It was a 5-years-long waiting for MINI to hear my thoughts (as they did in c1rca) and make the Cooper I’d buy. Not just buy but also adore, love, respect, be proud of and drive like I’m riding a dream. Here it is — coming soon MINI Cooper Countryman. Besides it’s new design and perfect body it has normal amount of doors. MINI fans can blame me I don’t feel the spirit, banish Countryman out of Cooper family — I don’t care. I just want to ride this perfect six-speed manual gear box beauty!

Just because it’s MINI, the ads are wonderful. I’ll spoil the joy a bit offering you to watch Countryman ad prior to teaser of that car.

As MRNCH said: I’m happy to see car ad that doesn’t say ‘Your car — your road’

And here’s MINI Countryman teaser. Pay attention to the camouflage that is usually used to hide specific details of new models from papparazi. Now it’s a part of a new promotion:

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Those who consider Countryman is not MINI can enjoy my photo of old marvelous MINI taken in Rome:

So Apple announced it’s iPad that looks much like iPod that was rolled and now supports 3G networks. Though I expected normal Mac OS X on it, not awkward iTunes syncing clumsiness called iPhone OS or something much like it, I think that this product is a big step forward. No, I won’t buy it now or in the next generation, but I can see positive trends.

First of all, there is a dock that is also a keyboard. I think that bluetooth keyboards would be supported too. That’s a real rush forward and I’ll tell you why. Furthermore, developing bigger variety of iPad’s Apple can make the screen size bigger, add camera, install normal OS on them, call the whole line of products iPad Pro and — voilà — replace notebooks and iMacs! Why do you need them if you can take your computer with you literally everywhere. Take it to your work, place it in the dock and work. Take it to your girlfriend and watch latest The Big Bang Theory episode lying in bed. I think this trend would rock. Especially if they add the keyboard to that fancy case.

Second, they’ve shown that normal applications can be made to run under OS that controls iPad. There is iWork already. I don’t expect for Adobe Photoshop or Final Cut Studio but that’s already enough for those who need notebooks just for presentations, movies and pictures. And I think it’s not less then 80% of users.

Nevertheless right now Apple just reinvented the photo frame. You’ll ask me “But what about all that innovations?” That’s what reinvention was about.

I love to cook and dislike using prewritten recipes. Even if I read the recipe I do the dish my own way and it always tastes better ;) I’ve made a salad that I called “Prawn the Queen” recently. It isn’t just tasty but it looks pretty. So I present you the recipe and infographic of this salad. Let’s file it under hightech ;)

Recipe

5 slices of carambola (starfruit) about 4 mm thick

5 prawns

5 leaves of Crisphead salad

30 gr of mayonnaise

30 gr of olive oil

Tear the salad leaves in tasty-sized pieces, add starfruit slices there (you have to cut slices on two halves so they look like little crowns — six-pointed starfruits suit better). Then boil the prawns, remove their armor and add to the salad and carambola. You can buy precooked prawns so you’ll have just to unfrozen them. Mix mayonnaise with olive oil and pour on ingredients. Mix the salad again and enjoy! This is salad for one.

7 pages (one for each day of the week) that turn around reflecting how fascinating the life is. The best present for the office worker.

Once the man I know and who’s job is something about moving numbers from on Excel row to another asked me, “How aren’t you bored with what you do for living (whatever you do)?” As long as whatever I do including writing is of this post can hardly compete with fascinating words of numbers and Excel I started explaining how I still haven’t shoot myself because of all this dull design and ad things I do. I stated that as for me, the secret of successful and interesting job, whatever you do, is in enjoying it. Working under whiplash is nonsense, you have to change either your attitude or your work. Laundering seals, joking on Higgs boson or making sites must be made with ease. That’s when the work will thank you with great ideas and good emotions.

Covers

While working on new site of Invest Gazeta I was caught by an idea that looked interesting. Couple of pen sweeps over Wacom, hand fluttering over the keyboard and 20 minutes of Google Images results exploration later I’ve sent a message to Akella who was on some part of technical realization:

His reply was immediate:

So I clarified a couple of details that covers and newspapers’ front pages can be sized different:

There was no arguing about that too. A little bit later Akella offered to use magazine and newspaper metaphor all over the site and not in just one block as I thought earlier. I drew a smaller version and made design for issues with no covers as for magazines and for newspapers. You can see them designed at Covers archive page or live at HTML-coded example.

Peugeot changed it’s logo because of 200th anniversary. Okey, they removed the tongue and body — their will. But what about the font? Does it have to be so freaky? I think that fixing it a bit to look normal would be much better. Something like this:

The behavior and color of this car reminds me of friends’ cat named Chacha

I was drawing lotsa kawaii pictures yesterday (I hope to reveal the reason in a couple of days). I drew everything needed but the heat wasn’t gone so I continued this morning drawing a cat who was in my dreams. He asked me why I decided not to draw him? A little bit later after the cat was drawn I was asked to teach to draw suck cats. It’s easy and fast that’s why I write this post and ran away to get ready for the New Year’s Eve. As far as cat is a tiger too, I insist you consider this post a holiday greeting ;)

Face

Create oval and convert it to the drop, pull the top part of the drop up, add one more anchor point and form it to look like a head with stick up ear.

Puffy boots

It’s even easier than face. Create rounded rectangle, bend it in the center to make it look dynamically and flying-like, tilt it, copy-paste it and paint the place where the belly is expected.

Tail

Draw the tail with the pen, outline strokes and fill it with white stroking with black again. It’s even easier than puffy boots!

Launch

Combine all the body parts together, fill with white, stroke with same weight black (not the belly it’s pure white with no strokes). After that add light effects and individuality ;) That’s all. The kawaii cat is ready in less then 10 minutes. To make him look like the cat on top of the post we’ll need to spend 2 more minutes. Do it without me, please — I really need to run!

Every time when I start doing something for periodical publications I can hardly choose between blue-black and black-blue combinations. This color combinations is diluted by grey, which makes it more — hahaha — delightful. Newspapers are mad about blue. Magazines are mad about red. It’s a good news that guys who made press color schemes didn’t paint our world. Otherwise we would live in the world without photosynthesis because there would be no green. We would choke — we can’t breathe without the oxygen.

Same here: we choke because of unbelievable variations: white letters on blue or red plate or red/blue letters over the photo. Wow! And now to something completely different — red letters with black decoration. Sometimes when we are good enough they give us orange — same as red but more yellow. Ok, guys, it’s too hard to think about more then one or two colors. Then make it black and white. Adding perfect photos and info graphics would do the trick. I still can’t get why the are just two options. Option one — red. Option two — blue. I am quite sure that according to some triangle shaped matrix of emotional connections to colors (that marketers like so much) red is drawing attention and blue looks quite serious, but there is one more thing… I remember how I, feeling myself like Paulo Сoehlo, explained the obvious things: highlighting everything means highlighting nothing.

Existing medias got their style but it can be freshen up with new ideas. Take a look at this couple of good examples from colleagues to get inspired ;)

Times Online added vivid color that made their pages fresh and eye-catching

It’s ok not to choose one lifetime-color for your unique media. You can choose a set of colors or, the situation I like moor, create logo that is recognized in any color variations.

Title on Esquire covers can be red, blue and other ;)

Logo on BG cover can be colored any way designer want though reader would recognize it anyway

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This is not “How to create design for your Media in 5 easy steps” tutorial. This is not quite fresh new about colors. There are not just blue and red, there are a couple… millions colors more. The most overwhelming thing is that you can you them! Как оказалось, повоевать за синий цвет — трендовое стремление!

Here is another fun fact about Chuck Norris: that was him who bited Apple logo. No, this one is really real not just real like previous ones. Long story short. Chuck Norris got offended by that fact that his application for iPhone had awfull sales and blamed — you’ll never guess — Apple usability for that. Apple App Store should be sorry for that some useless iphone run-and-gun app doesn’t sell. Chuck terrorised Apple Inc. that he’ll move to Android platform from iPhone (did anyone care about that?) and rejected design changes Apple proposed. So Chuck Norris created his own design for App Store and Apple used his idea to change the App Store interface. Know what? Chuck was much better counting to infinity and travelling to Mars then as UX specialist.

So what’s wrong?

The slight and not critical change was changing the grid and elements placement. Now they look like they were fitted not placed with ease and lotsa space around them like it was before. You can’t recognize where is information you need from the first sight. You have to search for it and even (can you believe that?) click more and more! Users say that they were delighted by how obvious the App Store was. Now it isn’t ;)

That’s how application page looked like before Chuck invasion (the image was found using Google Images)

That’s how application page looks now, after Chuck brought pain to usability

That leads us to the main problem of App Store as a part of iTunes Store redesign — elements got inconsistent. I wrote a post about GUI elements consistency, so I’ll just remind that every user interface element that does any function must look the way that best represents that it does that function. E.g. button looks like button andlinks are blue and/or underlined. And sure you don’t have to do a bunch of buttons styles — that would confuse users. Also don’t make not buttons look like buttons — that would confuse even more.

They don’t have it now in App Store. Here are the few examples:

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Can you tell which one is progress bar and which one is scroll? They look the same! The same like progress bar does

Ok, here is a hint:

Still inobvious anyway

I thought that applications block was loading for the first times until accidentally clicked there. Even Google with awful scrollbars in Wave was better.

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The next one is much harder. Can you spot all the links in text block below?

Except blue links (that are obvious and clear) “Report a Concern ›” and “Yes | No” are the links. The other black bold text isn’t a link. Don’t ask me why

By the way the blue color is also used for captions that are not a links.

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Breadcrumbs on top changed too.

They look more like links to websites (highlighted after the app description) not like the breadcrumbs Apple uses all over the site and used to use in App Store

While breadcrumbs on the bottom of the page remained ok

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Buy button looks like some kind of dropdown and tab vicious relations offsrping.

If the app is free then there is nothing to do about it — no “download” or “buy” just statement of fact

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To summon the unusable interface monster they also added awfull wet floor effect to rating stars that now look like overdecorated something but make it hard to read the info they should represent.

Wet floor effect is less aggressive and more readable when rating

Is everything wrong?

No gamma became lighter and it makes it easier to read text (but that wasn’t hard earlier) though it made iTunes Store look just like site opened in iTunes not like the part of application.

Fact

Chuck Norris isn’t good as UX expert. Apple ruins interface for unobvious reason.