Spelling, Spanish, Contrast and Capitalism

It's been just over two weeks since I launched the User Centred Design poster. The responses have been overwhelming. I want to say thanks to the nearly 8000 visitors and more than 300 people who showed their appreciation through the facebook like button and the countless retweets. A big thanks to everyone who sent me their feedback and of course thank you to all those who sent a donation. It's great to know that my poster will be put to use in design studios, UX and UCD departments in the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and the United States to raise awareness, educate and stimulate discussion about User Centred Design.

Many people have blogged about the poster. A particular post that caught my eye can be found on michaeljpastor's Amplify. He writes

The other aspect to it that I love is his public-broadcating-like pledge button placed dead center on the initial view. And hence my buried lead - I think this is the future of "capitalism" in the information age (it won't replace it entirely, but will broaden it).

I agree with him. Embracing generosity and voluntary financial acknowledgement of good content is certainly something that will transform the future of capitalism, especially in an age where the old model of capitalism looks like a big fail whale and Open Source models seem more attractive than ever. On that note  — if you're in Bristol later this month — be sure to check out Clay Shirky at the Watershed.

I have released the poster under a CC license for exactly this reason. I want people to share, use and build upon the work. I believe that this is driving innovation a lot more effectively than clinging to some obscure patents or copyrights. Juan J. Martín Beltrán has sent me an e-mail with his amendments to the poster. He has actually translated the entire poster into Spanish! He did this because he believes this would make it easier to understand for the Spanish community. I agree and think this is absolutely amazing. As soon as I have some spare time, I'll typeset it properly and make it available for downloading. Great work, Juanjo!

A somewhat amusing question that was asked a lot is "Did you misspell the word centered on purpose?". Yes I actually did. Because I live in the UK, I used British spelling throughout the poster and the website. In British English, the word centred is spelled like this. Read this rather funny blog post by Jacob Cass, he explains it all. If you like, feel free to send me a version using US English spelling.

I have received some great and encouraging feedback and those of you who've been to the site more than once (10% according to the stats) might have noticed some minor changes. First of all Nick Dymond, a Team Rubber colleague, pointed out some accessibility issues and pointed me to the WAVE toolbar and the WCAG Contrast checker, two very useful Firefox addons for testing the accessibility of your website. One of the issues with the website was low contrast resulting from the light blue background and the white text. Thanks to Wouter Walmink and others who pointed this out. In the poster design I actually considered issues regarding low vision and colour blindness, the website however is a different story. The colours used in the print version don't simply translate to web design. Using the contrast checker, I found out more details about the ideal ratio of background colour to text colour. Although the tool doesn't consider images, it gave me a good idea how much contrast was needed to make the design more legible. It's still not perfect (the 'perfect' contrast would be black and white anyway) but the amendments I made now are a big improvement and a good compromise.

Another amendment worth paying attention to is in the credits. Eva-Lotta informed me that the iceberg metaphor originally stems from her colleague at Skype,  the wonderful Steve 'Buzz' Pearce. He used the metaphor in his and Andy Clarke's great talk 'Brand Experience vs User Experience' at FOWD London 2008. I highly recommend checking it out on Slideshare.

If you were considering to get a copy of the poster and haven't done it yet, the prints you can get from now on are A1 offset litho printed on 135gsm coated paper with glossy UV varnish. They are beautiful. I'll send them out rolled in a postal tube. The poster is actually designed to work well as a folded give-away like pamphlet measuring 210 x 210mm but it obviously works equally well as a poster on your wall.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed! I really appreciate it.