danielheaf.com

I *heart* Datum

After waiting for what felt like months I finally received a beta invite for Datum and I've got to say I'm totally smitten. The brain child of interactive design supremo Ryan Case and graphic designer Nicholas Feltron, Datum is a service for collecting and communicating personal data. (If you haven't seen Felton's annual reports check them out now 2006, 2007, 2008)

Being a sucker for personal data, measurement and design I was bound to love it but it's the way it turns both subjective and objective into stories that's got me hooked. On the one hand the user interface allows you to input and visualise data on almost anything  - like the number of biscuits you eat or how you spend your time.

On the other hand it makes a virtue of users making subjective statements on anything they like:

 
The whole site builds on the growing trend of personal data collection and executes beautifully allowing users to communicate complex information in a beautiful and effective way. Any site that can attack huge complex problems like (record and display data on anything) this so simply and eloquently has much to teach us.

At present it's only dealing with active informational input. Over time I'm sure they'll be developing functionality that automatically pulls in statistics from any number of passive personal sources (e.g. number of tracks scrobbled on last.fm, photos uploaded on flickr, miles run on motionbased).

Future browsing

Making tag clouds fun

Wordle makes tag-clouds so much more interesting. Seriously impressive little service.

Beautiful nerdy design

Designing Authorship

Connected to my work around reputation and participation I've been thinking about the best way to design a sense of authorship. Finding the right design for your brand is crucial at conveying the importance you attribute to the individual voice.

Some brands, most famously the Economist choose almost never to give a by-line or credit. The theory goes that something like this: journalists are egomaniacs and protective about their own territory and their own work, and not having bylines mitigates against that somewhat. With bylines, you worry more about your own story. With no bylines, you worry more about the whole paper because your reputation depends on the reputation of the whole paper.

Understandably, hyper-personalised media experiences like Twitter and flickr put authorship at the centre of the design:

Books have traditions related to content type too. Novels where authorship give design prominence. The book is about sharing self expression and a particular view of style:

Poetry and auto-biographies tend to feature authorship even more:

But biographies put the lead character centre stage and the author barely gets a look in:

Books that tend to be more function or reference led rarely put the author's name at the forefront of design:

Which brings me to travel, where there's quite a bit of variation. Lonely Planet, celebrated for its editorial voice chooses not to lead with the author on it's book or on it's current website:

Newspapers, with a travel section do seem to go more for recognised voices and talent and design them into the product: