One of my favorite design projects in the last year is the main object screen for Imagist. I wanted Imagist to be a place where you could easily create stories from the photos you’ve already taken. Stories were already all around us, and we used our cameras to document so much of our lives, whether it was via Instagram, Facebook or Flickr. Imagist was going to auto-organize all the photos you took into little summaries — a la gists — and you could share them to our gallery or Twitter or Facebook or whereever.
Our mobile devices allow us to access — but also to create — data in a super contextual way. We can add where we are, who we are with and loads more stuff with each action we publish. I didn’t want to build a super intense tool where people were burdened with decisions about curation and filters. I just wanted people to have the a ha moment of — “Oh hey, that weekend was so fun, and all those shots I took in the moment already fit really well together”.
Taking a page from my work at Flickr, I wanted metadata to be more than just things to store and index. For us, the metadata can tell the where and when of the photos stories. And we wanted to make it cool! We displayed a satellite map of where the photos were taken. If it was cloudy, we’d show clouds floating by. If it was raining, rain fell and lightning flashed. And depending on the time of day, we’d even show a night sky with shooting star, or a gradient that mimicked the sunset or the dawn. Small gestures, but they add a lot to agument the vibrant moment when the story came together.
And at the last minute, I decided to place the avatar in the center. The photos are like the words in a speech-bubble this way… like you were really sharing a story through images.
We’ve moved on from the app for a bunch of reasons. Still, little details of the app are lessons I’ll take. We showed rather than told. We reduced the number of taps for you to be able to get to useful information. We thought long and hard about the unifying metaphor we wanted you to come away with. The idea of telling stories with your photos, as something you already do every day and every time you take a photo with your mobile devices, still is something I’m passionate about. I’m sure I’ll come back and work on it more.