Looking back at 2011

Another year is gone, and it’s time to review what has happened on this blog over the last twelve months.

2011 has been a busy year for the Android Market client that has undergone a complete redesign to bring it into the world of browsing, searching and purchasing digital media. The “Designing for the mobile form factor” presentation at AnDevCon conference in March was followed by a series of detailed entries about the design and implementation aspects of the new client. I took a deeper look at synchronized scrolling, swipey tabs and carousel animations, also talking about the reasons not to provide full source code for those areas. I also highlighted the importance of pixel-level details, and proper collaboration between developers and designers.

As we worked on bringing a unified experience to a variety of form factors, we started to define and refine principles of responsive mobile design. After making the presentation at AnDevCon II conference in November, I followed up with the four-part series that answered three underlying questions:  what are we designing, why are we designing it in a certain way and how are we implementing the target design (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). As we continue refining and polishing the application across the entire gamut of supported devices, this blog will be updated with more details on both the planning and implementation aspects of responsive mobile design. And on a related note, I’ve finally collected my thoughts about vector icons and put them in words.

A look at the colors of Tron: Legacy was just a beginning of a much bigger part of Pushing Pixels. A deeper look at the art of Tangled and the transition to 3D shooting and projecting has started a new chapter. Over the last nine months I’ve interviewed a number of creative artists working on various aspects of motion productions that I’ve found particularly impressive in the recent years. I’ve talked to Martin Ruhe about the cinematography of “The American”, Drew Boughton about the art direction of “Unstoppable”, Phillip Baker about the production design of “Chloe”, Claire Keane about the art of “Tangled”, Bradley GMUNK Munkowitz about the visual effects of “Tron: Legacy”, Luke Dunkley about the editing of “The Crimson Petal and the White”, Rosalina Da Silva about the make-up of “Tron: Legacy”, Mark Scruton about the art direction of “Easy Virtue”, Sarah Horton about the art direction of “The International”,  John Greaves about the storyboarding of “Edge of Love”, Jonathan Freeman ASC about the cinematography of “Edge of Love” and Anne Seibel about the production design of “Midnight in Paris”. I’ve also talked with Kyle Westphal about the craft of film projection, and with music director David McClister. You should definitely expect more interviews in 2012.

I also looked at the costume design of “The Tourist“, the rainbow colors of “Burlesque“, the colors of “How Do You Know“, the colors of “Emma“, the set design of “Mr and Mrs Smith“, the art of “Cracks“, the colors of “No Strings Attached” and the colors of “Twilight“. Finally, a smaller series looked at the iconic images of “North By Northwest“, “To Catch a Thief” and “Key Largo“.

The Retro:Active series started in October 2010 saw the total of 368 posts in 2011. This series showcases the fusion of modern and vintage in visual and industrial design, fashion, photography, typography, illustration, animation and other related areas. This is one of my main sources of inspiration, and expect it to continue well into 2012.

Pushing Pixels is here to stay, and it will only get better. If you still have not subscribed, click on the icon below to stay tuned in 2012!

Food for thought #6

Craig Villamor in Design is never “Done”:

It is foolish to think that you will get the design right the first time. It is also foolish to think that there won’t be changes to a design once development begins. And on a larger scale, software products are never done unless they are dead. Life is better when you stop kidding yourself and your team and admit that there is no “done”.

As a design manager, I use this concept of approaching done to evaluate the health of a project and the effectiveness of its designer. A designer is on the right path when his or her solution is approaching done. In the early stages of a project, there is typically a high level of variability. Designs may appear to be approaching done only to get completely reset once a new requirement or constraint is encountered. This is completely normal. But over time, this variability should become smaller and smaller. That is when you know a design is on the right path. There is a steady progression toward done.

The graph is a little awkward, conveying an incorrect illusion of the ideal target design that never changes. In reality the design is a living breathing thing that is reevaluated based on the current knowledge and understanding of the domain, and where you want to be. And the implementation is more of a staggered spiral, peeling away chunks of cruft, progressively iterating, refining and polishing.

What does the “desktop” mean to Microsoft?

Even though Microsoft has spent significant effort to branch into mobile, web and console markets, the company’s main revenue stream remains in the desktop space. Gearing up towards the next major Windows release, Steven Sinofsky (president of Windows division) has started extensive blogging about Windows 8. In yesterday’s entry he addresses a lot of criticism of the transition of Windows Explorer to use the ribbon component, the future of Aero and Metro, as well as the high-level approach that the Windows team takes towards the consistency of Windows desktop experience. The entire entry is well worth the read, but the following quotes are particularly interesting:

The unique element of Windows has always been the “open market” approach to interface. We embraced how people used and adapted the Windows APIs to bring unique experiences to market. Within any context there really isn’t a single “desktop” experience. Certainly some have been critical in the past that “Aero” did not achieve a uniformity or consistency, even within Windows.

We’ve long embraced apps that have palettes or toolbars, full screen / windowed / MDI, built-in controls or custom controls. The mechanisms to implement this variety are part of the desktop heritage. Some wish for more uniformity or policing. As a member of the team that built our early Windows tools, I know we tried. Even in the most homogeneous platform, developers will strive to differentiate and build their user experiences for specific purposes and experiences will diverge from commonality. Commonality was an answer to complexity in another era–today we are surrounded by digital experiences of all different types and we readily adapt (just as people adapted to a wide variety of print formats or video formats as these technologies improved from their first generations). The answer today is whether the design works in the context for which it was intended.

While this is not particularly surprising, it further confirms the focus on providing support for diverse experiences that allow differentiation, with particular focus on adapting to the context.

Responsive mobile design

In his seminal article published in May 2010 Ethan Marcotte coined the term “responsive web design“, paving a way for a unified approach to designing web sites that adapt to the current media context:

Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice responsive web design.

Ethan’s research into crafting browsing experiences that scale from large desktop environments down to tablets, netbooks and small mobile phones has culminated in the “Responsive web design” book published in June 2011. The original article and the book have prompted forward-thinking web designers to reevaluate their work flows. Trent Walton summarizes his experience working on responsive projects:

Web designers will have to look beyond the layout in front of them to envision how its elements will reflow & lockup at various widths while maintaining form & hierarchy. Media queries can be used to do more than patch broken layouts: with proper planning, we can begin to choreograph content proportional to screen size, serving the best possible experience at any width. [...]

In my mind, it’s best to build something that works on any possible width or device instead of something that works on all current widths and devices.

This underlines a major shift into approaching the web design. Instead of creating a number of rigid grids heavily optimized to a number of predefined screen sizes, Trent emphasizes the importance of fluid rearrangement of content that maintains the overall structure but adapts the presentation to a wide range of media contexts. Instead of forcing the user into the “best presentation” mode, the content reflows based on the current user preference, from full-size desktop browsing to smaller netbook screens to even smaller handheld devices. Mark Boulton drives this point even more:

How should we do it on the web? Remember the goal is connectedness and this feeling of belonging. We do that by defining the constraint from your content. The constraint could be derived from an advertising unit, or from a thumbnail image from tons of legacy content. Whatever it is, start there. Don’t start from an imaginary page. [...]

Embrace the fluidity of the web. Design layouts and systems that can cope to whatever environment they may find themselves in. But the only way we can do any of this is to shed ways of thinking that have been shackles around our necks. They’re holding us back.

The ever-evolving landscape of mobile devices keeps on producing an almost continuous spectrum of screen sizes, resolutions and ratios with increasingly more powerful computing and networking capabilities. Highlighting the long gone days of content dumbed down for small screens, Jeremy Keith notes:

More and more people are using mobile devices as a primary means of accessing the web. The number is already huge and it’s increasing every day. I don’t think they’re all using their devices just to look up the opening times of restaurants. They are looking for the same breadth and richness of experience that they’ve come to expect from the web on other devices.

Hence the frustration with mobile-optimised sites that remove content that’s available on the desktop-optimised version.

Rather than creating one site for an imaginary desktop user and another for an imaginary mobile user, we need to think about publishing content that people want while adapting the display of that content according to the abilities of the person’s device.

Designing native mobile experiences is undergoing a similar transformation, especially for the Android platform. A continuous stream of new devices coming to the market, especially in the 7″-10″ range presents a challenge to developers that create applications with hierarchical information content. On one hand, the single-window presentation mode seemingly removes the need to explicitly rearrange content on the fly – as opposed to the context of a multi-window desktop environment. On the other hand, even in this mode you need to properly handle device orientation change, especially on devices with “unusual” screen ratios that necessitate content reflow. And of course, if you go beyond the single device, you would want to support a variety of screen sizes, from 4″ phones to the 7″-10″ tablet range.

The same arguments put forth in favor of content-driven design that adapts to the wide range of media context are relevant for the native mobile design. Some applications will naturally “expand” to fill a larger screen; these would be mainly canvas-driven applications such as map viewers, image editors or video streamers. But applications presenting hierarchical (and mainly text-based) content require the application designers and developers to think in terms of a fluid content presentation. A single-column presentation optimized for smaller phone screens may look sparse and unbalanced viewed on a larger tablet screen, especially in landscape mode. Navigating information hierarchy that lends itself to master-details relations may require separate screens on smaller devices, but may be presented in a split mode on larger ones.

Android resource system has provided support for multiple screens and densities, allowing the developers to optimize user experience for different screen configurations. To that end, the screen configurations have been mapped along two separate buckets:

• The physical size of the screen – small, normal, large, xlarge. Each bucket is a continuous range, with some overlap between the buckets.
• The density, or how many pixels appear within a constant physical area of the display – ldpi, mdpi, hdpi, xhdpi. Each bucket is a continuous range as well, with some overlap between the buckets.

Combining multiple configuration qualifiers has allowed Android developers to provide layouts optimized for the specific screen configurations, in much the same way as CSS3 media queries enable the ever more powerful responsive web design. If you take a closer look at the range of qualifiers supported in CSS 3 and at the examples of responsive web design, you will see that the main difference is in defining the “boundaries” between the different configurations. Instead of a set of predefined screen size buckets, the main CSS3 qualifiers are width, height, device-width and device-height with optional min and max prefixes. The values themselves are numeric in units of either CSS pixels (corresponding to Android dip, or device-independent pixels) or ems (corresponding to Android sp, or scale-independent pixels that respect the user’s font size preference).

As we’re seeing a wider variety of screen sizes and shapes for Android devices, we’ve also seen that the developers need a more refined system for adjusting the content presentation. Introducing the new resource selectors, Android framework guru Dianne Hackborn writes:

Based on developers’ experience so far, we’re not convinced that this limited set of screen-size buckets gives developers everything they need in adapting to the increasing variety of Android-device shapes and sizes. The primary problem is that the borders between the buckets may not always correspond to either devices available to consumers or to the particular needs of apps.

Android 3.2 adds support for three new resource selectors:

• width dp: the current width available for application layout in “dp” units; changes when the screen switches orientation between landscape and portrait.
• height dp: the current height available for application layout in “dp” units; also changes when the screen switches orientation.
• smallest width dp: the smallest width available for application layout in “dp” units; this is the smallest width dp that you will ever encounter in any rotation of the display.

Unlike the existing size buckets, these selectors start from the content and not from the context. Instead of mapping your content presentation into the buckets of physical screen sizes or densities, you start by defining the main building blocks that represent your content and mapping those to different presentation strategies. Each strategy will arrange the content blocks based on their importance and require certain minimum width for a balanced arrangement. Then, you can use the new resource selectors to provide implementation for each presentation strategy.

As with the CSS3 queries, you have finer control over the bucket boundaries and the content presentation within each bucket. Depending on the overall information hierarchy depth and density for your specific domain you will decide when the content presentation transitions between the different strategies. So for example, if you’re writing an email reader, you can use the width dp selector to switch between single-pane and double-pane mode at, say, 600dp. Devices at the bottom “edge” of the large bucket will display a single-pane mode in portrait and double-pane mode in landscape.

This is both simple and powerful. Instead of thinking about all possible combinations of physical sizes and densities, you go back to the device-independent units. The content of your application domain drives the decision on how much device-independent real estate you need for each presentation mode, and the framework switches between the different modes depending on the physical characteristics of the device and current orientation. Each new territory needs best practices. Stay tuned for more.