Travel Weekly Blog

Eighteen months on, I still remember reading this article about (literary) character in the Guardian's print edition - not just because I like books, but because it uses a great and transferable phrase of Ford Maddox Ford's: 'to get [a character] in'.

In other words: to show at a stroke who a character is and how he or she operates.

Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: "He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway."

Ford comments: "that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He ... can get to work at once."

The phrase came back to me while profiling travel inspiration site Joobili (and on Twitter) for Travolution, because it strikes me that it achieves something comparable.

I'm willing to bet you understood what was going on before you even touched the slider; when the events beneath it shuffle in response to new date parameters, you can't fail to get the point.

The site's designers have 'got it in', and it can 'get to work right away'.

Interestingly, this neat focal point didn't emerge, let alone come centre stage, until the site was in beta - and it was part of a honing process that saw certain features stripped back to allow the site's central premise room to breathe.

NB - Alex Bainbridge tells me on Twitter that there's a technical term for this: affordance.

NB: Don't look for the Travo profile yet - coming in the September issue.