Earned Attention

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Interesting in that the “book” manifests as a printed volume, an eBook, an iPhone app, a blog and a few other formats that leave you with no excuse not to take a look.

The iPhone and iPad versions of the book include the original podcast interviews. Not sure if they are all in English, but most probably are; I was interviewed while in Amsterdam.

If you’re interested take a look, in your medium of choice. Klaas has done a brilliant job putting this all together and he deserves the support.

In an interesting and somewhat anachronistic move, the Quora folks decided to take the top voted answers of the past few years – from their website – and compile them into a rather nice hard bound volume, the so-called “Best of Quora 2010-2012“.

You evidently can’t buy this thing, they only sent them out to the original authors (although I have heard of one or two showing up on eBay). But you can get a free PDF version of the book if you’d like a copy, here.

Enjoy. It’s a really great read (the whole book).

The winning app – WeatherBug for Android – was created by the stellar internal dev team of Andrei Ponomarenko and Peter Liaw. The UI refresh was designed by ADG.

Despite this being a relatively minor refresh to the prior WeatherBug client the response – in user ratings, user adoption, and total device use – has been outstanding. An Appy is really just icing on the cake.

From the announcement:

It is hard to argue with 121,000 five-star and nearly 50,000 four-star reviews. WeatherBug made everyone happy by eliminating frustrating performance issues as well as outright crashes. Here, it presents just about everything one could want or need to know about current and forecasted weather. Users glide easily from a look at the temperature, wind speed and a five-day forecast to a map showing precipitation and on to a deeper dive into what’s to come, information gathered from what WeatherBug calls the largest nationwide commercial-grade weather and lightning network. Impressive!

Great team to work with.

“There are still people who think that design is just about making things, people, and places pretty. In truth, design has spread to almost every facet of human activity, from science and education to politics and policymaking, for a simple reason: one of design’s most fundamental tasks is to help people respond to change. A designer today can choose to focus on interactions, interfaces, the Internet, visualizations, socially minded infrastructures and products, 5-D spaces, bioengineering, sustainability, video games, critical scenarios, and yes, even furniture. Several outstanding examples of this vitality and diversity are presented in this installation, ranging from a mine detonator by young Afghani designer Massoud Hassani to a vessel made by transforming desert sand into glass using only the energy of the sun. Also on display are 14 videogames—including Pac-Man, The Sims, and Katamari Damacy—that constitute the beginning of a new branch of MoMA’s collection.”

Curator Paola Antonelli was also just on the Stephen Colbert show.

WeatherBug approached ADG to conduct a brand and product audit of their digital product line and design a next-generation look and feel that could translate across all platforms. We produced a wide range of design comps and full-motion visualizations introducing unique new ways of depicting weather using time and location-based motion graphics, including a new concept of weather-as-story.

During the course of the strategic design project, WeatherBug asked ADG to perform a tactical UI refresh of their flagship mobile product: WeatherBug Elite for Android.

Launched in January of 2013, the Android product refresh was enthusiastically welcomed by their large, and critical, user base. User reviews have been overwhelmingly positive. And product reviews by noted tech outlets are starting to appear.

(Update / Please Note: Some folks have asked if we were also responsible for the iOS UI refresh of WeatherBug, and the answer is no. ADG was only responsible for the Android redesign. The user reviews are quite different.)

Lifehacker: Best Weather App for Android

Lifehacker Best Weather App

Lifehacker has named WeatherBug The Best Weather App for Android. In a field of over 3,000 weather related applications, we’re proud to have helped WeatherBug maintain their extraordinary position in the category.

WeatherBug Android Screens

After almost 15 years, it felt like we had just walked out of the office next door: everyone is still doing great work, still fired up, all look fabulous.

It was great to hear how far most have traveled, and grown, and – in a couple of cases – sired (very handsome) offspring: hopefully all budding designers, strategists, creatives.

After almost 15 years, it felt like we had just walked out of the office next door: everyone is still doing great work, still fired up, all look fabulous.

It was great to hear how far most have traveled, and grown, and – in a couple of cases – sired (very handsome) offspring: hopefully all budding designers, strategists, creatives.

December 12, 2012 (12/12/12) at The University Club on Nob Hill, San Francisco (entire 3rd floor – great views).

At least two of us from ADG will be attending. Hope to see you there!

Asymco website is here.

Conference website is here.

Horace Dediu’s excellent Podcast, The Critical Path, can be heard here.

For the recent Verizon Apps store project, we wanted to provide Verizon management with a preview of how the interface might look in both a smartphone format as well as a tablet format. We also wanted to preview enhanced media types (e.g. video) in the interface long before the development schedule would get to that advanced version of the application.

In this short motion comp, an early design version of the Apps store opens on a smartphone showing common navigation tasks and transition animations – things not easily done in wireframes or static comps – then switches to a tablet format showing landscape orientation, enhanced media (video, wallpapers) and merchandising widgets.

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Shorts like this are both easily digested, and easily passed around, in groups that typically have little tolerance for reviewing more technical assets – like wireframes or even static comps. Simple, to-the-point, visualizations can convey concept, look/feel, brand and – of course most importantly – motion and process in a way that we’ve found can provide a strategic touchstone for an extended team – from exec down to junior programmer.

Making an app “real” as early as possible has many dividends.