Posts Tagged ‘design’

Albatros Travel

Friday, August 13th, 2010

Another project from 2007. Albatros Travel is a travel agency specializing in luxurious trips, cruises and travels to various marathons.

It was a redesign assignment, aimed at modernizing their outdated website. Albatros had a huge catalog of persuasive images, but the quality varied alot. Even though beautiful not all images could withstand being displayed in a size that would fit the page width. They also had vast amounts of text describing each of their trips day-by-day in great detail.

The design aimed to set the mood of a truly extraordinary journey using local symbols, patterns and small but almost iconic images. And combining this with one large full-size image at the top of the page.

A lot of attention when into the typography; mixing different display styles, optimizing liability and simply making the vast amounts of text more eatable for the users. (Doing the type, I was greatly inspired by Jason Santa Maria’s work – especially the A List Apart website).

The process was quite shady. It was done through another agency, so I had to do the design without meeting the client in person and only hearing their feedback from secondhand. When the client had approved the design, it was turned over to this other agency, who went and made a great big mess of it all. Not at all giving the typography the attention it need. Looking at their current site therefore always makes me sad – and I feel the client has been shortchanged.

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TDC Netway Lounge

Friday, August 13th, 2010

TDC Netway Lounge is a project pitch from 2007. TDC Netway was a simple broadband connection, but marketed at young people (early twenties, if I remember correct). Instead of simply promoting the download/upload speeds and prices – which could easily have been matched by competitors and which is not all that sexy to talk about – the concept was to focus on music.

The Lounge was created as a place were customers could listen, rate and discuss music. Participate in competitions, get special event invitations and read about new gadgets and phones. And help one another with the more technical aspects of the product – support (which was not part of the subscription). Furthermore customers could redecorate the lounge. Change the view, change the wall decorations and wallpaper etc.

The design was done by taking bits and pieces from magazines and catalogs, and then manipulating them into one, where layers could be turned on and off. Thereafter the interface elements was added. We wanted to avoid using flash, so quite a bit of effort when into creating dynamic (and vertical) areas for text and pictures. The interface/navigation areas were highlighted with the orange color.

When navigating, the lounge would remain unchanged at the top, and the page would expand downward with the remaining content. The remain content was kept in a more strict format (boxed and dark grey).

The lounge never when into production. TDC’s product didn’t succeed in attracting enough customers and they pulled the plug on it a couple of months later. But some aspects of concept seemed correct. A year later or so they introduced TDC Play. Moving focus towards music, by giving unlimited access to their subscribers.

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Obesity trends – Makeover

Thursday, April 29th, 2010

A response to the challenge at FlowingData.

The original graph – people are getting fatter, but it is hard to see:

My approach:

My main “beef” with the graph above, is that comparison is difficult, if not impossible. This is of course due to the data gaps, but it could easily be fix with a guideline of some sort. Adding an age-group average, makes it much easier for the viewer to see if the level of obesity is in fact high or low.

Of course the problem with the data gap still exists. And the age-group average will most likely be underestimated here. But now there is some level of comparison.

Final result:

I calculated an index in Excel where 100 =  the age-group average. Then grouped the periods with a stacked column graph. I copied the graph into Illustrator and played around a bit. The final result is multiple indexes/histograms aligned with the different periods.

Regardless of which age-group you choose to look at now, the trend is quite clear: Obesity has increased over time.

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The Current State of Water Purification Systems

Saturday, August 29th, 2009

LifeStrawThis years winners of the INDEX: award (Design to Improve Life) has just been announced. So it seems like a perfectly good time to reflect back at a previous winner. The INDEX: award 2005 winner LifeStraw, a 10-inch  plastic cylinder that can filter out or kill bacteria, parasites and some viruses. A great invention aimed at helping the more than one billion people who do not have access to clean drinking water.

A similar water purifier-system was recently demoed at TEDGlobal, by Michael Pritchard. The Lifesaver; which can make the most revolting water drinkable in seconds. As seen in the video below.

Honestly I am not certain what the difference is between the Lifesaver and the LifeStraw. But they seem to use similar techniques and more importantly for this post, none of them seem to have a determined plan for distributing their wonderful technology to the previously mentioned one billion people – that is the entire one billion.

Lifesaver UltraJurying from their website, Lifesaver seems to target soldiers and participants of various outdoor activities. Hence the Lifesaver can be bought online and has distributers in the US and UK. While you can’t discredit Michael Pritchard & co, because the invention can in fact be a life saver, it is highly unlikely that these to groups are include in the category “without access to clean drinking water”. So how does the Lifesaver get in the hands of the one billion in actual need for it? The LifeStraw has taken a more tradition donation approach. You’re not able to buy the LifeStraw on their website, but you can donate one. But with a $6 prices tag per person per year (their own calculations based on data from the World Health Organization) that still amounts to 6 billion dollars a year if you want clean drinking water for all.

Michael Pritchard has calculated that his Lifesaver Bottle can supply clean water for three years to a family of four for 1/2 cent a day. That is 152,1 million a year for clean drinking water for all – a number much easier to grasp. But does that include the distribution cost? Michael Pritchard still need to come up with a viable solution on how families without access to clean drinking water, will get access to the Lifesaver Bottle. Are they supposed to go online with their credit cards, order and wait for a package in the post, like the outdoor athletes? Or how will one billion people get their hands on the Lifesaver/LifeStraw technology?

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