBM express site today and was awestruck by the way they have used the rich media technology to enhance user experience.

In a nutshell, if usability is about helping the user get the content they are looking for without any hassle... well then this site has definitely done a good job. Conceptualized in a very interesting way, a job well done.

So here's what I liked the most about the design adding value to user experience "Loading files(streaming) is done in an intesting way: The whole design revolves around choosing which floor you want to visit and you get a virtual feeling you are taken there via the elevator. As you choose the solution of technology you want to visit the elevator takes you up and parallely uses this gap to load the file... For once i felt nice about waiting for the content to stream.

check it out: http://express-portfolio.com/ibm/?

You'll know what i mean.

The Design School I went to

Government college of Fine Arts (formerly Madras school of Arts) - The first ever School of Industrial Arts established in India in 1850, which later became the Madras school of Arts and Crafts and then College of Fine arts as it is now known. It was started by the british more as a training center for crafts. (I still remember seeing photographs of my supeeeeer senior: sitting with pot making wheel with half shaved hair and raised hair locks with traditional panchakacham like outfits and working in class rooms - This photographs is in the college museum now)

Picture courtesy - The Artocrats, an online alumni community of GCAC

The college took up arts and crafts more seriuosly as an education system when Debiprasad Roy Choudhury took over as the first Indian principal in 1929. Artists from the length and breath of India had travelled all the way to chennai to do their diploma in this college (It gives a nice feeling to know - I have walked the place they had years back). Even until today there are a lot of renouned people in the field of arts, animation, graphics, film industry who have made it big with their formal education from this college.

In the early days of my training I found the education system... as in, the teaching, trainning methods, syllabus to be slightly primitive, meaning in the year '94 when I did my 1year(its used to be a 5 year degree program), computer based designing was the hot thing (I'm taking about the photostyler days) In the contrary we at college were asked to do typography with pen and ink. I always used to wonder... when it is as easy as typing text and taking printout why do they ask me to sit and spend hours together figuring out how to do a slant line, curvy line with ink and brush.... There were a lot of design excercise like this. Today when i look back, I can relate it very well with what I'm doing at work, that is like even 8 years after finishing my course. I learned there are 2 parts of a design one is skill and other was technology. I guess at college i had mixed up then idea of knowing technology as the skill. But in days like this when there a lot of designers who are good at technology the skill which I learnt back at college is the differentiating factor.

It is an awesome place to be... And this article is a reminiscence of my college life and how it has equipped me to face the design world.

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Here's a design excercise which was easy for me to re-create. Take it up...

I enjoyed doing it as a student... I think about this little excercise when i get stuck up with my layout....

The shapes - Use the following shapes and create all possible layout

For example:

End of this excercise you will realise that you can do thousands of layout with just these 5 shapes... a friend from college had done about 3000 unique layouts out of these shapes...

The learning which I carry from this little lesson is that, today at work if i am assigned with a design work the moment i look at it, it is easy for me to visualize the end layout to an extend wihout even touching a piece of paper level and as I work on it gets better.

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Post me how many layouts you were able to do.