I came across this really interesting article on mobile typography at the Ministry of Type blog. It spells out the difference between the iPhone and the average mobile phone.

It’s also the only phone that’s been advertised purely on its UI, because that’s what the whole thing is about. The adverts for the Samsung D840 showed you the hardware buttons and how the glossy front of the phone is so reflective it can be used as a mirror, but with no showing off of the UI. The Motorola RAZR had a similar set of ads – you’re invited to gawp at the thin, sleek hardware, but you’re not shown the UI. Same for most of the Nokia ads in fact. That’s because the default UI is at best workable, at worst, hideous.

Why is most mobile UI design unusable, unresponsive, and ugly? Here’s one theory: “If the UI of these other phones was usable, responsive and beautiful, there’d be little need for themes and a big source of revenue (from advertising on the theme sites alone) would disappear.”

I’m not sure if this is a serious theory, but there might be some truth in it. Desperate to upgrade their poor interface experiences to a superior one, users purchase a new theme, hoping it’ll solve their problems. Unfortunately, themes are superficial solutions to mobile interface problems. Anyway, I don’t think this theory works, though it does highlight a problematic approach to interface design.

Manufacturers need to address the deeper problems with interface design on the mobile phone. They must focus on making software and hardware more powerful in order to accommodate users’ needs, as the mobile phone becomes a web-browsing device as well as a phone. Manufacturers will, and are, shifting from seeing a mobile phone as a mobile phone, to seeing it as a mobile internet device as well. Nokia admitted in May that they’re now competing with Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Mobile’s restrictions are frustrating both for users and for designers. One of the most frustrating things for me right now, to use one example, is working with antialiased outlines on mobile phone graphics. For those unfamiliar with the term, antialias means, in plain English, the smoothing process between the object and the background, whether font or graphic element. (Here’s a simple illustration.)

Mobile interfaces, composed of typography and graphic elements, suffer because of this lack of support for alpha antialiasing across devices. When I say mobile interfaces “suffer”, I really mean users. Lack of wide support for alpha antialiasing is just one example of the inadequacies of mobile interfaces. However, inadequacies present new, interesting challenges, both for designers working with the imposed restrictions, as well as companies spotting opportunities for improvement.

I’ve been following Twitter and watching the SXSW conversations unfold in the last few hours. Many have been focused on Sarah Lacy’s interview with Mark Zuckerberg, which are mainly negative. There’s a really interesting write up on the interview at BuzzMachine.

From Jeff Jarvis’s write up of the interview, this is the most interesting bit to me:

He [Mark Zuckerberg] says that Facebook is working on a universal need: connecting people who want to communicate. He says that someday everyone on the world will be using these tools. “It may not be Facebook.”

Interesting. Facebook will need to evolve, as I think that branding and advertising will only obfuscate a communication tool. I think that if Facebook really wants to “connect people who want to communicate”, it needs to be as invisible as possible, and it needs to be open as possible. I want to easily sync my contacts with my address book, my phone, etc. I want to take data out.

Transparency in social networking: a good analogy would be plain typography, or the principles set out in Beatrice Warde’s ‘The Crystal Goblet‘: basically, that printing should be invisible, so that words and ideas can be read and understood as clearly as possible. A real communication tool must give privacy, yes, but also transparency and flexibility.

I have just finished reading the story of boo.com, ‘Boo Hoo: $135 million, 18 months… a dot.com story from concept to catastrophe’, by Ernst Malmsten et al.

From any perspective, it’s quite a read, and I would recommend it to anyone based on its thrill factor (“reading [this] has the fascination of watching a high-speed car crash in slow motion”) and lucid, readable prose style.

Boo.com seemed to be a web 2.0 site before the world was ready for it. Tristan Louis argues this in a blog post (about two screens down the page, titled ‘Was boo.com the first web 2.0 company?’). If Boo.com had launched the same way in 2008 as it had in 2000, it would have stood a better chance — widespread broadband alone would have helped significantly with the website’s problems — but it’s hard to make excuses for the excessive spending of investors’ money. Frugality is quite topical right now: reading the story of boo.com side by side with the recent discussions about dollar-stretching in startups is quite a contrast.

It’s easy to see how boo lured interest from media and investors: the story is both romantic and convincing. Founders Kajsa Leander and Ernst Malmsten were friends from childhood, millionaires from their previous internet book e-tailing success bokus.com; and one founder was a former fashion model, the other, a poetry critic. Patrik Hedelin was the third founder, whose role was played largely out of the media spotlight.

One thing that really interests me is the level of thought that was given to the site philosophy and emphasis on “more than a brand — boo is a lifestyle”. The branding was carefully applied across the site, with visitors depositing items into their “boobag”, mixing with other shoppers at the “boo party” (encompassing a forum and chatroom), and reading their fashion and style magazine, Boom. The design of the site itself was ahead of its time: it used the rounded corners which feature as part of the standard branding of web 2.0, a rounded logo typeface, and bright colours.

Miss Boo, the character introducing visitors to the site, was anything but a one-dimensional cartoon: her personality, looks, history, and ‘voice’ were given careful consideration and thought. Unbelievable to me, they booked Eugene Soulemain, the world’s top hairstylist whose clients include Hollywood A-list actresses, Prada, and Louis Vuitton, to advise them on Miss Boo’s hair.

The depth of thought they gave Miss Boo is amazing to me, and perhaps symptomatic of the rather too-visionary nature of its founders (come on: booking the world’s top hairstylist for consultation on a website character? Is it a joke?). Focus on their business model, and being accessible to all users, would have been a better idea. Immediately after the site’s launch, there was a bug preventing Mac users from purchasing items. Unfortunately for boo, a lot of journalists used Macs, experienced this bug, and negative reviews flooded in.

It is intoxicating to learn how seriously boo took its brand, and how much money they managed to raise, and subsequently burn through, to build it. I felt a bit drained by the end of this book, and feel that as a model, the failure of boo at least leaves behind a lot of lessons.

View an archived copy of boo.com here

Another interesting read about boo

Boo on Wikipedia

Right now, websites are the domain of the graphic designer. I’m not sure why the web hasn’t been leapt upon by modern fine artists as an exciting new canvas and set of media. Video can be fine art. Sculpture can be fine art. A banana dangling from a string attached to the ceiling can, apparently, be fine art.

Why not a website?

A webpage is a blank canvas. It’s been utilised well by writers and graphic designers, so why can’t artists use a webpage as a canvas? The obvious negative side to this approach is the fact webpages are unreliable, and typically look different depending on the technology of the viewer. A canvas is static, a webpage is scalable. (Surely, an artist could keep that in mind and accommodate this idea into the thesis behind the work?) I think it’s definitely something that could be experimented with.  You can make a mark on a webpage in lots of ways: HTML, CSS, images, text, space …

One of the things I’ve really wanted to do is to experiment with telling a story through a sequence of pictures. The pictures could be scrolled to or clicked through. I’d like to try doing something really unusual (and, of course, not functional, which is part of the beauty of it) with a webpage. Something that makes you stop and stare and paste the link to your friends. Something that breaks with all the convention of what we’ve seen visually on the web.