One of the most controversial and ironically effective typefaces for the web is and has been Verdana. Personally I think it’s ugly as hell and almost never use it in my designs. Arial, a poor mans Helvetica, is basically the only sans serif one can choose from. Hobson’s choice indeed.
An identity is usually built up around a number of key concepts. In art direction a concept is often distilled down to a phase of even just a word. Now if you could only make a website that asks anybody and everybody what they think a brand name stands for. That could potentially be very useful. Does a companies actual identity match up what they want to be? For example on the Exxon page the tag word “Valdez” is very large. Years and years after the Exxon Valdez disaster the brand is still tied to death and destruction.
Very nice video built up with different applications reflecting the lyrics of a song by The Bird and the Bee. The video is great but after rewatching a few times the song gets on your nerves a bit.
Via Fake Steve Jobs
Twitter has many uses and we’re starting to see some creative uses for it. Twistori is one of my favourites. Simple, clean, stylish and mesmerising.
Also it uses Helvetica as its font. Any vaguely self-respecting designer would have the font installed (or a Mac). Enjoy. I think.
Via swissmiss.
SuperDuper is truly one of the best little apps on the mac. It’s works as advertised. It’s clear, it doesn’t confuse and you actually feel happy you have it. All that for less than €20,-. Backup software is often confusing and a pain to use.
Apple’s Time Machine takes care of the daily hassle of backups. However, I don’t drag the Time Machine drive everywhere I go so having a separate bootable duplicate of my laptop hard drive is worth way more than the separate portable drive I bought to duplicate too. It’s so good I can imagine the developers and support staff sitting behind their computers sporting tights and a cape!
Dear oh dear. This is has 80’s all over it. Do they realise that the 80’s seriously sucked? However, this is a great music video!
It’s over. The struggle of convincing anybody that web standards is more than ideological piety is behind us. Microsoft, the last obstacle to industry wide compliance, has changed their stance on what might seem to some to be a minor reversal in how they will cope with browser specific web pages. In actuality it’s one of the most profound statements I’ve seen from Microsoft in a long while.
“We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can.”
I am by my own admission a bit a grumpy and unconventional web standards advocate. It’s been said that Web Standards advocates are simply put painful and downright unpleasant to work with. However, I’m not to concerned with strict adherence to W3C recommendations never mind validation. I work towards sustainability, accessibility and usability. The W3C is in these terms not very helpful, indeed that can also be very annoying.
Internet Explorer 8 will, most likely, employ a system called version targeting. The system seems to be well worked out. Issues with conditional comments aside, the method allows for faulty coded sites not to ‘break’. Many front-end authoring tools still implement faulty front-end code. Some of these tools come from Microsoft, what a pickle for them to be in.
This morning I was going through my feeds when I bumped into this fantastic little video, it made my morning. Members of an improvisation group, hundreds of them, planned that they would all stand still at exactly the same time creating a spectacular sight. The effect bewildered commuters not in on the act. You’re going about you business an suddenly most of the people around you freeze for no apparent reason whatsoever.
(thanks to the infamous swissmiss)