Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0 RELEASED!

It's about time!

I just turned on the new website for Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0. Press releases are going out tonight... Get it while it's hot!

Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0 has under development for 18 months and I've been working pretty much full time on it for the last 13 months.

Special thanks to the T2 User Design Panel and to the hundreds of folks who has given me feedback over the past 3 years. Thanks also to Kenichi for the wonderful icon artwork, Bill for help with the website, Tony for help with the filming, Michael for the website concept, the folks at Apple who have provided lots of valuable advice and encouragement, and Exbiblio for letting me use their very cool office space. Most of all, thanks to the folks who have bought a license and made it possible for me to do this.

Give me about two days to relax (just kidding) and then start sending your suggestions, feedback, and ideas. Most of all, I'd love to hear how you are using Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0. It would be fun to post some real-world examples of your work on the blog.

Release Schedule for 2.0

Well, here we are in December! I've picked December 12 as the official release date for Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0. That gives me a couple weeks to finish up my demo videos and marketing materials as well as fix any last minute bugs that show up in the beta testing. However, I want to get the beta in some more hands, so if you are using Leopard and would like to try out the beta, please send an e-mail to beta@beedocuments.com. While you are at it, please let me know who you are and how you plan to use Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0. Thanks!

T2: Full Screen View

T2 will allow a full screen view of your timeline in screen optimized mode, bulk edit mode, and print preview mode. This will allow you to give full screen presentations or use the maximum screen area for editing timelines.

Because timeline events are now editing "in place" instead of being edited in a panel, you can also make adjustments to your timelines in full screen view.

By the way, this toolbar icon and all of our custom icons are being designed by Kenichi Yoshida who has been doing great work, don't you think? He has made high resolution versions of all the icons so that T2 will be ready for resolution independence someday in the future.

T2 Sneak Peeks: iPhoto Import

Here is a screenshot sequence that shows creating a photo timeline in about 3 clicks. T2 will be able to import photo albums from iPhoto and chart them based on the date they were taken! This is going to be very cool for vacations and creating timelines of your kids' first steps, etc...

T2 Sneak Peeks: Timelines in Seconds

This may be the most dramatic new feature of T2... You will be able to instantly create timelines based on the media and information that you already have stored on your computer!

The following sequence of three screenshots shows charting of recently played iTunes albums.

T2 Sneak Peaks: Event Rows

A while back, I posted a tutorial for creating parallel timelines using Bee Docs' Timeline and page layout software. Charting multiple rows of events is a great way to make comparisons. For instance, you could compare one persons recollection to another or you compare the history of painting with architecture.

In T2, multiple event rows will be a built in feature and will be easy to create. For example, I have created a timeline that compares major releases of Windows OS with major releases of Mac OS X:

T2 Sneak Peaks: Background Images

Another very exciting feature of Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0 will be user settable background images!

T2 Sneak Peaks: Search

Search in T2 was a feature I wanted to get right. It turned out to require a bit more design attention than you might expect. I don't know if you've stopped to think about it before, but search works different ways in different applications.

For example, in iTunes search hides the categories and songs which don't match the criteria, so the list if songs being shown is getting smaller as your search criteria becomes more specific. In a word processor, search does not hide all the non-matching words. Instead, it highlights the found words in context of the document, often sequentially.

When you are looking at a timeline with many events, what do you want to do when you use the search feature? Probably, you want to locate a particular event in order to make a change, or perhaps you are presenting the relationships between certain types of events. For example, take a look at the following timeline based on WWI events as described in Wikipedia:

As I mentioned in a previous post, there are 254 events in this timeline and it spans over 100 pages. Let's say that I wanted to present all of the events related to France. If I search for the word "france", the events which do not match will fade down but will stay in place in order to provide context to the events regarding France:

By contrast, in Bulk Edit mode the search hides all of the events which do not match the search (à la iTunes). This is because the chronological relationships between events are not reflected in this view, so there is no value gained by keeping the events on screen which do not match the search.

T2 Sneak Peeks: Bulk Edit Mode

If you need to create a timeline with very many events, it is often best to enter all the data first and then format the timeline. In the current release, I often use Excel to create tab delimited text files of my events and then import them. However, it is not very convenient to use two different applications...

I am pleased to announce that T2 will allow an editable table view of your events! It looks like this:

In table view, you will be able to add, delete, and edit events as well as drag images onto events and assign event colors. You will also be able to use search to find exactly the events you are looking for.

As an example of how helpful this feature can be, the timeline shown in the screenshot has 254 events from wikipedia (printing on letter size paper spans 140 pages). To color all the events related to Russia red, I searched for "russia" then did a "select all" and chose red as the event color. I'll give more details on search in the next post...

T2 Sneak Peeks: In Place Editing

This is what editing an event looks like in T2:

When I first launched released Bee Docs' Timeline 1.0 in May 2005, it was designed to allow folks to click an event to select it and then edit the event data and formatting options in a side drawer.

For T2, I decided to rethink the paradigm to make the editing process easier and more efficient. Now, you will be able to double click an event to edit all of its data "in place" in the timeline. This will be easier, particularly for new users because the area of attention stays the same instead of shifting to another part of the screen. It also allows you to edit events when the formatting panel is closed or the chart is in full screen mode.

I find that it is also nice to separate the event data from the presentation options. The edit form that you get upon double clicking an event only contains the facts associated with an event. Colors, fonts, sizes, and other visual options are left in the formatting panel. In this way, you can be focussed on entering events quickly and then when you are done, you can style the timeline appropriately.

Quicklook in T2

As noted in this interesting article from Apple Insider, Apple has continued to evolve the Finder in Leopard. In particular, Quicklook and an improved Spotlight make it much easier to find and browse the files you are looking for. However, in order to take full advantage of these features, the software applications you use must support them.

T2 will offer full support for both Quicklook and Spotlight in Leopard. The screenshot below shows the thumbnail view of two Timeline documents, a text file, and a PDF timeline. The icons for T2 documents are dynamically created to match the color and font scheme of the timeline chart they contain.

If you select a T2 document in Finder and press the space bar, a Quicklook preview instantly pops up like this:

Just a few weeks left until Leopard if Apple keeps to their October shipping date!

T2 Sneak Peeks: Images and Colors

Bee Docs' Timeline has always been first and foremost about communicating history in a beautiful and elegant fashion.

To this end, T2 will introduce event images! To add images to events, you simply drag and drop images from the image panel onto the events in your timeline. The timeline automatically resizes the image and reformats the event layout to fit the image. You can also drag and drop images from other applications.

To create the following timeline, I dragged images of jazz piano players directly from Safari (wikipedia.org) onto the related events.

Images can be resized on a per event basis or in bulk, and your events can also include notes and hyperlinks as well. Notice that two of the events shown in the screenshot contain notes and that each event can link back to the Wikipedia article that describes the event. Like the other screenshots that I am posting, the layout is completely automatic, there was no dragging events around to make them fit.

This is one of the most requested features and I am thrilled to be able to provide the functionality with T2!

Leopard delay - What it means for T2

If you are a Mac fan, you probably heard Apple announce this week that the release of Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X, is being delayed from June until October. Those of you who are Timeline customers may be wondering what this means for the next major release of Timeline ("T2").

The bad news:

• T2 is heavily dependent on Leopard technologies at this point, so the release of T2 will also be delayed until October. For me, this means a financial hit. For you, this means you'll have to wait a few more months for features that many of you have requested and to see the cool new stuff that I'm cooking up for you.

The good news:

• The more Leopard functionality that I build into T2, the more convinced I am that building it for Leopard was the right thing to do. T2 is going to be a huge leap forward for timeline software and I'm sure both Leopard and T2 will be worth the wait.

• A few extra months of development time means that some features that I had slated for point releases will be able to be implemented by the T2 launch.

• I've got a handful of important bugs that I've reported to Apple about Leopard that directly impact T2. If delaying the launch of Leopard helps Apple fix these bugs, T2 will directly benefit (so will other apps).

• T2 will be a free upgrade to existing customers, so you don't feel like you need to wait until October to purchase Timeline software. If you need to make timelines, go ahead and purchase the existing version which is still great and when T2 and Leopard are ready, you'll be the first to know.

• If the iPhone (which is blamed for the Leopard delay) brings more people to the Mac platform, this will be great news for all companies that depend on the Mac, including my own, which would make up for the delay in Leopard.

My biggest fear is that the delay may be a sign that Apple is losing focus on the Mac. But, it is way too early to be able to make any conclusions about whether or not this is happening...

WWDC will be very interesting to watch. If Steve Jobs amazed us with new Leopard features and some insanely great Mac hardware, and if Apple doesn't make a habit of delays like this, then all will be well and I'll just chalk it up to growing pains.

How does the Leopard delay affect you and your business?

Timeline with Gradient Fill

T2 is well underway. I'm going to be a bit conservative about posting screenshots of new features until I am ready to release it, but I wanted to show a timeline with a gradient fill in the background.

Besides gradients, T2 will also allow a transparent background which will be cool for exporting timelines as PDF. The transparent background will allow the chart to be composited with other media. For example, a timeline could be composited over a video for a documentary or used over an interesting background in a Keynote presentation.

It is a small upgrade from a technical perspective, but should allow users a lot more flexibility.

Best Month Ever!

I'm pleased to announce that January 2007 was our all time best sales month for Bee Docs' Timeline. The record was previously held by our launch month back in March 2005! The number of licenses sold surpassed our launch month by a large margin. I'm not sure why... we didn't launch any new ad campaigns or anything, but the timing is great.

Thanks to everyone who either bought a copy or told someone about Timeline!

In other news, I have been plugging away at the code for T2, the second major version of Bee Docs' Timeline. I had been doing design and prototype work for the last several months of 2006, and on January 1st, I began working on the T2 project itself (this is a "from scratch" rewrite).

There is still much work to be done, but basic event drawing and editing, parallel event rows, collision detection, notes, drag and drop event images, and Timeline 1.0 document support are complete. I should be able to release a beta to existing customers around the time that Apple ships Leopard (T2 will be for Leopard only).

I've also been brainstorming and thinking about what is next after T2. I contacted the lead engineer on the Simile Timeline project who was supportive about having us integrate their AJAX timeline charts into Bee Documents' products, so who knows what the future will bring... Something for web perhaps???

Getting Close to the Audience

I was watching one of my U2 concert DVDs this past week and was struck by the efforts that Bono makes to be close to his audience. It got me thinking about business...

Bono, who is one of my heros, has often found ways to reach out and touch his audience. In 1985 at Live Aid, he jumped into the crowd so thick that the band was unable to finish it's set. During the Joshua Tree tour he used a hand held spot light to extend his reach to all areas of the arena. In the 90's U2 popularized the "B-Stage" which allows the band to be out in the middle of the audience. On the Popmart tour, the band walked through the crowd with a camera crew on their way to the stage at the beginning of the show. On the Elevation tour, they started the concert with all the house lights on. In recent tours they have had catwalks which allow the band to walk through the area within reach of fans.

Of course there is always the good old fashion kind of reaching out and touching someone too. Bono often invites audience members on stage, jumps into the crowd, or sprays the crowd with champagne. The band also makes an effort to sign autographs for people before almost every show.

It seems to me that companies, particularly technology companies, could learn something from Bono. I can think of a few good examples of companies that tried to make a personal connection to me... For instance, my ISP sent me chocolates in a hand addressed box this Christmas (they also have a real person that answers the phone when you call). Amazon, in the good old days, used to send little treats like mouse pads to thank me for being a customer, and the e-mails Amazon would send would be signed by Jeff Bezos with his e-mail as the return address (probably screened though).

However, the bad examples far outweigh the good. Isn't it ironic how hard it is to get a real person on the phone when you try to get service from a phone company? Have you ever tried to find a contact phone number on Amazon's web site? Many tech companies seem like they are trying to hide from their audience instead of trying to get close to them.

So, I'm thinking, how can I get closer to my own audience? Blogging is a start. I've also begun to Google my customers' names and companies as orders come in to see who they are and subscribe to their blogs if I find them. There are a few authors who are customers, so I have bought and read some of their books. I've also been handwriting thank you notes to new customers. I've launched an invite only customer design panel where I discuss new design ideas. And, of course, I try to answer my support e-mails and phone calls as fast as I can.

I had rock stars in the back of my head as I was designing the Help menu for T2 last week. I took a look at the Help menu of many of my favorite applications. Most of them just have documentation that you can search through on your own. A few have links to User Forums in the Help menu. One of them (can't remember which one) had a menu item for "E-mail Support."

I was thinking that it would be cool to have a menu item in the Help menu that is "iChat Support" that shows a little green dot next to it when someone is available for real-time support via text, audio, or video chat. I'm not sure how this will scale. After all, there is only one of me for now... But, what would Bono do? Throw himself into the crowd probably. Just a thought...

Many thanks to Flickr user iChris for permission to use his great photo.

T2 Implementation

Over the past several months, in addition to my design work on T2, I have build many small test applications that implement different aspects of the T2 project. They give me a chance to work out some of the challenges without diving full on into a large code base.

In the past week, I have shifted much more of my attention from design to implementation. Much of that effort has been on small test application, but I have recently started to assemble the various technologies into a "T2" project as well.

Here some of the things I have been working on:

• New Layout Code for Events
• Multiple Row Layout (Parallel Timelines)
• An Inspector similar to Keynotes Inspector for editing visual attributes
• An importer for Timeline 1.0 timelines
• Event drawing and layout

There are at least a few months of work to go before a beta release, but it is fun to finally dive in.

Final Icon Detail

T2 Beta

Are you planning on doing a public beta for T2 by the way?

Good Question!

Let's start with some history... I got the idea for Bee Docs' Timeline from a Mac Lawyer discussion group that I was hanging out on about 2 or 3 years ago. I decided to take on the project, spent a few days drawing timelines in Adobe Illustrator and two weeks later, released my first beta of Bee Docs' Timeline.

For the first beta (which was an extremely rough version), I only invited people from the Mac Law discussion group to participate. They gave me their e-mail address if they wanted to join and each and every Friday I released a new and improved version to the beta group.

As the software reached my own milestones of stability and functionality I expanded the invitation to more and more people. Eventually I sent out press releases telling people about the beta. When the software was about a month away from its final release, I no longer required that people sign up for my e-mail list, instead anyone could download the beta from my website or sites like version tracker.

Bee Docs' Timeline was in pre-1.0 development for about 6 months and by the end of it I had several hundred people on the e-mail list and hundreds more who downloaded it without officially signing up. Each week's release generated dozens of e-mail suggestions and bug reports. The process was lots of fun and highly collaborative.

For T2, I also want to involve customers in the creation process but I want to try something new. One thing that is different is that I now know, based on hundreds of customer e-mails, phone calls and blogs, what people as a whole would like to do with Bee Docs' Timeline that they can't do now. I also know which of those things I am going to tackle in T2. The trick to T2 is going to be how to provide the new functionality while increasing ease of use, which everyone wants but nobody every asks for (especially those who try the demo and don't end up buying).

I'm also dividing my time differently with T2. Instead of doing design, development, and testing on a weekly iteration, I am slowing the cycle down. I am doing most of the design up front this time. This allows me to focus on the integration between all the new features. It also gives Apple time to stabilize Leopard before I get too deep in coding. It may also allow me to hire outside help for some aspects of the development.

Consider this blog the first part of the process. I'm tossing out ideas here about basic design, features, pricing structure, beta, icons, etc... The reason I am doing that is so that I can get feedback.

I'm a little concerned about other developers copying my design ideas, so I'm being a guarded about some of the design specifics. I'd rather be completely open, even to a very detailed level. So, I'm thinking of starting a separate private blog that I could invite select customers to join and provide design feedback. It wouldn't be for people to tell me everything they've always wanted but rather for things like "Out of these two alternatives, which do you think would be the easiest method to add a new event" or "In which menu would you expect to find the event import feature?" The private blog would be invite only and I would want those invited to commit to regular participation, not just lurking to see what's coming.

After the design is complete. I'll spend a month or two (or three) implementing the design. As soon as it is stable (ie, won't screw up your data or your computer), I'll release it for other folks to try. Probably the private blog readers first and then expanding the circle of users like I did in the 1.0 beta. There will likely be a month or two of polishing the application while there is a public beta before the commercial release. There will likely also be some polishing after the public release in the form of point releases too.

To the readers of this blog, please let me know what you think of this plan. If you agree that this is a good strategy, I'll work out a process for choosing the "design team" participants and get it set up right away.

Working Situation

As some of you have surely noticed, I said goodbye to Exbiblio two weeks ago. This has been a full time job for me for about a year and a half.

The relationship ended on good terms, and Exbiblio is even allowing me to rent back my office space for my Bee Documents and contract work. It is a great office in Pioneer Square in downtown Seattle. Here are some pics:

I'm not sure what is next for me as far as a day job. For now, I'm limiting my search to a few "dream jobs" and am instead focusing most of my time and energy on T2.

This should be good news for the T2 project which can definitely benefit from the extra time that I now have available.

Are we there yet?

Here is the latest icon draft with some more details added. We are so close to being final I can almost taste it!

T2 - Images and Links

In addition to line wrapping and notes, two Bee Docs' Timeline features that are often requested are the ability to add images to events and ability to link events to a document or URL.

Images

There are a few design challenges related to images. Most importantly, I want to have a visual design that seems obvious and natural. I don't want the images to appear like they have been tacked on as an afterthought.

Another challenge is that as events support more features (titles, dates, images, notes, links), users may choose any combination of these things in the same timeline. I want events that show only an image to look great next to events that use all the features, or next to events that don't have an image.

I have tried a bunch of different design ideas over the past week. I've tried placing the image above, under, and next to the notes, putting the image next to the title, etc... Here is the design I like best so far:

(Like many of the other design ideas I'm showing on this blog, this was mocked up using Apple Keynote which is my rapid prototype tool of choice these days.)

Links

Links are another often requested feature. Lawyers, in particular, have wanted to be able to link events in a timeline to external documents or videos.

One of the design challenges with links is that events are currently selected with a click, and I always get annoyed using software that makes me accidentally click links... Don't you hate it when you enter an e-mail address in Word and then try to edit the address and instead it launches your e-mail client. Arg!

The other challenge is that links are often ugly URLs that I wouldn't want to add clutter and distract from the main point of a timeline chart which is to show the relationships between chronological events.

Here is my favorite solution so far. When an event isn't selected, you don't see anything related to the link. When it is selected, the link (if it exists) shows up as an arrow button. Clicking this arrow would open up the external document or web page.

One thing that I'm thinking would be fun is automatically generating timelines based on news feeds (I'm doing a really rough version of this in my blog header). The article title could be the event title, the first few lines of text could come from the article, as would the image. If you clicked the link it would open the original article in the web browser.

Please let me know whether or not you would use features like these and, if so, what you would use them to present. I also welcome comments or suggestions on the design ideas.

Icon Details

Kenichi and I have been trading e-mails back and forth about the last icon draft. I asked him what he thought and he said that he would like the pencil to be more original.

I spent a little time digging around Flickr for pictures of colored pencils. I found this one that I like:

Notice that pencils are sometimes stamped with foil lettering and that the tips are rarely perfect once they have been used. Maybe adding some more fine detail like this will bring the icon to life.

I also wanted to play around with the arrows on the timeline and see if we can get them to look more like a sketch without loosing the clarity at smaller sizes. I took the last design and ran some Photoshop effects on the arrows (noise, motion blur, smudge tool, and color adjustments), to get a quick idea of how more sketchy arrows might look. I like it and think it helps separate the pencil and the chart.

I sent this back to Kenichi, so we'll see what he can do with these ideas. And thanks to all those who have provided feedback via the comments or e-mail! A big reason why I am blogging all this stuff is to harvest the wisdom and ideas of the community.

Line Wrapping in a Timeline

The current version of Bee Docs' Timeline displays events like this:

The event label gets one line and the date gets one line. This design is very simple and elegant. If the event only has one date like the one show here does, then the label and the date are next to each other. If there is a date range, then a horizontal line representing the length of the event goes between the label and date (more spacing is added to accommodate the line).

The automatic layout feature of Bee Docs' Timeline only needs to know the length and height of the total event to avoid collisions.

The single line approach works very well for many people but it isn't flexible for handling very long event names. Really long event names are hard to read on a single line and can cause collisions that the auto-layout system isn't able to handle.

So, the next version of Timeline (T2) will handle line wrapping for events. It might look something like this:

It seems like a simple thing, but it will actually be quite complex to make the auto-layout choose good widths for events in addition to finding the best height to avoid collisions. I could let users choose event widths, but the whole point of Bee Docs' Timeline is that users only need to worry about entering data and the software will do a good job of drawing the timeline.

Another popular feature request is the addition of a notes field. An event with a label and notes (both line wrapping) may look something like this:

Notes add another layer of complexity to the layout because they could be of any length (an extreme example would be an entire book). The software is going to have to make good decisions about line wrap, width, vertical placement, and the length of the notes to show when all the events are being placed on the page.

If I do my job well enough, users won't have to think of any of this, it will just happen "magically" and people's timelines will look like a million bucks with minimal effort on their part.

DISCLAIMER: These are early designs, drawn using Apple's Keynote software. The end product might be very different, but they give you an idea of my thoughts toward T2 so far.

Inmates are Running the Asylum

An associate from Exbiblio loaned me this book a few weeks ago. I've been doing a lot of thinking about project management and design processes lately, so it was an appropriate read.

The main theme in the book is that engineers should focus on implementation and leave design to product designers. Alan Cooper makes some valid points but seems like he has a big chip on his shoulder. Of course, I do both engineering and design frequently. In fact, for Bee Documents, I am also in charge of marketing, keeping the books, and customer support too.

In any case, I don't have the luxury of giving these tasks to specialists at this point. I do agree with Alan Cooper though, that it is best to keep design and engineering separated. For example, I try to do most UI design away from the computer, preferably outdoors with a sketch pad or in a completely non-technical environment. Design and Engineering are simply different ways of thinking and it is nice to be in one mode or the other. When I'm designing I'm looking for the "best" way to do something and when I am implementing, I'm looking for the "most efficient" way.

The book starts to get good when Alan begins to discuss design techniques including the use of personas. A persona is an imaginary person that represents a typical user of the product. I first encountered the idea of personas about a year ago and thought they were lots of fun and useful. Alan Cooper does a great job of explaining the personas and I have recommended this book to several folks already for the persona chapter alone.

I have developed three personas so far for T2. They include a high school teacher who teaches American Literature, a malpractice attorney from New York who loves gadgets, and a student from India who is attending the University of Chicago and studying Anthropology.

Each of my persona has an age, a photo, likes and dislikes, etc... They are very much based on real people and what I have learned from my current customers. In fact, the photos I am using are a real Lit Teacher, malpractice attorney, and student that I found on the internet.

When faced with design decisions such as whether or not to include a certain feature, I can "ask" my personas whether they would value such a feature. If my personas don't like something about the software than it has to change! They haven't argued with each other yet, but if they do, I will have to do my best negotiate a compromise.

What was that about an Asylum...?

Final Icon?

This may be the final draft of the T2 icon...

What do you think?

More Icon Details

Here is the latest icon draft from Kenichi. This one has the timeline added to the sketch pad. I've asked him to tweak the coloring a bit and Kenichi is working on refining a few details, but I think we are almost there.

T2 Notebook

Last week, I bought a sketch book for my T2 design and planning work. I wanted something nice enough that I would carry and use it often. I found a great sketch book at Elliot Bay Book Company in downtown Seattle.

Having beautiful and simple tools like a favorite notebook and a quality pen help me to be creative and enjoy the process of designing products. Hopefully the software I create will, in turn, be that kind of simple and beautiful tool for someone else.

The notebook I bought is both hand made and individually hand signed. It got me thinking about software and how I could bring this kind of personal touch to Timeline...

I've started by sending out hand written thank you notes to all the people in the United States who recently bought Timeline. I'm not sure how scalable that's going to be, but I thought I could take a small chunk of time everyday to read through all the names of my new customers, visit their web sites, and send them a note of appreciation.

Icon - New Draft

Here is the latest T2 icon draft from Kenichi. It is a more detailed version of the last version. At my request, Kenichi is going to try a horizontal page layout and more similarly colored pencils in the next iteration.

Icon - 3D Rendering

Here is the first 3D mockup of the T2 icon. Kenichi created with it with Cinema 4D.

I'm happy with how the icon is coming together but I asked Kenichi to concider a few changes... I asked to have the notebook rotated into a landscape position as this is the most common orientation for timeline charts. Also, I asked that the colored pencils be more similar in color (all cool colors or all warm colors).

Of course, Kenichi will also need to add a timeline chart to the sketch pad.

He is now working on a final design and I can't wait to see it! I'll be sure to share it here as soon as it is ready.

T2 Icon Design - Keywords

Kenichi Yoshida, who is doing the application icon design work for T2, starts his design process by asking for keywords which describe the purpose and utility of the application.

This was a good exercise for me. I am used to describing Bee Docs' Timeline with many words ("Timeline makes it easy and quick to create beautiful timeline charts worthy of..."). However, using single words was a challenge. I think the ones I ended up with get to the heart and soul of the application:

• Visualization
• Presentation
• Charting
• Understanding
• Communication

I'm glad I have begun to pursue the icon design early in the development process. As an icon is a symbol that quickly conveys the utility of an application, I can use this design process as an opportunity to think through all the issues that will guide the design of the application itself.