Djonckheere

Torontonian here. Our traffic gridlock is among the top 10 worst in the world for major urban centres, and I think you have to be a bit of a lunatic to drive into the city core. There are simply too many large-footprint vehicles clogging our streets, which were never designed for the volumes we now see. Rather than adding more vehicles (driverless or otherwise), Toronto needs more investment and prioritization of public transit and cycling infrastructure.

Your site is the second one I've seen using the JetBrains Mono typeface -really easy on the eyes, even when set light grey #eff1f5 on a very dark #07080d background.

Very cool, very creative. I found myself hitting refresh multiple times on the index page to see the random ascii art headlines. Finding the hidden menu in the corner leads you down a rabbit hole of fascinating experiments.

What a sobering indictment of our screen-obsessed world. It seems all roads lead back to the introduction of the smartphone —the mid-2010s, a critical turning point:

> "Never before has there been a technology like the smartphone. Where previous entertainment technologies like cinema or television were intended to capture their audience’s attention for a period, the smartphone demands your entire life. Phones are designed to be hyper-addictive, hooking users on a diet of pointless notifications, inane short-form videos and social media rage bait."

> "The average person now spends seven hours a day staring at a screen. For Gen Z the figure is nine hours. A recent article in The Times found that on average modern students are destined to spend 25 years of their waking lives scrolling on screens."

The WSJ piece only reaffirms what is playing out in large urban centers around the world (not just the US): that it's getting tougher to get ahead these days.

In Toronto, for example, the average selling price for a home has almost doubled in the last 10 years from ~$570,000 in 2014 to ~$1.1 million dollars in 2024; the average monthly rent ~$1,100 in 2014, now ~$2,300/mo. in 2024.

Is it any wonder this has created a housing affordability crisis forcing younger adults to delay many of the so-called traditional markers of adulthood mentioned in the piece?

Compassion — not compression — is a big part of design and creativity; coming up with original and unexpected results. What we see in these explorations is that AI is, I think, good at generating a bunch of novel yet visually repetitive and nonsensical outputs. The helpful-looking-elf-santa-hat-robot iterations from AI all look like variations of 1 concept with their monotonous use of gradients and brush stroke styling. Good for brainstorming? A good human designer, based on these same instructions, would ideate and generate a wider range of concepts. And we see that in the results from humans, which are actually much more interesting and diverse in terms of contrasting styles, their use of form, colour and negative space in my opinion.

Curious, was the inspiration for the Labelf AI logo the Wall-E animated movie character Eva?

Interesting app.

Some UX design feedback:

1. The sort filter (sort by "new" and "hot") is bewildering.

2. The search iconography gets lost on the teal coloured background. I would suggest more visual contrast is needed. (make the search icon consistent with the camera icon on the home screen)

3. Branding: the script font used for the app icon logo ('OS' monogram) is different from the full logo wordmark ('One Set') -is that intentional?

4.Inconsistent menu colour conventions: the header background is teal (#00838f) on which a pale teal colour (#8ac6cc) is used to denote inactive items and a pale white (#edf6f7) is used to denote an active menu selection. The 'Category / Muscle group' toggle uses the inverse: teal (#00838f, the same colour as the header bg) to denote the active selection and grey (#757575) to denote the inactive selection. May I suggest consider using the darker teal colour that appears on the landing screen ("Welcome to OneSet..." message) for this toggle and follow the colour cues used in the top nav (i.e. #edf6f7 = active, #8ac6cc = inactive)

5. Menu orientation: considering the app only appears to work in portrait mode the horizontal menu forces users to do a lot swiping back and forth (as I found myself doing). May I suggest get rid of 'Home' and replace with an arrow icon; represent 'Profile' with a gear or avatar silhouette icon or relocate to the 'more' menu (the vertical "..." icon) that appears next to the camera icon when you tap 'Profile'.

6. Perhaps more on the subjective front, I would reconsider the rainbow of colours used for the Category and Muscle group buttons.

hahahaha! Great response. Yes, mass digital surveillance or mass collection of data if you like. This is arguably Google's hidden agenda and perhaps the most compelling reason to dump Chrome aside from performance issues.