Inspired by the work of Vannevar Bush and Ivan Sutherland, Engelbart’s oNLine System (NLS) was the first implementation of a GUI, a virtual desktop incorporating windows, menus, icons, and folders. For an industry used to dealing with punch cards and command lines, this was radical thinking. While most computer scientists were focusing on making computers smarter, Engelbart was interested in how computers could make humans smarter.
In 1963 State Mutual Life hired cartoonist Harvey Ball to create a smiley face for the company’s “Friendship” campaign. He designed a circular yellow face with two black dots for eyes and a simple curve for a mouth. It took him 10 minutes and he was paid $45. In 1970, brothers Bernard and Murray Spain added the line “Have a Nice Day” and sold millions of dollars worth of merchandise.
It’s 20 years old. It supports only 256 colors. It’s unsuitable for photographs. It has no sound capability. It’s inferior to the PNG (see below). Yet the GIF is still hanging in there. Why has it proved so tenacious? Because it can move.
The father of user-centered design is arguably William Fetter, an American designer who worked for Boeing. In 1960 he coined the term Computer Graphics. In 1964, he made the first computer model of a human body. Known as “Boeing Man,” this wireframe pilot was used to design a virtual cockpit ergonomically, optimizing his ability to reach the instruments. The manufacturing and design industries have put people at the center of design ever since.
In 1952, computer scientist Christopher Strachey developed a program for the Manchester Mark 1 computer that created randomized love letters. It was the first example of computer art.
In January 1993, Jonathan Gay, Charlie Jackson, and Michelle Welsh founded FutureWave Software. Their vision was to create a software application that allowed people to bypass the mouse and draw directly on a computer screen. They called it SmartSketch, but just as it was about to launch, AT&T scrapped PenPoint, the operating system it was built on. FutureWave had no choice but to adapt its software to the keyboard and mouse. From having a market to itself, it was suddenly competing with Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia FreeHand. SmartSketch had become a “me too” product.
The web has given us access to more information than ever before. This volume of data demands new ways of navigating it. David McCandless, author of Information Is Beautiful, says that “by visualizing information, we turn it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes, a sort of information map. When you’re lost in information, an information map is kind of useful.”
The first generation of web browsers, such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, displayed set fonts. In 1995, Netscape introduced the tag, allowing web developers to choose their own fonts. Technically, you could specify any font you wanted for your site; in practice, users had to have that font installed on their computer to view it.
Whether we are consuming media on a PC, a tablet device, a smartphone or the TV, we like content optimized for that particular device. This is not easy when they all have different screen sizes and interfaces and are used at different points of the day for different tasks.
