marchaprilpreview2012

MARC & CHANTAL DESIGN ZINA SAUNDERS DUNCAN/CHANNON COMMERCIAL TYPE CHRISTOPHER WAHL EXHIBIT INTERACTIVE ANNUAL 18

INTERACTIVE ANNUAL 18

35 AWARD-WINNING PROJECTS SHOWCASING THE BEST INTERACTIVE DESIGN OF THE YEAR

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March/April 2012 Twenty-Four Dollars www.commarts.com

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am very interested in passion.” Meeting illustrator Zina Saunders, one immediately understands that these words are her credo. With her long hair, red jeans and sparkling gaze, Saunders radiates intelligent energy and friendliness, and that same spirit inhabits her richly colored, painterly illustrations. Strong emotion drives her, whether she’s doing editorial illustration for the Wall Street Journal or Discover, lambasting Rick Perry in a cartoon for Mother Jones or creating a loving homage to a fellow city dweller for one of her many reportorial portraits of ordinary, yet extraordinary, people. This is one illustrator who can truly be said to bring an idea to life—and to bring real, vivid life to her work.

ZINA

Saunders

A born-and-bred New Yorker, Saunders, 58, still lives in Manhattan on a quiet, tree-lined street off busy Third Avenue. Her apartment, which doubles as her studio, is bright, scrupulously clean and free of clutter. Remarkably, no art hangs on the walls. “There’s so much going on in my head, I want to rest my eyes when I look around,” Saunders explains. Instead of a visual collection commonly displayed by many illustrators, her all-white walls carry a clue to her sense of humor: Over her kitchen and drawing tables, she has affixed whitewashed picture frames; at the center of each is a tiny, printed label that reads, “fine art.”

This visual wink represents Saunders’s enthusiasm for her life as an illustrator as much as it pokes fun at gallery morés. “To me, doing art has always been illustration,” she says. “I’ve never imagined myself to be a fine artist.” One reason she cites for this clear self-image: Her father, Norman Saunders, was himself a commercial illustrator. As a child, when she and her parents lived in an Upper West Side brownstone that she describes as “kind of like The Addams Family,” she spent many hours in her father’s studio, drawing “horses and girls” while he created the artwork for Topps bubblegum cards. The young Saunders also made some surreptitious adjustments to her father’s work, adding extra eyelashes to the girls he painted. “My father was a tough guy in a lot of ways—it’s amazing that he didn’t give me hell for that,” says Saunders. Instead, he taught her how to be a careful observer and imparted his own fondness for learning about other people. “He would talk to anyone on the street. [He had] curiosity about the people around him, about regular people.” Saunders’s mother, an executive editor for special interest magazines published by Woman’s Day, also gave her confidence that she could become what she wanted.

“I never felt like I shouldn’t grow up to be an artist,” she says.

by Caitlin Dover

However, growing up to be an artist turned out to be a different process for Saunders than might be expected. While she did attend what was then the High School for Music & Art, she admits that she didn’t take it very seriously. And she went to Cooper Union for only a month or so before dropping out to run away with a “guy with a motorcycle and a beard.” For a while, she played the levitating lady in a circus troupe (and no, she will not tell you how levitation works—it’s a trade secret). Understandably, undergoing formal art training felt somewhat beside the point

Right: “Newt Gingrich as the new guru of the Republican party.” Tim Luddy, art director; Mother Jones, client.

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interactive annual 18: information design

The Daily “A well-considered news interface. Lots of rich content that keeps the interest high.”

—Kim Rees

Launched just over a year ago, this tablet-native national news brand publishes original content exclusively for the iPad. With the depth and quality of a magazine, delivered daily like a newspaper and updated in real-time as on the web, it’s incisive, optimistic and independent. It’s not just an app, but a new voice that presents the day’s news and information in a way that’s innovative, informative and inspired. Combining everything print, web and broadcast, The Daily mixes images, text, video, infographics and unique engagement in a package that provides information in a way that dazzles as users interact with it.

Overview:

• From conception to launch, the app was created in approximately six months.

• The Daily puts out over 100 pages of original editorial and designs every day.

• In 2011 The Daily was the third highest grossing app in the iTunes store, after the games Angry Birds and The Smurfs, and subscribers spend more than 30 minutes on each visit and return to the app multiple times each day.

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www.thedaily.com

“A beautifully designed iPad app that has the potential to simplify the way we consume news on the Internet.”

—Keith Butters

Comments by John Kilpatrick: What was the most challenging aspect of the project? “The obstacles to establishing The Daily were big: Nothing like this had ever been done before, so we were creating everything from scratch. Like many startups we worked unending hours, building a robust daily news publishing platform and producing an incredible amount of content.”

What’s the process for creating content? “The Daily features every kind of media, from text on a page and interactive infographics to videos and photo slideshows. We’ve learned that there’s enormous value in presenting content in, not just a variety of formats, the right format (sometimes a story is told best when the reader can interact with a graph while another story might be only text or video). A critical component of our storytelling is reflected in our workflow: Reporters, editors, designers and producers work together as content producers to figure out the best way to tell a story.

Each spoke of the wheel is involved from the beginning, enabling us to figure out the best way to report—as the story develops, each element can evolve with it.”

Frank Campanella/Pablo Caro/Jon Dobrowolski/Ramon Espinosa/ Gaberiella Zappia, art directors Alicia Hallett, user experience designer Jon Magliola/Mike Scott, user experience directors Christie Ha/Courtney Mitchell/Taryn Wood, senior designers The Daily designers, design team Mike Schmidt, associate creative director John Kilpatrick, executive creative director Rebecca Grossman-Cohen, strategic planner Ariscielle Novicio-Alban, technology director Jesse Angelo, editor in chief Emily Grad, executive producer The Daily (New York, NY), project design and development/client

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interactive annual 18: self-promotion

Mill Touch “A gorgeous use of touch technology.

Very deliberate controls and navigation provide a fluid and lush sensory experience.”

—Kim Rees

Remember the interactive touchscreen that detective John Anderton used to fight pre-crime in Minority Report? Remember how crazy and far-fetched that concept seemed in 2002? Fast forward to presentday and The Mill’s New York office. This rear-projected, 5' × 3' interactive touchscreen panel, made of switchable glass, presents a galaxy of info-nodes—each representing a project from The Mill’s portfolio. The nodes float in a responsive celestial space made up of two million particles simulated in real time. When fingertips move across the screen, the particles and nodes respond. Users can play with the particle stream or interact directly with the nodes to reveal content and dive deeper into projects.

Overview:

www.themill.com/work/mill-touch/behind-the-scenes.aspx

• Design and development took ten weeks.

• Traditional video controls were replaced with an accordion track-bar that allows jumping to any part of a video with a simple swipe.

• The making-of video has amassed around 30,000 views on the web and has been demonstrated in-person 200 times since June 2011.

Bowe King, art director Chris McKenzie, user experience designer Jeff Stevens, design director Sheena Matheiken, creative director Hai Nguyen, technical lead Andrew Bell, technology director Audrey Davis/John Koltai, animators Kei Gowda, producer Bridget Sheils, executive producer The Mill (New York , NY), project design and development

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“Ordinarily touchscreens like this are all about rotating and scaling images, or Minority Report-style graphics, but this project flows and feels organic and makes the touchscreen matter.”

—Keith Butters

Comments by Andrew Bell and Sheena Matheiken: How did this project compare with others you’ve worked on in

“Much of what makes a project like this interesting is that even core workflow questions are largely unexplored territory. Programmers of course have constraints in terms of what the schedule and the hardware will allow; contrast that with designers, for whom the sky is (mostly) the limit (if it’s ‘in the pixels’ then they’ve succeeded). It presented an interesting dilemma. Did we want to have our programmers dictate the set of parameters and techniques that the designers would be allowed to use, or did we want to have the designers create visuals for the programmers to vet with a technical eye? Ultimately we arrived at the latter. The designers did motion tests in After Effects and Cinema 4d and, afterward, the programmers evaluated them for feasibility. The argument was that designers can iterate much faster than developers, so it’s sensible for them to begin the conversation. It worked very well for Mill Touch, and has been the workflow we’ve been using ever since.”

the past?

Did you use any applications that you hadn’t used before?

“Having frequently worked with web technologies that pose limitations on interactivity and visuals, it was incredible to see the full range of creative possibilities offered by Cinder.

What’s exciting for us is the opportunity to not only redefine the way we interact with technology, but to have the very technology remain hidden, seamlessly integrated into the experience. The results are beautiful objects of design that transform the spaces we live in.”

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