If you have not heard about him before, Yue Minjun is one of the most instantly recognized contemporary artists in China. He is best known for oil paintings depicting himself in various settings, frozen in laughter.

I was first introduced to his work around 2 years back at Singapore Esplanade (if I can remember correctly), whereby his sculptures are being displayed at the hall lobby. At first look, I thought the sculptures of himself looks funny and eerie at that time, I guess its because of the grin on the face. But after a while, I noticed that there is certainly lots of thinking behind those grins, he must have trying to put some message across. I’m not sure what is it, I guess its up to your imagination. I like his work, mainly because its iconic, at first glance, you will know who is behind those art.

If you are interested to know more about him, just watch the interview on him by CNN:

Hi all, it has been a while since my last blog post, and now I am back in action, its my first post from San Francisco. I shall started off my posting what I have learnt from one of the sessions, its presented by John Zeratsky (YouTube) and Matt Shobe (Google). Below are some of key points that were shared by them:

How to make sure you have positive user experience, hopefully it helps you too:

• Fast – biy.ly/fred-speed
• Provide Shortcut - e.g Twitter login box
• Be yourself
• Engage in Conversation
• Listen to what people is saying
• Respond with honesty and humility
• Surprise your users
• Provide your own support
• Be willing to give up control
• Make it easy to get started
• Offer a way out
• Prepare for failures
• Be reliable

I was reading through the magazine on Engineering & Technology (E&T), talking about how design will affect today’s and future products, and was being reminded of around 7 years back, in 2003, when I first saw the 3rd gen iPod at a computer exhibition. The white colour casing of the iPod, is the first thing that got my attention, because back then having white other than the usual black for electronic device, is pretty uncommon.

It was also the first Apple product that I ever bought, its kind of expensive back then costing SGD 700+, but the design and whole idea of iPod totally got me. I didn’t know that an electronic device can look and function that well, until I saw the 3rd gen iPod, which basically consist of 4 touch buttons (previous, menu, play/pause, next), and a touch-wheel, which allow you to scroll through all your songs very easily. The most interesting part is that, the buttons are illuminated when you touch the buttons, kind of make the whole device come into life, and also very “high-tech” feeling.

From that day onwards, I have learnt that design can actually merge with technology, to enhance the overall experience for a user. And later part of the years, I have been watching Apple very closely, with them launching the later models of iPod, iMac, iPhone, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, Apple TV, until the recent iPad.

Apple has never fail to show me how they actually innovate over these years, while still focusing alot on user experience. I have come to learn that sometimes its not about creating something no one else has done before, or trying to squeeze in all the features you can within a device, which can complicate things further. Instead, we should work more on the integration part, which is very important to let the users enjoy what they are using, and not finding them a hassle to learn before using it.

P.S. Thanks TZ for lending out the E&T Mag

Check out the video created by Transparent House for Apple above, which act as a tribute to a company they greatly admire on the occasion of the iPad release. The idea was to show a glimpse into the history of this product giant by modeling some of the innovative products they’ve developed in their 3+ decade history. I thought that the animation is very well done up, quite inspiring to look at. However, I’m surprised that they didn’t include iMac into the video.

Are you aware that when you “Save for Web & Devices” in Photoshop, the software might strip out the colour profile? Unless you check the “Embed Color Profile” box when saving out a jpeg to preserve ICC profiles in the Save for Web & Devices dialog. In versions prior to Photoshop 7 you do not have this option which means that, when using the option “Save for the web” there will not be any ICC-profile embedded.

I’m not sure why this “Embed Color Profile” was implemented in Photoshop at a later versions, since there are still not much browsers will read in this embedded ICC profile, even if the colour profile is embedded in the image, most browsers will just simply ignore the embedded color space information and render them as sRGB images. sRGB is pretty much the default color space everywhere you look. This means that most browsers, applications, and devices are designed to work with sRGB, and assume that images are in the sRGB color space.

However, notable exceptions are Safari, starting with version 2.0, and Firefox starting with version 3.0. Although disabled by default in Firefox 3.0, users can enable color management by using an add-on or setting the value “gfx.color_management.enabled” to “true” in Firefox 3′s “about:config” file. Starting from Firefox 3.5 it has color management enabled by default only for tagged images.

So, the first question is should we still embed ICC profile in images, regardless of the little support for colour profile in web browsers? Please bear in mind that the extra ICC profile will probably increase the image size by a few more bytes (sounds pretty ok, but imagine you have tons of images or very large images required to be downloaded). For myself, since the first day I started using “Save for Web & Devices” option, I do not embed the ICC profile for all web images. Hopefully, in the near future more browsers could consider implementing this ICC profile function, to make colour accuracy better on screen.

Another question I have is, when should we convert images to sRGB? I guess that should depend where will you be using the images for, is it for web or print? If you want your images to look the same regardless of where it’s being displayed, you should always publish them as sRGB. This makes it so what you see when you save is what you get when it’s displayed. It helps to simplifies the workflow, and you do not need to worry about color spaces at all if you’re only going to publish your images to your Flickr or personal photoblog.

However, for myself, I do not convert it to sRGB, I would still prefer to work under the Adobe RGB colour space, as it can offer a wider range of colours, and who knows in the near future, I would require those wider range of colours. Please note that, once you have converted the images to sRGB, you cannot convert it back to Adobe RGB.

For now, the choices is really up to oneself, but I do hope that one day the web browsers can really reach up to a more consistent colour standards, thus lessening the burden on designers, as well as providing the best experience for any web surfers who really deserve it.

What is ICC Profile and sRGB?
ICC Profile – Wikipedia
sGRB – Wikipedia

As today’s Internet connection is getting faster and better, many designers will tend to make use of web effects, such as Ajax scripts or Flash, trying to wow the visitors, but we have to think that its still all about the content in the end, we are trying to sell off the products and services to the audience, and not the effect (Unless its some kind of experimental work or portfolio sites, then I think its ok). I’m not sure for you, but when I am surfing the web for information, I would usually prefer sites that have the minimum number of effects or clicks, and yet providing the maximum number of info. Maximum number of info does not mean to the extend whereby it feels overloaded or cluttered, but its adequate enough for me to know what the page is trying to tell me.

There are just too many side effects for using Web effects, I shall name a few, firstly its when the network connection is slow, the site will take an even longer time trying to generate the effects out for the users. The users will become impatient and eventually leave the site. secondly, its the complexity of effects some sites will have fantastic effects, too fantastic that the users not sure how to use. Thirdly, users might get annoyed by the effects, one good example is the mouse-over effects to pop-up additional info, sometimes can be good to replace the clicks, however too much of it will again cause a headache while using the site, as users will tend to accidentally mouse-over something which they are not interested, and intend to move the mouse cursor away (it can be distracting at times).

A good design should really come from the customers point of view, and not from the company perspective. In the end, if the customers don’t find anything useful from the sites, the lose end will still be the company. Therefore building a site which focus on the site content with less clicks, while adding adequate effects to facilitate the browsing process, will certainly make a great experience for the users and company.