We have recently published the work we have done for Envy.rent, a cool Hawaiian car rental:

• The logo
• The website
• Hot prices font

Check it out.

Here is one detail that brings me joy. It’s the calendar where the client selects the rent dates:

Notice how the sticky part works. The heading moves up and fades out, the weekdays come to stop, and the ruler under the weekdays stretches to touch the edges, thus separating the sticky part from the moving part. There is also a nice time slider.

The calendars for start and end dates drop down simultaneously. This is counter-intuitive, but very convenient.

In user interface design, we define a Karaoke button as a button which exists solely to highlight the existence of some feature, often a gimmicky one. The button is visible on a product pictures or screenshots, so it’s more likely that the users will notice it and buy the product.

Since Karaoke buttons do not solve any user problem, they do not make a product better. Actually, sometimes they make it worse, for they occupy space which could have been used better. But apparently they help sell the product.

On top of that, a particular class of Karaoke buttons is worse still: those that make product universally better when you press them. An example would be my air conditioner’s Quiet button. If it’s technically possible to do the same job quietly, why not just do it so all the time?

Check out this new Ekaterinburg metro map:

Designed by Pasha Omelyohin, directed by myself.

A large metro network works like teleport: people don’t care how it gets you from point A to point B, it just does. In London, Paris or Moscow metro maps do not show the surface geography: there is no room. And for many people, the metro map is the map of the city.

But that’s not the case for the small metros. Designing a map for a small metro this way makes no sense:

This does not contain any new information compared to a plain list of stations. The need to simplify and get rid of surface details only occurs when the complexity of the map gets in the way of finding your route. Ekaterinburg does not have this problem.

When there is one metro line, there is no teleport effect. It is very important to show how the metro is connected to the surface:

That’s why we list the routes of buses, trolleybuses and trams, show metro exit locations, nearby streets, parks, the river Iset, railway and coach stations:

I made my first Moscow metro map in 2007. The official map was disgusting then, but nobody cared. My work inspired many designers to try to design their own map. I know several designers who gave up after they’ve appreciated how hard the task actually was. I had two major revisions of my map including the one for the official 2013 competition for the new map to be used on the system. In that version I’ve solved the problem of the Biblioteka imeni Lenina junction and invented the Compass (more on that on the 2013 map’s page in my portfolio). I took the second place.

In the beginning of 2015 I saw many ways to make my map better. I wanted to use the space more efficiently and to improve the graphical design: remove the dirty gradients and pseudo-realistic shadows, use beautiful peanut-like transfers that I imagined. It took most of the 2015 to design the new map.

Here it is:

I like it on every level, it’s beautiful. I’ve spent much time to perfect the overall shape, the graphical rhythm, the relationships between the widths of the lines, ticks and circles. Inside the Circle line, I’ve found the most even distribution of captions and white space. This not only looks calm and unforced, but also makes possible a significant font size increase as the space is never lost.

I also had to engineer a special version of the PT Sans font for the map. I used PT Sans in the previous version and I like it. But it has a problem: the capital letters are too high. When you have a multi-line caption, you have to make its line height quite large, which is hindrance when you strive for density. So I had to create a version of PT Sans with lower capitals and slightly less prominent accents specially for the map. Thanks to Anna Danilova for help with this.

Go see the new map’s page in my portfolio. There you can also download a PDF to see the map in detail. Don’t forget to share.

Eugene Lazarev has updated Jouele to version 2.1. It works much faster when multiple audio tracks are used on a page. So my blog post on London Underground voice announcements will no longer kill the browser. Also, space bar now toggles pause (after you’ve started playing a track with a mouse).

See documentation on Github. Special thanks to Alexandra Godun for the English translation.

Three years ago I made Jouele, a good audio player for the web.

Eugene Lazarev has made version 2.0. The player has dropped the skeuomorphic look and got even nicer. It is now easier to customize the colours. The new version has dynamic initialisation, and is a jQuery plugin with an API (these are presumably good things). I have installed it on my website.

Related:

• Eugene Lazarev
• Jouele on Github
• My Music

With Alex Babaev we have a policy of no comments about the future of Ångström. We want the freedom of being able to change our minds any time. And we don’t want to look like jerks who don’t keep promises. So whenever somebody asks about our plans or requests a feature, we just thank them and explain that we do not pre-announce things.

About a year ago I got this email message from a user:

Best converter ever, I immediately deleted all the others, yours has the best UI. Really nice would be a German translation. Can I help you with that? Should be pretty easy, just give me a list with variables.

We had Ångström 1.1 in the App Store and were waiting for 1.2 to get approved. We also had the German translation done by that moment and we were planning to ship it in version 1.3. So something broke in my head that day and I responded:

We’ve started the work on German translation recently. We cannot promise anything so far, but it is likely to be added in an update (not in 1.2 though). Thank you for being ready to help, we will drop you a line if we have questions.

And thank you for the kind words!

I didn’t say it had been done, I said we’d started the work on it. I even said “We cannot promise anything”! But that’s not how things work. As I learned later, I promised to ship German translation in 1.3 in that email. In March, I got another message from that same person:

I was a little sad, there was no German translation in the 1.3 update.

I, too, was sad. Why didn’t we ship German in 1.3? While it was ready for version 1.2, the translation became a little bit obsolete when we finished work on 1.3. We added many new features which were not covered by the translation we had. We could delay the release of 1.3 to update the translation, but we decided that it was more important to ship the actual features. And so we did.

In versions 1.4 and 1.5 Ångström and our German translation further diverged. We just couldn’t find time to update it, because other features felt more important. In August, I got another message from the person:

A year ago I asked about German translation. I even offered my help. You stated, your team already started working on it, so I bought the damn thing. A year later… nothing happened. Thanks for lying to me.

This was not a message I enjoyed reading. I almost started a reply saying that actually I had not promised anything. So technically I did not lie! But we are not in court, and what matters is not what I wrote in that first message, but what my words felt like. And they really felt like we were going to add the German translation in 1.3.

We finally shipped German with version 1.6 a week ago, more than a year after that letter where I promised in it 1.3. I am sorry about that.

Don’t repeat my mistake. Don’t say anything about the future of your product except that you don’t want to say anything about it.

We’ve updated Ångström to version 1.6.

First, we’ve lightly redesigned the app. The numeric keyboard got full width and there’s now a gear icon to go to the About screen (few people could find it before). Everything looks twice as cool now, especially if you have iOS 9 with the San Francisco font. Before and now:

Check out how the gear spins when you pull the About screen from the left with your finger.

Better onboarding. We explain to the new users what they are supposed to do:

Before, some people did not understand that they could just type what they thought, and Ångström would get it. They were trained by other converters to first set stuff up in various menus, but could not find anything like that in Ångström.

When converting local time we now find cities by timezone codes (like PST or CET). New units: gallon per minute, gallon per hour, kilopascal, megapascal, technical atmosphere and millimetre of water. We also now understand the words “quid” and “buck”.

Improved voice recognition, much improved VoiceOver support. Added German localization (special thanks to Pascal Kreil and Dmitri Evmenov).

If you are not yet using Ångström, you should:

Download in the App Store for free

The app is free, but you can buy an extended unit pack with an In-App Purchase. Even if you don’t really need it, you can buy it as a way to say that you like Ångström.

iOS 9 will get released soon and everyone will be able to enjoy the San Francisco font.

Check out the new official diagram for Chelyabinsk tram network:

Designed by Aleksander Karavaev, directed by myself.

When printed on a matte film it looks like iOS 7:

I particularly like how the lines fan out at terminals. Boom: