Color makes an impact. It’s one of the strongest visual cues you can use.

When we started Infovark, we knew we wanted to make something different. Gordon and I had just come from the enterprise software arena. We were tired of boring press releases and the battleship gray applications.

And then we stumbled upon the name Infovark. And our lovable mascot. Suddenly, we not only had an idea for a software company, we had a way to express it.

One of the things that caused us to reach out to Amy Hoy for help with our user interface design was her bold use of color, which you can see on Slash 7, her principal blog, and also on her projects twistori and freckle.

One of her first questions to us was about the adjectives we wanted associated with the project. What sort of impression did we want to make? In addition to “new and different,” we provided answers like helpful, friendly, enthusiastic, accessible, earthy, natural, and intuitive. Clearly, our approach to creating software, the company name, and the critter all had an influence.

We had already taken one pass at the user interface for our application, but it still retained too much of the drab, corporate look so common in applications today. Even paragons of design like Apple and Adobe use neutral tones like brushed metal and charcoal gray. Microsoft is noted for Windows’ blue and white scheme. Amy’s advice:

My suggestion for fixing the aesthetic problems can be summed up in two words: Be bolder. Ditch the color waffling: go bold. Ditch the lighter shades, commit to the bright ones. Kill the grey. Get rid of borders and boxes. Get rid of gradients. Ditch the icons, unless you can get bold, iconic ones that can do the job with just one color.

You can see that advice at work in the new look of this blog and the Infovark Underground. And we hope you’ll see it in our user interface, too. The screens aren’t ready for primetime yet, but you can see our color palette below.

These are not the exact colors you’ll see in our application, but it’s provided the inspiration for our scheme.

But what does it all mean?

Have I mentioned that I’m the son of an interior designer? I may sling code all day, but I appreciate good design. And for me, these colors have meaning. I won’t bore you with color theory, but if you’re at all interested in color, marketing, and branding, it’s worth looking at the Usability Post‘s Guide to Choosing Colors for Your Brand and Smashing Magazine‘s Colors in Corporate Branding and Design. Both provide insight, advice, and lots of examples of how color influences our impressions of companies and products.

Continue Reading

After our first round of product testing, we decided to make big changes in the look of our Infovark product. This is the first of an occasional series of posts about the design of the Infovark Beta.

We use the Infovark mascot — we call him “the Vark” — to represent our company. We use his head for our avatar in twitter and as the favorite icon for web bookmarks.

I like the simplicity and abstract look of the icon. It has a certain Scott McCloud less-is-more aesthetic to it. As Scott explained in his book Understanding Comics, the less detailed an illustration is, the more it invites the viewer to use their imagination to fill in the gaps. The more detailed a drawing, the more it represents a particular thing. We wanted Infovark to be about you, the knowledge worker, and not about us, Gordon and Dean, two guys making software.

We also chose an animal mascot for a reason. The Infovark name was partly an accident, but it stuck because it was a useful metaphor for us. Infovark does a lot of work in the background for you. It watches files, catalogs email, indexes content, and other useful things automatically. We liked the image of an animal digging through your information, trying to find interesting items and making associations between files, contacts, and email. It made our software feel friendly and helpful, like an enthusiastic pet you’ve taught to do neat tricks.

For round two of our product design, we wanted to try giving the Infovark just a little more personality. But not too much personality. Ever since Microsoft introduced Clippy to the world — and to much popular scorn — software developers are mindful about overeager assistants. Does anyone remember these guys? It’s a fine line that we’re walking here… 

So after much consultation, this is our attempt at something a little cuter, with a touch more detail.

What do you think? We’ll use this new character on our redesigned blog theme, and possibly in the product itself. Leave a comment and let us know your thoughts!

Continue Reading

I recently finished Keeping Found Things Found by William Jones. It’s subtitled “The Study and Practice of Personal Information Management” but I think it ought to read “The Study of a Practice…”

The book is intended as a broad survey of information management practices and principles that individuals use to manage information. This is not a how-to manual or a self-help guide. It’s written in the style of an introductory textbook, which is not surprising given that much of the content was developed as part of the Keeping Found Things Found Project, run by the Information School at the University of Washington.

The academic style of the writing might appeal to some, but I found it a slow read. The footnotes and citations often got in my way as I was trying to absorb the material. Each chapter begins with a lengthy introduction and ends with a point-by-point recapitulation of key messages. These are probably useful for a semester-long course, but it’s overkill for anyone wanting tips and tricks.

Your mileage may vary, of course. I’m not the target audience for a book like this. If you want a primer on the personal information management field, Keeping Found Things Found is a decent place to start.

Key messages

We live in a world awash with information. Some of it is useful to us, but much of it isn’t. The point of information management is to keep the useful information easily accessible while ignoring the unhelpful bits.

This is an extremely challenging task, because we use information in a variety of different ways depending on our current situation. It also requires us to make some guesses about the future. How likely is it that we will need to recall or retrieve the information again? Is it worth memorizing it? Writing it down? Saving a hyperlink or adding a bookmark to our browser? We can’t predict our future needs exactly, so we often wind up storing more information than we need.

And that leads us to develop strategies for organizing it, indexing it, and searching it. And because we’re all different, there are almost as many different methods for keeping found things found as there are people. Some of the strategies — like the post-it notes stuck to your monitor — are obvious. Others are subtle, like keeping a mental list of go-to people that are experts in a particular topic so that you can ask questions as needed.

How this relates to Infovark

Having recently worked at a firm making records management software, I was familiar with much of the material in the book. The main reason for reading it was that records management focuses on large-scale organizational methods used by government and corporations to store, track, manage and dispose of information. I wanted to find out whether there were specific strategies that work well for individuals or small teams. Were there methods or tools that might help us refine Infovark’s design?

Well, I didn’t spot any, though some of the sources cited in the book might be worth checking out.

One of the book’s themes that connected with me was that we are really operating in a different age. The amount of information available to people is orders of magnitude greater today than in the past. Many of us now have music collections on our iPods that would have put independent record shops a few decades ago to shame. We have vast amounts of movies, television, and other video available to us on DVDs and streamed across the Internet. And then there’s the mountains of text and reams of financial data. All this content means that we’ve outgrown many of the concepts that guided us and tools we used in the past.

Gordon and I saw this clearly in our old job. It seemed silly — ridiculous, even — to expect a large organization to get a handle on its information when most of its employees have difficulty dealing with their own email inboxes. And companies can’t afford to train all their staff in the ways of research librarians so that they can manage the stuff on the corporate intranet. We need new approaches.

And we’ll keep reading, and talking with people, and attending conferences, and scouring the Internet, until we find them.

Continue Reading

Here’s a philosophical topic to start the week. Information Aesthetics, a blog about design and data visualization, posted two videos from Maya Design. The first discusses the term information, the second architecture. As a software developer, these are terms I use all the time, but I often have a hard time defining precisely what they mean.

It’s a bit of a challenge for our marketing and communications strategy. The core API for Infovark, our product, is fundamentally nothing more than an information architecture. We use this core to create solutions that help knowledge workers get stuff done. But if information and architecture are tricky to define, you can imagine the confusion involved in combining the two! But where was I?

The two videos do a great job describing the terms information and architecture from the classical point of view.

• Information is the essential message being communicated. It is separate from the form the communication takes.
• A design is a plan for making a thing. An architecture is a design for making plans.

These definitions are classical in the sense that they rely on Plato’s concept of an idea being separate from a particular physical representation. There are other approaches. For example, Marshall McLuhan believed that “the medium is the message” — that you can’t separate the meaning from the representation that conveys it.

Did I mention this was going to be a philosophical post? I did warn you…

Getting real

Even though the topic is a bit academic, there are real-world debates going on about representations and forms right now.

How many differrent representations of you can be found on the web? There’s your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook page, your  StackOverflow account…
Much of the buzz surrounding the open stack technologies is due to there being a way to finally associate a person with all the stuff about that person on the web. Wikipedians talk about having “canonical URIs” — a web page address that points to the master record for an article, rather than a particular translation of an article. And if you support or build software that uses the REST pattern, you’ll face this issue. What is the base address for this web page? How do I get to the HTML version, the XML version, the PDF version, or the MP3 audio version of the page?

There’s not a “right” answer to any of these questions, but we usually adopt certain conventions for dealing with them. Libraries had to figure out whether to keep Braille editions of books together with the print editions, for example. After all, they’re the same book — they contain the same message — but the format is different.

We’re working out those same conventions on the Internet right now with regard to privacy, data portability, text translations, podcasts vs. screencasts vs. print, etc.

Continue Reading

Our mascot, the aardvark, is a popular animal. Recently, we discovered another software project using an aardvark mascot. That got Gordon and me thinking about applying for trademark protection. After all, we registered the domain name and signed up for Twitter and GetSatisfaction accounts. It makes sense to register our name and logo, too.

While trademark registration is more expensive than domain name registration, it’s still very reasonable for small businesses. Trademark registration costs vary depending on whether you do it yourself or have a lawyer file it for you. We opted to have a law firm file for us. It saved us some time and paperwork.

We submitted our application two weeks ago, but we didn’t use our original logo. Instead, we used our new and improved version.

Small logo changes, big results

As part of our UI redesign, Amy suggested that we make a few changes to our logo. Now we really like our logo, but we thought we’d entertain a few ideas. The new look of our application keeps many of the same colors, but is much brighter and bolder. Amy felt that we needed a friendlier, chunkier font for the logo, rather than the refined Avant Garde. Here’s the original logo:

We’d also noticed that people tended to misspell Infovark in all sorts of interesting ways. People often wrote our company name like “Info Vark” or “InfoVark” instead of as Infovark. I thought the two-tone color scheme used by the text might be at fault, so we decided to make the letters all one color.

Our original logo also implied a lowercase “i” for the company name, with the dot of the “i” being the Infovark’s head. We liked the friendly, unpretentious feel of the lowercase “i”, but after a few months of fighting automated spell check in email and documentation, we decided to go for the path of least resistance. (We are building an easy-to-use productivity tool, after all. having to mess around with funky capitalization ran counter to our mission.) That meant that we wanted the “I” in Infovark to appear in upper case. The easy fix was to make the critter all one color and the text a different color.

So after all these tweaks, our new and improved logo looks like this:

I’m really pleased with this version. It’s amazing what a dramatic improvement those little changes make.

Oh, and for my fellow type nerds, the new font is Whitney from Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

And now a word from our lawyers

We’re in the process of registering a trademark on the new logo as well as on the Infovark name. That means that in 4-5 months, assuming we pass examination, we’ll be able to use the “circle R” ® symbol. For now, we can use the trademark symbol, ™.

It’s tedious and pedantic to use these symbols everywhere, so you won’t often see them on the site. But for the record: Infovark™.

Continue Reading