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The Flickr style / Ugh

7 May 2008 in flickr, ixd, photo, visual, web | 1 comment

It’s hard to ignore the fact that Flickr promotes a distinct style of photography; I say “promotes” because Flickr’s “Explore” tab displays photos that are deemed “interesting” by Flickr’s “interestingness” algorithm, and the photos in this area are generally characterized by what many are now calling “Flickr style.” This is shorthand for “extensively post-processed” — color-corrected, cropped, montaged, and so on — techniques that turn simple pastoral landscapes into vivid, science-fantasy dreamscapes like the example below.

Flickr interesting - sci-fi pastoral scene

This was in Sunday’s interesting pool, and it’s a pretty strong example of the “Flickr style,” i.e. heavy-handed, post-processed and much-adored by like-minded members of the community. Photo: James Neely

I don’t patently dislike post-processing, but I find that the photos deemed “interesting” frequently have a creepy unreality about them, a flatness, an obsessive visual “perfection.” The result is that many of these photos seem like scenes from Dune, or Lewis Carroll, or a Bjork video, or a Thomas Kinkade landscape. Everything is in focus, perfectly lit, tightly composed. In short, I dislike “interestingness” because it feels like a sort of Pixar-ization of photography. (I love Pixar). But I don’t like that CG-esque feel creeping into a medium that, for me, derives its essence from its simplicity and imperfection.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m down with post-processing and unreality

I just appreciate when post-processing supports the natural aspects of the photo, when it adds layers to the scene. The photo below is called “The Flooded Grave,” and the photographer is Jeff Wall. It’s a montage of 75 separate photographs from two separate graveyards and Wall’s studio. Why all the cutting, pasting and blending? Well, If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s actually a small coral reef growing at the bottom of the grave.

Wall says, “I worked with oceanographers to create a momentary fragment of a real undersea corner. I didn’t want an aquarium display, a cross-section of sea-life from the area, or anything like that. I wanted it to be a snapshot of everyday life at a certain depth of sea water.” Read more at the Tate Modern’s online catalog.

So where does the Flickr style come from?

I’ve been excited to talk about Virginia Heffernan’s article in last week’s New York Times, Sepia No More. She addresses the disconcerting popularity of high-dynamic range cheesiness in the Flickr style, and she strikes at the heart of what is emerging as a formula for popularity on Flickr. She discusses Rebekka Gudleifsdóttir, one of the Flickr style’s “leading proponents:”

[Gudleifsdóttir] discovered ... how to create images that would look good shrunk, in “thumbnail” form; and how to flirt with the site’s visitors in the comments area to keep them coming back. As perhaps is always the case with artists, Gudleifsdottir’s evolution as a photographer was bound up in the evolution of her modus operandi, a way of navigating the institutions and social systems that might gain her a following and a living.

Creating images that look good shrunk

I’m intrigued by the interpretation of the UI’s effect on the Flickr style, i.e. that the Flickr interface for browsing thumbnails informs the way in which people compose and upload photos. It makes sense to me. The browsing mechanism is tightly-tiled matrix, so photographers are going to want to craft individual elements that look good when they’re (a) cropped to be square, (b) shrunk down small, and © snugly packed together.

Here’s an example from a photographer I like, a nicely differentiated matrix with some intriguing juxtapositions. Photos: Feedbacklove.

Is “Flickr style” a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Maybe the early users and founders were graphic designers? Maybe they really liked glossy, vivid stuff that often looks like the background of beer billboards? Whatever it is, I feel like the “Flickr style” is much less free-form than most may think. The formula behind “interestingness,” as stated on the site: “Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.” Interestingness as a function of the community actions makes sense. Tagging, assigning photos to groups, favoriting, commenting — all of these things seem like useful vehicles. But my sense is that everything that’s being folded into “interestingness” is coming from a fairly closed system, a group of like-minded people with similar tastes promoting the same stuff again and again. Back and forth, forever. ))<>((

Un-interestingness

I’ve got a list of my own “un-interesting” photographers, mostly gleaned from the group I Shoot Film. I also follow the feeds of a few Flickr photographers — This Is a Wakeup Call, Feedbacklove, and Last Leaf, to name a few.

Still, it seems like most interesting stuff still lives outside of Flickr. I look at SUCKAPANTS and The Constant Siege pretty often, both of which can be NSFW, by the way.

Idols / Khoi Vinh of NYT.com

23 April 2008 in ideas, ixd, web | No comments

I’ve followed Khoi Vinh’s excellent blog, Subtraction, for a long time. A couple of years ago, he became the Design Director of the New York Times website, and in the meantime the site has really changed, for the better, mostly, I’d say. This week he’s doing a Q&A about his work, the NYT, design, and all of that.

As I’ve always been curious about what he does in his role, and the structure of the NYT.com UX department, I was glad to see that someone went there right off the bat:

As the design director, my responsibility is to oversee the creative aspects of these continual improvements. Each one is a project of its own with some range in scope, from very short and discrete to long and drawn out over many months. And each project requires one or more of the members on my team: information architects (who are charged with organizing the features and the flow of information so that people can make use of them most intuitively), design technologists (who do the actual coding of many of these sites, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, etc.) and/or visual designers (who handle the overall look and feel, including layout, typography, color, proportion, etc.).

You could say that all put together, the final product of our efforts is the user experience, or the sum total of the content and the framework as it’s used by visitors to the site. Of course, it’s not true that my design group is the only team responsible for creating this experience; it’s really the result of contributions across the board, from editors and reporters to project managers and software engineers and many more.

More here.

UX / Cellphones & world poverty

15 April 2008 in ixd, mobile, urban | 1 comment

Jan Chipchase seems to be the “it” guy¹ of user experience these days. He lives in Tokyo, works at Nokia, and plays this kind of swashbuckling, Indiana-Jones-ish role in researching mobile technologies in developing cultures. He keeps an intriguing blog called Future Perfect, where he documents UX-related nuggets from the shantytowns of Lagos, the markets of Accra, the Singapore airport, and so on. This week’s NYT Sunday mag has an article about him — “Can the Cellphone End World Poverty” — which, aside from having a somewhat puzzling title, provides an interesting perspective on the field of UX in general.

My own person Jan Chipchase experience: Walking through a back alley in Bombay, from my trip there to deliver design training to GE engineers.

First, what’s the title all about?

It’s called “Can the Cellphone End World Poverty,” but it’s really a profile of a researcher rather than an economic analysis of the effect of mobile technologies. And Jan’s research — if his blog and conference keynotes are any indication — focuses on the ways in which people in developing cultures *use* and *adapt* the technology, not about the ways in mobile technology can effect macroeconomic change. It’s a quibble, really, but it seems strange to describe market research as an effort to “end world poverty,” and to cast Nokia in an altruistic light when what they’re doing is really identifying and understanding a unserved market and potential customers:

... No company churns out phones like Nokia, which manufactures 1.3 million products daily. Forty percent of the mobile phones sold last year were made by Nokia, and the company’s $8.4 billion profit in 2007 reflects as much. Chipchase seems distinctly uncomfortable talking about his part as a corporate rainmaker, preferring to see himself as a mostly dispassionate ethnographer ...

I also sympathize with Jan. It would be impossible to do the kind of research he does without a higher purpose, and I know I’ve spent a lot of time rationalizing some our client work (which is always about the benjamins) with what I imagine the greater good to be. It’s easy to say that Nokia’s stock will benefit from tapping the billions of people below the poverty line, but it also seems possible that mobile technologies and connectedness in general could effect positive change. Nevertheless, I really think that the article should be called something like, “How the developing world sees technology,” or “What the developing world tells us about technology,” or something way less catchy than ending world poverty.

What methods are used to gather input from folks in developing nations?

I was most curious to hear anecdotes of what exactly he was asking people, how exactly he was gathering information, whether he was simply observing or conducting surveys, or what. (He has a number of interesting entries on “field research” on his blog, but none that give much insight into his methods).

The article has an interesting description of the outcome of an exercise in which people around the world were asked to draw their ideal mobile phone:

[Jan’s researching cohorts] said they’d found ... [that] the phone represents what people are aspiring to. “It’s an easy way to see what’s important to them, what their challenges are,” [a cohort] said. One Liberian refugee wanted to outfit a phone with a land-mine detector so that he could more safely return to his home village. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people sketched phones that could forecast the weather since they had no access to TV or radio. Muslims wanted G.P.S. devices to orient their prayers toward Mecca. Someone else drew a phone shaped like a water bottle, explaining that it could store precious drinking water and also float on the monsoon waters. In Jacarèzinho, a bustling favela in Rio, one designer drew a phone with an air-quality monitor. Several women sketched phones that would monitor cheating boyfriends and husbands. Another designed a “peace button” that would halt gunfire in the neighborhood with a single touch.

Hmm. I can see how some of this stuff could be helpful in aggregate. People see the phone as a platform — and perhaps there’s a sense that it’s somewhat magical — a “peace” button, a landmine detector, a cheating boyfriend monitor, etc. (Maybe?) But does the person in Liberia really want a phone, or does he want a land-mine detector? I wonder about this.

¹ Not I.T. guy. It guy, like it girl. It’s sort of amusing to me that it’s totally clear what is meant by the words “it girl” but that the words “it guy” just seem to relate to the guy who fixes your internets.