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Imagination is the only key to the future. Without it none exists - with it all things are possible.

—Ida Tarbell

Project Blog:
Echo
This public art and civic journalism project will produce and collect stories tied to physical locations throughout Atlanta. Signs with Echo phone number and location ID will invite pedestrians and cyclists to access a story about that site via cell phone, podcast or the Web. “When a space becomes inscribed with cultural or personal stories, it transforms into a place of significance,” said project leaders Lila King and Karyn Lu, movers behind CNN’s user-generated site iReport.com. Follow their progress here.

Sign of the signs

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Signs 3Karyn and I stopped by our friend Joe’s shop this week to talk through some options for Echo signs and got to watch a few of them materialize before our eyes. (Note Karyn’s awesome photos!)

Joe owns a local design-build shop that makes furniture and signs and full-scale installations for places all over town, so he’s got some pretty nifty equipment, including a machine that makes incredibly precise cuts in all kinds of materials. To give us an idea of what he can do, Joe cut a few variations on our logo out of some metal sheeting.

Signs 4One thing we learned today: for all our experience in building web pages, we don’t know a whole lot about the way designs work in physical space. Joe asked us lots of questions about how we expected people to spot and interact with the signs, which naturally included notions of readability and distance and dimensionality, none of which figures a whole lot in the 2D world of our beloved monitors.

Joe kindly offered to give the logo and signs some thought and come back with a few options for us to consider. For now, we’re thinking of going with signs in the shape of the “o” in our logo, so it looks kind of like web-map pins coming up out of the ground in real life. Cool, right?

Signs Signs 2
   • Posted by Lila King on 04/26 at 01:01 PM
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Who's Blogging

 
Karyn Lu

KARYN LU works in the Design Experience Group at CNN.com, and is the User Experience Lead on iReport.com, CNN's citizen news initiative. She is passionate about creating a great user experience across multiple disciplines and platforms.

Lila King

LILA KING is an online media producer living in Atlanta. She's pretty sure everyone's story is fascinating if you listen well enough. Echo is all ears.

Click for full bios.