A Mist Opportunity - fast food, UI design and Snoop Dog’s favourite weather

The commute to work the other day was that classic British trudge in the rain-not-rain which soaks you to the bone despite existing as a seemingly inert omnipresent grey smear. You could call it Cornish weather. Or maybe a grand soft day if you're in Ireland. I suppose it's drizzle, but it's a bit closer to mist. Hard to explain to your Spanish cousin, but if you're the BBC, you solve it with a simple icon of which Gerd Arnz would be proud.

The BBC's icon for drizzle

I'd never seen this weather symbol before. I'm not sure how long it's been in existence, but it must be quite new (I'm British. I own a smartphone. Ergo, I check the BBC Weather app like a teen checks Snapchat). So I had a dig around, asked someone I know from the internet called Jeeves, and found an old BBC piece on the redesign of their weather services, written by Melanie Seyer. It's a fantastic read, which - given the speed of how digital design develops - is still a relevant overview of a complex project, discussing research, user experience and graphic design. Curiously, it's briefly mentioned they were trialling a new symbol for drizzle. In 2011. Maybe I'd just never bumped into it?

Regardless, it's a thing of small beauty. It sits perfectly within the complete set of BBC weather icons and is a lovely bridge between the light rain icon and 'MIST' (one of only three which use words as adjectives - FOG and SAND STORM being the other two). Which got me thinking, imagine if mist absolutely definitely without a doubt needed an icon. What would it look like? How would you do it?

I did actually go through a brief design period of wanting to pare all messaging down to iconography, to the point of madness whereby I wanted to subtitle Stanley Kubrick's The Shining using only icons. Maybe the effect of reading too much Isotype history, or working on games which had to be localised in multi-languages. Instruction and information as a graphic was often an elegant workaround; pictures speaking a thousand words and all that. However, sometimes just one simple word is the quickest way to cut through and deliver your message.

Take the much maligned 'burger bar' for example.

IKEA's burger bar, appears top right on the nav.

It's a symbol many web users take for granted as an instruction to open a hidden menu. However, herein lies a classic design problem: no matter how intuitive you could argue this particular design pattern is - it's still a part of a language recondite to any user who's unfamiliar with it. (There's a wider UX conversation we could have right now, but I'll let Cassandra Naji do it better so I can stay on point - this is just a pithy blog entry after all).

Anyone who's owned a smartphone from the start has had the benefit of learning  iteratively, in tandem with the developers who create these user interfaces. New actions, swipes, hidden features, 3D Touch - they've been drip-fed to us. Now imagine it's 2017 and you've never picked up a smart phone before. No matter how intuitive the design of the OS may intentionally be, there's still an incredible learning curve involved. Intuitive design only works as part of a complex and myriad series of learnings undertaken by the user - not just technologically but socially. For the burger bar to work, you need to already have an idea of interfaces hiding content which can be revealed. You also need to decode the metaphor of three horizontal lines and what they could represent. A stack of content? Greeked text? A concertina? A delightful Rococo chest of drawers? Then there's action and consequence. Will tapping it make something happen which the user doesn't want to happen? And I haven't even mentioned the alternatives to the burger bar. Apple's Avocado on toast (I made that name up BTW) or the 9x9 cluster of dots. All variations on a theme trying to convey an action for which there is no set visual standard. Confusing.

Top: Apple's burger, bottom: Wired's burger.

So, three questions the user may ask themselves when trying to find the menu:
Where is it?
What is it?
What happens if...?

So, assuming the website is created for an English speaking audience, If we simply replace the icon with the word 'Menu', then the user need only ask the first question. It's an elegant simplification which seems counter-intuitive to the aesthetic simplicity of an icon, but it works. Which brings me back to 'MIST'.

Mist doesn't need an icon in this context. Mist is a atmospheric condition which affects visibility. It's damp. It's almost physically not there, but is. It's similar to fog. But it's not fog. It's mist. So, back to my original question, how would you create an icon for it? My answer: I wouldn't bother. Let it simply be 'MIST'.



Want some extra reading?

One of the original members of that small BBC design team, Adam Morris, writes about his experience on Medium.

The BBC’s guidelines on iconography (GEL - Global Experience Language) across their brand, including the weather.

Writing in beige ink

If you have previously experienced the imperfect storm of stumbling upon this blog and having the time and/or patience to read any of my stuff then A: thanks for returning, I'll do my best that you don't regret it, and, B: you'll know I'm not a writer. That is to say I write, but I'm really a designer. One could argue that a paragraph is just an efficiently designed series of sentences built from words constructed from letters buried in a foundation of language protected by a damp-course of grammar. But there'd quite rightfully be a real writer waiting outside the back of this blog shaking their head in disdain whilst an architect pins me down in an ugly cacophony of smite and bawling and "BAD ANALOGY" ringing in my thick ears. So I won't. I'll merely flippantly suggest it in the preamble and sneak out the toilet window.

So no, I'm not a writer. I know writers, work with writers and read writers to know that what I write isn't quite writing. So bear with me when I have the bloody nerve to suggest that some of the writing I've been reading of late has gotten just a little too beige for my colour palette. An unassuming hue of safe with a magnolia buff of staid.

Raised on a (probably unhealthy) diet of NME, I could hear the agitating voice of each writer loud and clear. Their enthused, often unflattering opinions of the bands/TV/movies about which they wrote meant a lot to me, regardless of whether I thumbs-upped or -downed their point of view. But regardless of what I or anyone else thought, the truth of the voice was always (and still is) the guiding light through the shadowy land of the dull prose and, ultimately, missing in a lot of written content I've been consuming.

Maybe that's it: consumption.

The voracious appetite for perpetual free content has, after all, given rise to the reams of grammatically incorrect newspapers being left on trains and untold duplicated duplicated content curated (un-lovingly farmed) for boggle eyes to gorge upon like Jabba the Hutt on spring break at a Las Vegas buffet, so reading yet another same-old toothless story on the democracy of Lego seems to make sense in this context. The demand for more certainly can make one feel the pinch. When the monster needs feeding, I know from experience 'getting work out the door' is the means to an end and a surefire way to end up on a fly-by-wire job; it helps avoid any snags and ultimately ensures a nice, pleasant, safe ride. And a satiated monster.

Did someone mention monster?

Adam Lee Davies, the ever-reliable syntactical buckaroo contributor to Little White Lies magazine recently reviewed Gareth Edwards' Godzilla for the publication online. It caused a right old hoo-ha, people spitting about how teenage and ill-considered the piece was. I really enjoyed the review. In no uncertain terms, you definitely know that from his perspective the film's a noisy, fun, smart, lizardy caper. His totes apprope prose only helps emphasise the giddy feeling that remains after viewing. Plus at no point are there any spoilers or synopsical (is that a word?) plot reveals which can often occur in these affairs. Read it for yourself here. Then read those comments below. If you have time, of course - I know how busy you can be.

The volume of vitriol disgorged from 'the bottom half of the internet' has been well documented, with both sides of the fence being painted with, erm, opinion paint. Good or bad, is the chance of authors bleeding to death by a thousand cutting remarks hobbling the writing that makes for interesting content? The idea of creatives being tractable by noxious bullshit is worrisome. I wanted to find out, so got in touch with Mr Adam Lee Davies via a medium I felt commensurate to my style of scribing: Twitter. A few questions pinged across with only a pocketful of characters, Paxman needn't be soiling the bedclothes.

I wondered, in 140 characters or fewer, if I wasn't the only one experiencing writing caught in some magnolia flux? "There's plenty of featureless beige deserts between the glittering gems." Adam offers, whilst I breath a sigh of relief that I'm not completely barking up the wrong tree.

However, isn't this the case in every industry? Graphic design is no different - there's wheat and there's chaff. You just don't want the chaff to take over or you'll go hungry. He adds "A lot of copy is written against the clock these days and some of it does tend to read like (lightly) re-written press releases."

Which goes some way to explain an often homogenised style that comes across in a piece. If the press release issued is like an off-the-shelf white label product, then the feature that emerges is just a re-skin - a work model which I can certainly relate to from previously pushing pixels in video games. "Of course, not everyone wants red-line, adjective-heavy gonzo opinions all the time. Sometimes you just wan the info." Adam tweets.

Yes, it's true. A wonderful snafu served up by his Godzilla review seems to be a lack of solid info for which the trolls are hungry, not the emotional opinion of one person which they get. I wondered if the bottom half of the internet snake pit could influence a writer to play safe? Adam doubts that's it. "It would be horrid to rile people up for no reason," a leaf UKIP would do well to take out of his book "but every writer wants to engender debate."

Something that he's quite familiar with. But how does reading comments make him feel? Using Godzilla as an example, the chop encountered isn't a problem he says - he's a big boy (his words - unverified) who's happy to stand by what he's written. "Getting death-threats for my Skyfall review was perhaps a little strong though..."

What the what? Reading that James Bond review it's hard to see what would cause someone to send a personal email with the exclusive offer to die. Did it sway him in any way? "It wasn’t exactly what you’d call a pleasant experience, but the initial review was rather even-handed, so it goes to prove you never know what’s going to set people off. You just have to stick to your guns." God only knows the fallout from a lukewarm Star Trek review. JOKE internet, it's just a joke! Brrr.

We've learned recently - using Twitter as a media-friendly touch point - just by airing an opinion in an open forum you put yourself up to exposure to the worst in human behaviour. I can't even imagine creating something myself - say a logo - to receive anything other than mild annoyance from a disagreement on a colour way. So it's on reflection, and with regret (just like Sir Alan Sugar in The Apprentice) that I should be pointing the finger (just like Sir Alan Sugar in The Apprentice) at all. I understand deadlines, I understand creative thinking, I understand the mechanics of supply and demand (yes, the irony of this blog entry existing at all hangs coquettishly low in front of me). So maybe, I should wind my neck in. I ask Adam: should I wind my neck in?

"There is an awful lot of great writing out there, so it’s important to accentuate the positive, but you leave your neck exactly where it is, as I’m looking forward to reading the comments you get!".

It may not be a war, but for writers, it's a coal face out there. And it's very hot and coal face-y.


Special thanks to Adam Lee Davies for his time. And for his always splendid Ex-Rent Hell.

...every time sheet: Mar 09 - Dec 12