Levi’s illustrative talents go far beyond the icons you see here – but it takes an amazing amount of creative discipline to develop simple graphics with a distinctive personality. These are created in Adobe Illustrator using a Wacom tablet and pen, which preserves the hand-drawn quality. Our hat is off to Levi!

Greetings! It is Saturday, and I finally have time to write the blog post for Wednesday (so much for Internet Time . It is becoming somewhat of an RDC tradition to tweak the details and let the ideas percolate a bit before posting to the web, which suits me fine. The best work takes time to develop.

Levi is making great progress with the icons. He has about a third of them completed, and I asked permission to post a few of them today to show the process. To give the icons uniformity, he is starting with a basic visual element – the circle – and building out from there. We are also using the Sugar icon set as a basic palette for look and feel (and eventually, color). As you can see, the set is beginning to work together on its own, and it looks spectacular on the XO.

Steven has gathered the metadata for the UI and made it available in a .CSV format. After brainstorming a bit, we decided to explore building out the web UI programmatically before we solve the puzzle of how to extract the metadata from the .CSV file into the Journal from the stick. We want to ensure that this collection will be accessible in other applications, such as GIAB (now in its 3rd revision) which solves the metadata issue, but does not work with local collections. We are always thinking about how to keep the architecture and data open so other people can use it and we can continue to improve it in the future.

We also conducted a few usability tests on the XO, and made some adjustments to our layout. The most notable change is that we decided to use a liquid layout as opposed to a fixed layout. Simply put, liquid layouts allow the user to have control over a very important personal aspect of their view: the amount of information that they see on-screen. Using our own layout as a basic example, if a user prefers to see more than five books in a row, all they have to do is resize the browser window (go ahead, try it! – you can see a similar design practice in the search result view of Open Library). This is important on both the web and the XO. On the XO, using a liquid layout means that the display refreshes automatically when a user physically flips the monitor from a horizontal to a vertical orientation. We like smart, elegant UI at the Rural Design Collective.

We have also tweaked our collection considerably in terms of categories, which is reflected here. We are still contemplating what the best approach is in regards to collection size and content in general – but that is a design solution for another day. In the meantime, enjoy your weekend!