Imran Ali

Save To... the Cloud?

A couple of years ago, my good friend Ian Pringle wrote about the anachronistic persistence of a floppy disc icon to indicate a save command.

Ian noted that the notion of 'saving' in an age of web applications is itself an absurd notion and that state is perhaps more appropriate - recording a temporal snapshot of attributes and values. However, expressing state/time in a universally comprehensible icon is a daunting brief...

Of course, replacing the floppy with a hard drive or USB key icon would be just as arcane as a 3.5" disc, but I've noticed recently that alpha-geeks speak of saving to the cloud or assert that a particular document is in the cloud.

With the advent of web-based applications such as Google Docs and the emergence of cloud computing, perhaps The Cloud is an appropriately contemporary metaphor for saving a piece of work.

Saving to the Cloud blends the notion of a resilient, repeatable and trustable act, with an ambiguous, dimensionless, time-skipping cloud of data, servers and connectivity...a metaphor that's a good enough start :)

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Curiously, the discless Google Docs does employ the traditional 3.5" floppy icon, but the disc-based iWork does not...

The Tango Project

The Tango Project is a collaborative effort of a variety of free/open-source software designers and artists to work towards unifying the visual style of the free (mostly Linux) desktop...so far Tango have published a style guide and a set of base icon library.

Unfortunate Graphics...

What should the Federal Emergency Management Agency really have done during Hurricane Katrina? Jon Stewart suggests the answer may lie in an unfortunate graphic on the official FEMA website showing the key stages of FEMA deployment, beginning with Disaster and leading ultimately to, um Disaster...a perfect example of Policy By Powerpoint. If you want to dumb down your policy presentation, try not to employ dumb design.

You can catch Jon Stewart's hilarious clip here (time code 3:58, streaming Windows Media).

Round The World

The Energy Clinic's home page depicts a map of the world as a simple cluster of overlapping circles... a simple, lovely, abstracted graphic of a well known image :)

Designers Galactic Republic

The European Space Agency recently commissioned The Designers Republic to create an ident for its Music2Titan project. Evidently, ESA-mission.heads were inspired by  tDR's Wipeout team patches ;)

The Cassini-Huygens probe will carry a four-track CD to Saturn's moon Titan 'for intergalactic and himan audiences.'

iTunes users can listen to Music2Titan at their local store...

AREVA Energy Experts

AREVA's Energy Experts campaign ran throughout 2004 with possibly the cutest promo for nuclear power. Produced by French design collective H5, the campaign is stylistically similar to their Röyksopp video for Remind Me and no doubt part-inspired by SimCity. The campaign consists of some beautifully crafted isometric animations and design - giving the mundane industrial breadth of AREVA's nuclear infrastructure some energy and charm.

The campaign site consists of a number of Flash tutorials, games, downloadable PDFs, TV ads and a 'making-of' documentary. You can see more at AREVA's Energy Experts.

10x10 - This Is Now

Jonathan Harris's Number 27 is doing some of the most interesting work in interactive media at the moment.

His 10x10 project (pictured) gathers photos from news organisations (Reuters, BBC News and the New York Times) and arranges them into an hourly photo-montage of the state of the world...providing a 'continuous patchwork tapestry of human life'...analagous to the Marumushi Newsmap.

Other interesting projects include Wordcount, (an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words) and a series of information maps on globalisation, produced for Princeton's International Networks Archive.

Marumushi Newsmap

Built with the Google News aggregator, the Marumushi Newsmap is a great example of where graphic design can be used to distill complex data into a simple, ambient information source.

Newsmap attempts to visually demonstrate the relationship between data and the unseen patterns in global news. Story types are categorised by colour (Red = World, Blue + Business etc.) and size (larger type indicates frequency of the story) - filters are also available to constrain news by country and by category...very much an intuitive 'at-a-glance' resource.

Newsmap would make for a great Time Square billboard :)

Metro Maps of the World

The map of the London Underground is universally regarded as an iconic piece of graphic design. Recently I picked up Mark Ovenden's Metro Maps of the World in a Borders store...ostensibly a collection of metro and subway maps from major cities around the world but also a great essay on design, iconography and typography, as applied to designs that come to characterise and embody the cities they represent.

UPDATE: After finishing the book, I decided to start a Flickr group!