Oleg draws a series of comics called “Cat”. He started the strip while he was working in Moscow, Russia. The “Cat” is amazingly popular in Russia: several heavy volumes of “Cat” comics have been published and invariably sold out. The English version of the strip is available as an iPad app “iCat”.
Exactly a year ago Oleg drew a strip about flying to space and mailed it to one of his fan friends in Moscow who liked it a lot. In fact, the friend passed the strip on to Sergey Ryazansky, a Russian cosmonaut who flew to the ISS last year, and served as a Flight Engineer on Expedition 37 and Expedition 38 before returning to Earth aboard the Soyuz on March 11, 2014. Sergey took the strip with him to space, and then brought it back with him in the Soyuz TMA-10M on March 11.
Oleg has received his strip back in the mail today! As far as everyone involved is concerned, this is the first hand-drawn original comic strip in the history of human kind that flew to space, resided on the International Space Station for six months, and returned back to Earth. Congratulations, Oleg!
That officially makes Rukuku visual design truly heavenly and super highly technological. Sky is no longer the limit.
Rukuku design work is progressing full steam. In the process, we have discovered that interface design can be driven by the Power Law.
In early 20th century Vilfredo Pareto noticed a particular quality about incomes—in different towns around Europe, across many centuries, regardless of political systems, geographical location or anything else, incomes were distributed on a curve:
The graph illustrates that roughly 80% of wealth belongs to about 20% of people. And the remaining 80% of people collectively own the remaining 20% of societal wealth. This 80/20 rule magically works in many areas of life.
We discovered that when people post pictures and attach tags to them, 80% of pictures have fewer than 10 tags. Furthermore, any type of tagging activity on the web seems to follow the Pareto Law and 10 tags is the tagging capacity that should satisfy most of the users.
We concluded that if there is a need to limit the number of tags that a user can make in a software interface, most of the people will be satisfied with about a dozen.
Once all the number crunching was done and we were certain that “rukuku” would be our brand, we set to design the image. We needed to marry the ideal etalon brand qualities with those perceived to be attached to the word “rukuku”. We soon realized that the main challenge was to come up with an interactive solution that was also easy. Looking at the list of perceived brand traits in the previous post, it becomes apparent that we also needed to link some very contradicting traits: male and female, aggressive and cute, facetious and serious, etc. This was becoming really fun!
Our mighty design and programming team is exceptionally strong. Our graphic design work is led by a world-class illustrator, graphics designer and book author Oleg Tischenkov (you should definitely buy his fun interactive book for iPad). Here’s how the process went:
First sketches
Hm… this sort of looks like an owl with teeth; owl is a bird, but a weird one, and it is generally considered smart. Good idea. Where’s the interactivity we need?
This origami idea is brilliant! It is as interactive as it gets: anyone can make our logo themselves and interact with it. Plus, origami is Asian, it can be both puzzle and art, and it is fun, and can be easy! This is an ideal solution.
That’s the direction we should go—origami owls. Let’s see what is there in the world of origami owls. Google search reveals hundreds of paper owls, and we like three of them. The idea is to use one of these designs as a basis for our own design:
All of them look adorable. The next challenge is to choose the one that is ideal for us. The perception histogram for the ideal emphasized easiness, so that’s what we decide to test, and for a couple of days we folded dozens of owls.
The one with long horns (“mimizuku” in Japanese) by Hideo Homatsu is absolutely stunning:
Let’s try to fold one:
This takes some persistence and skill, but we do not give up:
Finally, we make a bunch of those mimizuku’s, and the results are disappointing. While Hideo Homatsu’s is a brilliantly designed origami owl, it is not easy one. Reject!
This is much easier—a good candidate for modification.
What did we like in the difficult one? It was a mimizuku, i.e. the horned owl, and the horns gave it a mildly aggressive look. We liked its three dimensional eyes and the symmetry of the design. However, Fumiaku Shingu’s owl is definitely facetious, cute and just lovable. Let’s play with it futher and give it the qualities we liked in the mimizuku:
We discover that with a profound change to the design the owl can be put on its feet. Great! We love more interactivity—the Rukuku Owl can be placed on a desk or a bookshelf as a decorative object. Three dimensional blister eyes are great, but the owl is almost too cute. We need to make it a horned owl. The solution is simple: make small cuts in the folded edges above the eyes and unfold the horns. Done:
Now we need folding instructions for the Rukuku Owl. They have to be easy, but not too easy. We go through several versions of the folding instructions, use our friends as test subjects, and settle on the one below:
Finally, we were completely happy, and our super smart lawyers filed for copyright protection. Done.
Stay tuned! Tomorrow’s post will be about our approach to user interface design.
Oleg draws a series of comics called “Cat”. He started the strip while he was working in Moscow, Russia. The “Cat” is amazingly popular in Russia: several heavy volumes of “Cat” comics have been published and invariably sold out. The English version of the strip is available as an iPad app “iCat”.
