Stuff for Chelyabinsk transport
I’ve published a lot of stuff designed for Chelyabinsk transport over the years :
Ilya Birman’s Blog
Ilya Birman’s blog on design, cities, music, and life
Latest posts
The Lag Theorem
Let’s talk about software lag. By “lag” I don’t mean things that take time in general. I mean delays that interrupt the flow of interaction, causing frustration. If your computer is downloading five gigabytes of data, compiling a large project, or rendering a video, those tasks may take a while — but that’s not lag. You asked the computer to do work, and it’s working. Now imagine the render…
The Brightest WWDC in Years
I came away from this year’s WWDC keynote surprisingly optimistic. For the past decade, I’ve been waiting for Apple’s marketing department to stop chasing spectacle and let the designers and engineers get back to doing their jobs. Every year the company tried harder to impress us with the scale of its announcements, while the substance kept shrinking and the quality of execution kept…
Dear Steve Lemay
Dear Steve Lemay, Please consider paying some attention to fixing the user interface problems Jony Ive and Alan Dye have made during their years. This list is a mix of general interaction problems, performance issues, inconsistencies, missing feedback, data-loss bugs, and seemingly minor annoyances. These are the things I happen to encounter in my own workflows every day. Another user would…
Public information screens that cycle through pages
In airports and at public transport stops, you often see screens that need to show more information than can physically fit. The usual solution is to cycle through pages, which is poor design. Let’s look at an extremely bad example from Hong Kong International Airport. It is now 13:22, but the screen is showing about an hour of departures starting from 17:30 (as we can see in the corner, this is…
Design is dead, it’s all evolution now
There’s no design in digital products anymore. It’s been replaced by evolution. When I was reading Richard Dawkins about evolution, one example stuck with me: the giraffe’s laryngeal nerve. It connects the larynx to the brain, but in a giraffe it runs all the way down the long neck, loops around the aorta, and then comes back up. Logically, it should run straight from the head to the larynx. But…
Tashkent Metro wayfinding
I’m happy to show and tell you about a great and very interesting project I’ve done last year. Tashkent Metro wayfinding :
Hoping for a brighter future at Apple
The internet is celebrating the news that Alan Dye, Apple’s head of design, is leaving. Alan has been the face of Apple’s interface decline in recent years. There was a time when the core principles of good interface design were easiest to explain using Apple as the example. Now Apple mostly serves to show how not to do it. Dye ended up with enormous power despite minimal competence: he simply…
When you type to search in Finder, files and folders are mixed together
In Norton Commander, as well as in Windows Explorer it’s always been the norm that folders go first, then files. On Mac, it used to be different: files and folders were always mixed together based on the selected sort order. A few years ago, Apple finally gave in and added a proper sorting option to Finder: folders now appear first, files below. In Norton Commander, as well as in Windows Explorer,…
Recognizability between mobile and desktop
How much can a design change when adapting it for mobile? I go by this rule: the mobile and desktop versions should be mutually recognizable. If I’ve used a website on my computer and then open it on my phone, everything should be where I expect it to be — and vice versa. If, say, there’s a row of six images on desktop and on mobile it becomes two rows of three — that’s fine. But if the images are…
Superpedestrian fleet management interface
Check out the Superpedestrian fleet management interface: I like designing interfaces of this kind where you need to figure out an obscure process.
Samara metro map
Check out the new Samara metro map : Designed by Nikolay Romanov, directed by myself. Special thanks to Sergey Chikin and Leonid Motovskih.
The problem with automatic email sorting
New email apps keep coming out, trying to organize your inbox. Folders in email were invented nearly fifty years ago, and since then we’ve had filters, rules, and now AI — all aiming to automate sorting. Some apps don’t even call them “folders” anymore, but “categories” or something else that only adds to the confusion. Every new app tries to outsmart the others at sorting: “inbox”, “important”,…
Noise cancellation on a Mac mutes keyboard clicks
The Mac’s built-in noise cancellation suppresses keyboard clicks. It makes perfect sense, but there’s an annoying side effect. When you’re taking notes during a client call, it looks like you’re just reacting slowly or constantly zoning out. It’s hard to convince anyone you’re actually typing because they can’t hear a thing!
Wayfinding elements for “Parus” station
Another project, wayfinding elements for “Parus” station :
Apple Watch swimming screen
On the left is how Apple Watch displays a swim workout, on the right is how it could: And below is what you can see in both cases, if your goggles are fogged up (Photoshop simulation). Apple’s design is silly: what’s the point of using small type when you can use large type? But it’s especially silly that even if you enable enlarged fonts in the accessibility settings, it doesn’t apply to the…
Wayfinding for Wildberries suppliers
Check out a new large project : wayfinding for suppliers of Wildberries, the largest Russian online retailer. Wayfinding is not about drawing signs, but about streamlining the whole scenario of how people find something, and even how they understand what they need to look for. The project included signage, maps, printed instructions, a mobile website, an LED board, and a banner. And that’s all…
“Zoom into maps” talk video
Here’s a video of my February talk at the Transit Mapping Symposium in Abu Dhabi:
Official Tashkent metro map
A new version of our Tashkent metro map is now an official map .
Tashkent Metro map
Check out our new Metro map for Tashkent, Uzbekistan :