Daytum joins Facebook’s product design team
The personal data and design gurus at Daytum have announced they’re moving west to join the ranks of Facebook. This has the ZJ table abuzz.
If you’re not familiar with Daytum or the works of its infamous wiz Nicholas Felton, prepare to waste the next hour perusing his extensive annual reports, downloading the Daytum app and setting up personal infographics that you will never actually feed data to (trust me).
So what does this mean for Facebook? On a smaller scale, we can probably assume:
1) Facebook is trying to tighten up its design creds. (Can they hire someone to redesign their photo lightbox?)
2) They probably plan to enhance analytics data reporting.
3) They are hopefully going to share the idea of designed information with the Facebook community, giving users the ability to see their stats in stylish, visual ways that we hadn’t previously imagined.
On a larger scale, Facebook is clearly trying to up their reputation for having some big thinkers on staff. They recently stole Google’s Creative Director Ji Lee, along with a lot more of Google’s top talent. From a prowl through Li’s portfolio, it seems he’s more of a guerilla artist than a graphic/web designer, so we can probably expect Facebook to make with some Google-style quirk.
Li's branding work for New Museum
Facebook in general seems to have a “climb inside” mentality for the whole Internet. Foursquare check-ins? Cool, let’s just do the same thing, on a platform people are already using. Data visualization? Let’s do that here too.
What do you think? What will Daytum create in their time at Facebook?