Design that lets you know yourself better

I remember reading about the importance of colours in design. Each one of them conveys a feeling, an emotion or a state of mind. But what about fonts? I found this website that connects your personality with a specific font. It's interesting because it may also be useful for reinforcing the other elements of design like colour, graphics, photos, sound, and writing style.

There are two aspects of this website that set it apart from others on the Internet. The fist one is the content and the second one is the way the content is delivered.

Let's start with content. It presents some interesting (and debatable) points in terms of matching fonts with personalities. The right type of writing for you will depend on deferent combinations of four categories: emotional or rational, understated or assertive, traditional or progressive and relaxed or disciplined. So, there you have, 48 different types of personalities to match with different fonts. It's good inspiration if you feel, one day, that you are stuck trying to find a specific font that will appeal to a certain audience.

About the second point: The way the message is conveyed. The website does a great job at immersing the visitor in a fun, relaxed and interesting environment. This is possible because of:

An interesting introduction, short, to the point and explains the site's purpose.

The colours: The deep black adds credibility and creates a perfect contrast with the video which, makes you feel that you are at an expert's office (at the same time you can tell it's a joke).

The music: It's perfect, adds a humorous note while keeping a sense of formality.

The video: It's one of the best parts. The actor's face is never shown. The voice has an accent, stereotypical of scientist and eccentrics. 

The test and the feedback after each answer create the feeling of a dialogue. It doesn't create the awkward feeling of talking to a machine.

And, of course: The font. It's just perfect: clear, clean and book-like. 

This website is a complete design success.   

Design creates transparency

This website is fascinating. It's a story about a seemingly insurmountable task and an ingenious solution that involved fine design.

If you visit the website: http://sarahsinbox.com/ you'll find all of Sarah Palin's emails from when she was governor of Alaska. Doesn't seem too exciting so far? Wait until you hear the story behind it.

The History:
A number of American newspapers were given access to Sarah Palin's email from her time as governor of Alaska through a Freedom of Information request. The journalists wanted to see if there was anything of interest to the public amongst her correspondence.

The Difficult Task:
The governor of Alaska's office provided the newspapers with the information that they required. But there was a catch: If they really wanted it, they would have to go to Alaska and collect 250 pounds of paper that the emails were printed on -- no digital option was given. And because the information was not in electronic format, searching for any information involved sifting through all of the emails by hand, without search tools, a long process.

The Solution:
While other organizations like the New York Times chose to crowd source the emails to help them in their hunt for interesting information and provide readers with access to a database of the scanned emails, an organization called Sunlight Foundation went one step further with a website that mimicked Gmail in its look and feel, and in its functionality. They did this by taking Palin's digitalized emails and loaded them into a website with a Gmail frame. The result is this amazing page where you can browse through Sarah Palin's inbox as if you were, well, Sarah herself. You can click on "sent" to see which emails she sent, you can use Gmail's label function to read the emails on topics of interest to you and you can star particularly important emails to go back to. It's crowd sourcing in a way that is very natural to the crowd because it's using a format they interact with everyday.

The Conclusion:
Good design ideas don't have to be complicated. They have to be functional, simple and easy to understand by the end user. In this case, by creating a website similar to Gmail, Sunlight solved a very difficult problem: How to get people to go through all this information (emails in this case) and make sense of it. And more importantly, how to get people engaged in a relevant way so, they can effectively become a relevant source (crowd source) for solving a problem that otherwise could take months to solve.