carolin horn’s mfa thesis project was around visualising information. out of her research came anymails.

it is a very cool way to both visualise and think of emails. every email is represented as an animal (ameba looking but cute). the colour and shape of the animal tells you what sort of email it is (ie filtered – friend? family? work? spam?).

For instance, all received emails from school are blue and look a bit like croissants.

very cute!

the colour also determines the age of the email – it fades as it sits in your email. knowing whether you have read/not read/replied to an email is also important and visually represented by the motion of the beast (it pulsates faster when it needs attention) and how many hairy little feet it has (hairs fall out as you go from unread -> read -> replied).

it looks fantastic but IMO would fall apart if you had more styles of animals (ie more categories). i receive a lot of email and i filter a lot. i also sub-filter (sure it’s a friend but which friend?). the critters could be images of my friends faces or icons representing each mailing list but i think it might go into visual overload fairly quickly.

will be really interesting to see if this gets developed further.