I have been an active resident of social media. I am alive in three social networks, write two blogs and ardently follow a few. But lately I succumbed to information overload fatigue. I cannot machete my way through tweets and farmville updates anymore. Thought I should recede and reclaim my inner peace instead.

Enter Flipboard on iPad. Created by Mike McCue, former CEO of a voice search services firm and Evan Doll, a senior iPhone engineer from Apple, Flipboard is an iPad application that effectively merges the beauty of print and the power of social media. And they had me at the first flip. On launch, the cover randomly picks posts from my list and plays them out for me. I can personalize the content page by selecting from a list of trusted sources including my twitter and facebook accounts. Flip on to read stories, photos and comments delivered to me like an attractive magazine. Delectable!

However, there are a few ‘nice to have’ features that can better this product. I will be happier if I can add my own sources to the list, like a friend’s blog. Or easily post to social networks, which I cannot. The visual design can get better at places. Pages of the magazine filled with photos can be on black or typography can be enhanced on white pages with a few status posts. The landscape version of the pages are not as resolved as the portrait. They fold mid page over the content, which is unlike any good magazine worth it’s salt. There are more such niggling bits of peeves in this early version. I am sure the updates will solve them.

But Flipboard is probably the most compelling new way to find, read and share social content – served as easily digestible nuggets of well designed magazine snippets. Happy flipping!

As published in Pool magazine. View the issue online here.

Isabel Allende, a passionate writer and Paula Scher, graphic designer influenced by the politics of sixties. These women do ignite a vacant mind.

Isabel Allende has the writers’ passion that is contagious. She is Salvador Allende’s daughter, probably grew up listening to Pablo Neruda and fled from Chile as her father was killed by Pinochet. Hear her speak at TED.

I heard Paula Scher speak at Designyatra, Goa, India two years back and I fell in love with her. I saw her work that is emotive, political and inspiring. This is she at TED.

Apparatus has always been open about getting summer interns from design schools and training creative teams in organizations ‘the boutique way’. This letter is to all of you who are learning to spell mnemonic and understand pair kerning (If you are not better do it now).

Dear Friend:
You probably thought, like I did, that you will become a graphic designer and create those pretty logos, websites or magazines that we are inundated with. You joined a design school to learn all elements that cumulatively will make you a worthwhile professional. You have been at it for a few years and yet if you feel there are a few shortfalls read on.

Graphic design never was and never will be solely about making things pretty. It is about presenting information appropriately – persuasive, useful and usable. Like how the lay of a piece of land dictates the design of a building on it, the underlying structure of content and concept defines the look and feel. So typography, color palette and imagery are elements or tools to achieve the desired result. They are not the end by themselves. Though it is still valid to debate Spiekermann versus Hoefler Frere-Jones you should know how to use their products intelligently to tell a story. And if you do not know of these guys go back two steps and start over.

There are few things that you need to do to make hardworking pieces of design. Design schools do not teach you to:

• Structure it: Look around, research to understand domain and objective. Prioritize information to visualize your own content structure (a photograph or a video is also content). Create an information architecture that is intuitive, compelling and clever. Now your job is to gently walk the audience/user through this architecture by crafting (with type, color and imagery) well resolved visual assets that work.
• Articulate your viewpoint: Graphic designers need to write and talk. Not like a poet or a playwright. But well enough to clarify thought processes, communicate to team members or at times add to effectiveness of the deliverable. They need to use and teach tools like mind maps, or thinking hats. These tools help you organize your monkey mind to walk a tightrope and reach goals faster. Will help you define your scope and list a set of tasks towards the solution.
• Emote: Persuasive communication is all about emoting right and creating emotional work is all about being humanist. You need to understand the audience/user to twang at their heartstrings. Close hands on research techniques that involves personal presence among the target group is the foundation for concepts that affect sentiments. An empathic approach towards audience/user automatically triggers emotive concepts that work. And emotion buys you unwavering attention and recall.
• Design like a craft: Now that you have distilled stuff down to the product, you are ready to apply your skills in typography, imagery, color and other such elements of design. Choose visual and verbal style deliberately by trial and elimination. Assemble content on a grid with pride that comes with precision. Learn how to depart from the grid to make your work interesting. Importantly, do not ever fall in love with your work that it devastates you when others refrain from appreciating it. Be distant.

I also extend invitation to share your work with me through this blog and we can get collective feedback through social media. Apparatus will start three week certification courses in information design and user experience design for recent design graduates and professionals soon. If you are interested contact us. Watch this space!

Apple has sold three million iPads in 80 days and that is a lot of pressure on the eReader market.

‘There are going to be five million ereaders in the United States alone this year and is estimated to grow to 15 million by 2014′ says Consumer Electronics Association. With Apple’s stride it is clear that the tablet and ereader markets are merging rapidly. All big players are worked up with iPad’s rapid climb to success. So, Amazon slashed Kindle’s price by a record breaking 27% down to $189. The Nook, Barnes and Nobles ereader product saw a price slash of 23% and retails at $199. The trailing Sony ereader sells today at $169. Given all this, they realize they are way short on features compared to an iPad. We hear a lot of research and development to bootstrap the standard reader.

All this when iPhone 4 releases this Thursday with a new version of iBook on it. This allows users to read on that desirable fantasy of a gadget. Apparently well designed, like any Apple product, and can dent the ereader market further.

Now what does all this rambling mean to us designers.

I have been at client meetings lately where tablet apps are substituting traditional marketing and other promotional assets. There are more devices realized for various verticals and target markets. More devices mean more user interfaces, more challenges to differentiate, surpass and brand better. Not to mention all that content that needs to be designed to consume.

Well it is going to rain interfaces my friend and we have to be there monitoring the sanity.

My all time favorite TED talk by Rives who folds language and information to meet at points that surprises you or at times makes you wonder whether is actually there. Over to Rives.

Team Apparatus has worked with startups, product management groups and product teams to create new offerings. This post is to demystify the role of a creative team or a designer in product definition. Contemplate on the graphic below.

Click on the image to enlarge. This image is of a product star that unites competencies to create a product idea that is useful, usable, feasible, lucrative, compelling and most often, successful.

This post is an outcome of a question that haunts designers often – ‘What do you do for a living?’. I am, most often, bothered about overselling or understating my competence. Read on.

When I sit down and think about an abstract version of what user experience is I do not reach a definite answer. Yet I believe that it is a lot closer to a curator, guide or an interpreter. If you take a set of information and tasks within a context, a user experience designer is converting them to bite size pieces of experiences. These experiences when strung together in a compelling sequence helps the user reach his/her goal.

User experience design, in my opinion, is a seamless blend of pragmatism, engaging emotional narrative and sensitivity to user and technology. In other words, designers build bridges that brings the user closer to any object, tool or system by scripting an experience. I have a lot of professionals call this ‘uncommon’ sense.

These user advocates need to be in solution definition teams to create successful products. We will talk about this soon.

I was raised in a small temple town in south India, a bell jar of life, love and inhibitions. It felt self contained and comfortably familiar – a severed outpost of progress way in the days of trunk calls and rationed television on tall 13-element antenna with boosters.

I remember mornings of temple chants, smell of ground coffee or anise and those blazing afternoons with distant songs on Radio Ceylon wavering on on thin air. Picture this: a collage of small eateries with spicy food, barber shop with a bright rooster against a rising sun mirror etched on saloon doors, Charles Bronson at Regal Talkies which was Victoria Edward Library by day, opening movie shows where foul mouthed men pranced on railings over the queue to reach the counter faster, gold foil tickets, jubilant shadow confetti when the hero shows up on screen. Nights came with percussive mincing of ‘parothas’ over flat hot girdle, migrant Rajasthani men serving hot milk over nuts served on streets and street fights that ended invariably with bloodshed. There were colourful visitors too – caucasian backpackers – residual free spirits of seventies with their long hair, worn cottons and lost destinies; complaining North Indian pilgrims in bright saris and bus full of tonsured heads off loaded near the temple; Tamil poets and Sanskrit scholars deep in discourse under cackling monkeys at the temple. There were street acrobats, dancing bears and movie announcements with posters on wheels or a brass band playing old tamil songs. The west temple tower stood sentinel, like an ornate backdrop, watching us grow up.

School was of early fear for the system and yoghurt on hot rice. The walk from bus stop was across an old banyan tree and a graveyard full of stories. There were plots to throw blankets on that unsuspecting nasty teacher and beat him up right at that cemetery. Education was taken too seriously by most of us. BUt the classes were boring and most often without an objective. Stealing glances was all that was permissible with girls in public, unless you were brave. However, we did have our share off school sweethearts and juicy gossip. Those weekend cricket matches at the school grounds should not have ended at all – small ice boxes on wheels that sells lollies. Stories involving catapults, dead snakes, garden lizards and the reluctant stride to extra classes after matches.

Literature was largely Tamil pulp, comics like Rip Kirby or Lawrence David translated and paperbacks from Higginbothams. There was the street library too run by an old man with his taped-together spectacles. I grew up with a thirst to know more. Seasons changed, Skylab fell (our school was sure that it will fall on the admin block), civil war broke in Ceylon, radios went silent, refugees came in, love died and new ones flowered. And one day like mine shrapnels we graduated from school to disperse into the wide world of our joys and agonies. A few stayed. But most moved out.

I was thrown into the shifted reality and culture of a creative school. I had to catch up real fast. This readies you against all hurdles without losing the honesty, values and integrity borne from growing up in a small town under the temple towers.

I believe in small towns.

I have been an Apple user and a fan for over 15 years. The brand and products have moved on from being a cult to a larger faith. Steve Jobs is a compelling reason to buy and use more Apple products. Here he is in conversation with Walt Mosberg and Kara Swisher for Wall Street Journal.

Recently I attended a meeting at Idiom campus in Bangalore. The agenda was to define a structure to celebrate half a century of formal design pedagogy in India. There were a few ideas floated. I came out of the group with a specific mission.

How many times have you met a fellow designer one-on-one and talked about how they evolved, present day design business, expectations and future? I decided to do this with my friends and document it as a personal note – an inspirational capsule for creative professionals. I want to meet designers with varied objective and write a series of articles. And why?

1. Seek Inspiration: We are constantly looking at the next best thing to do. We are seeking a spark that will stimulate us for a while and then we can seek the next one. I probably will find a few in this journey to keep me running for a longer spell. Be inspired!
2. Show and Tell: With my association with publications and Mario I have acquired skills in representational techniques for narratives. The truth in editorial design is about creating compelling narratives through written word, images and typography. I want to do this myself and see it working.
3. Dry Design Writing: I am not a great writer. Yet I have an opinion. Other than large documentation projects that culminate in exquisite books, Indian design writing lacks personality or emotion. They read like industry journals on commodities or aluminum scrap forcibly written by clerks in dungeons. My articles are going to be personal accounts on people I know, with a hope that it will make these a good read. Keeping it honest.
4. Exercise Humility: There are a few of us who can listen, enjoy, appreciate and assimilate good work by other designers. Over the years it has bothered me a lot. Visits to seminars and Designyatra has strengthened this belief further. I take this as a personal cleansing, getting off the proverbial ivory tower to look around and feel humble.
5. People: Finally it is all about human beings, friends and fellow professionals. There is a lot that we can share and everybody has a story. I like that thought!

There are more reasons not articulated yet. If you are somebody that I contact to do an interview or a profile I will promptly point you to this post. This is an easy way to understand the ‘why’.

As of now this series of articles are going to be published right here in Apparatus blog. If you are interested in publishing, sponsoring or helping with this exercise please do leave a note here. You can mail or call me too. My contact details are at here.