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UnBeige logo by Angela Voulangas and Doug Clouse, as part of our regular design our logo feature
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webCritics Claim Whitney Gets Sloppy, Audi Babbles
A couple of web critiques to start your day off both a bit more reasoned and maybe more cranky. First up, by way of a tip, comes Perry Garvin's review of the Whitney Museum's new site redesign. We'd seen it when it launched a little while back, and played with it here and there, but hadn't really paid too too much attention. Certainly not with an overly critical eye. Garvin does the exact opposite, digging in to the user experience on the site and finding some seemingly very big flaws, claiming it to be far worse than what it replaced. "Visual confusion, counter-intuitive navigation, and illogical organization put it on par with its predecessor but setting it a step backwards is an absence of a compelling design that knits the site together into a coherent whole," he says. There are some strong arguments and examples in there, and while the Whitney's design team might not agree with some, we certainly hope some of the review makes its way to them. Second, and more funny, comes TG Daily's Andrew Thomas' commentary about auto company Audi's recent foray into "social media," wherein they requested that regular people help design a car to be released 29 years in the future, called the YouthMobile 2030 program. Although we think that Thomas takes the whole thing a bit too seriously, as the company was clearly running the program as a way to both give the brand some warm, fuzziness while also trying to foster young people's interest in design, not actually build anything because of it, he does pull out some of the program's copy and links this unbearable video, wherein Audi uses far too many empty buzzwords and jargon (if "...enabled seamless communication through a host of channels including messaging and social networking integration via mobile broadband" doesn't make you want to turn off your computer right now, then you're likely one of the people who writes such things) and generally continues to make anything connected to "social media" feel like internet leprosy. But that's enough negativity for one day. On to the positive! Don't Judge a Film by Its Nostalgic Faux Book Cover
Answer the Age-Old Question: Cheese or Font?
With Spoonflower, Custom Fabric Is Just a Click Away
Twitter Along with UnBeige
Famed literary critic Lionel Trilling once described Henry James as a "social twitterer." Sure, he meant it as an insult, but it makes us feel better about having signed up to twitter ourselves. Look to the official UnBeige Twitter feed, for up-to-the-minute newsbites, event snippets, links of interest, design trivia, and free candy (OK, we're still working on the physics of that last one). The mediabistro.com tech wizards have added to the sidebar at right a handful of our most recent word bursts (limited to 140 characters), but you can sign up to follow all of our twittering, and start twittering yourself at twitter.com. A few other twitterers we suggest following: Pentagram (@pentagramdesign), Frog Design (@frogdesign), Paper's Kim Hastreiter (@kimpaper) and Mickey Boardman (@AskMrMickey), designer Constantin Boym (@OhBoym), RISD president John Maeda (@johnmaeda), and of course, Karl Lagerfeld (@karl_lagerfeld). Ampersand Aficionados Unite & Delight
Identity Archives Project Building Online Database, One Logo at a Time
Google's Subtle Big Redesign
Yesterday, during one of our usual five bazillion trips to Google to look up things like what Andrew Shue has been up to these days to how to correctly pluralize cozy (as a noun), we kept stopping in our tracks, wondering if our browser's settings had been mysteriously readjusted without our knowledge or maybe we were sitting in some strange new position, somehow closer to the monitor, because the company's iconic search page looked somehow different. This writer even asked his wife, "Does Google look different to you?" before realizing that he could just Google "Google" and find out if something had been changed. Turns out, we were right, as the site had just rolled out a new redesign. It's subtle, for sure, but enough to stop us a few times (which isn't the first time this has happened). Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience, has put up a description of the change, which is a little obvious (spoiler: they made the search field bigger), but certainly helped us regain our belief that we weren't going crazy: The new, larger Google search box features larger text when you type so you can see your query more clearly. It also uses a larger text size for the suggestions below the search box, making it easier to select one of the possible refinements. Study Finds Women and Men are Drawn to Website Designed by Members of Their Own Gender
Last week, we posted that we were a little suspicious about the definition of "design" used in a study by the Journal of Consumer Research. Now we return to our skepticism, this time about a new piece of research to be published this month in the journal Behavior & Information Technology, wherein the central finding is that men prefer websites designed by men and, as follows, women like those designed by women more. Although we think that's probably old hat, understanding that there are differences between the sexes and what appeals to them, outside of topic or maybe Geocities pages (e.g. bunnies and unicorns vs. monster trucks and laser shows), we can't really wrap our brains around how genders would view the web differently, purely on a design level. The look and feel of the internet seems fairly collective, built from teams of both genders working together or everyone, regardless of sex, improving upon earlier ideas. But, again, we haven't read the study yet, so we can't pass judgment (or at least not go overboard with it). If we can get our hands on a copy, we'd be interested to see what it says. If anything, it'll be beneficial for our stand-up comedy ("Men are all 'I like blue websites that rock!' and women are all 'I like pink websites that have flowers!'"). Good Things Come in Poorly Designed Packages
PreviouslySpend the Final Days of Summer Watching Vintage TV Commercials GM Launches 'the Lab' in Effort to Make Design Process More Transparent Another Day, Another Graphic T-Shirt YSL Makes Sloppy Move Into Social Media, Namesake Designer Spins in Grave Illeana Douglas Assembling More IKEA-Sponsored Projects Design Firm Delete Not Fonda Jane for Thieving Their Website DIY Dyna Moe: AMC Taps 'Mad Men Illustrated' Artist for Avatar Application Bookforum Launches New Website Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn Launch 'Significant Objects' Project Habitat Gets Into Twitter Trouble Guggenheim Launches Online Design Forum Layer Tennis Playoffs Kick Off This Very Morning Make It Like a Polaroid Picture Redesigns and Responses: An Interesting Discusssion About Site Redesigning Without Being Comissioned At Mediabistro Circus, Data Is King but Design Is Differentiator And the Winning Google Doodle Is... NYT Launches Photojournalism Blog Milton Glaser Launches New Website Kids Nationwide Vie to Doodle for Google Coming Soon to a TV Near You: Adobe Flash Planned YouTube Redesign 'Totally a Hulu Approach' LIFE.com Launches with Millions of Photos, Ellen DeGeneres's '6 Cutest Dogs' Yoox Moves Forward with IPO Plan Ai Weiwei Blasts Chinese Government for Earthquake Response Is Damien Hirst One of the 100 Most Influential People in the World? Wanted: Designer Who's Up to the Test Flickr Teams with Getty Images to Launch 'Flickr Collection' MoMA Debuts Redesigned Website Mediabistro Launches MediaJobsDaily.com Cooper-Hewitt Gets In on 'Doodle for Google' Design Contest Action Joseph Ungoco Leaves Zink for Fashion Site WhatsWear.com DnA Talks Rockwell's Oscars, Gehry's 80th, and George Lucas Building at USC The Queen of England Unveils Her New Website Layer Tennis Kicks Off This Afternoon Architectural Digest Remembers John Updike Google Celebrates Jackson Pollock's Birthday WhiteHouse.gov's Sudden Redesign and Macon Phillips' Promise for a More Internety America And DIY Shepard Fairey Posters for All Neville Brody Appears on Design Matters Today at 3pm French Fashion Companies Sue Over Photographs Taken at Fashion Shows Pandamania Pounds Taiwan Website Marriott CEO: What My Deep Fryer Accident Taught Me about Hotel Management Edward Leida Launches Website, Will Guest Art Direct NYT 'On Language' Column Virtual Person to Win Actual $10,000 for Outstanding Achievement in Second Life Helmut Newton Estate Issues Critic Paddy Johnson a Cease and Desist New Website Tracks World Trade Center Progress, or Lack Thereof Anti-Spec Target, Pixish, Set to Shut Down Candy Pratts Price on Style.com and Substance: 'We Run It Like a Magazine' Behind the Scenes at Yanko Design Info on, Reactions to Wall Street Journal's Redesign A Wiki for Future Project Runway Designers Sartorialist Falls into Gap Ads A Day In the Life of the T-Shirt Design Competition World The Death of PodTech and the Importance of Good Design Illeana Douglas to Star in IKEA Web Series Critiquing Obama's 'Thanks to Hillary' Banners Brandweek Retools Website, Picks 'Superbrands' Newspapers Run Into Messy Design Trouble Online Focus Web Design on Quick and Easy, Says Jakob Nielsen's Usability Report MB Circus: Designing for Speed, Simplicity Armed with 'Lots of Little Ideas' Sixth Grader Designs Today's Google Homepage Logo Making a Case Against E-mail Meeting Web Design By Jouve, I Think They've Got It: Artnet Adds Design Marketplace Ian Adelman Leaves nymag.com for Tina Brown's Online Venture Dash Still Doesn't Dig April Fool's Photoshop Express Launch Round-Up In Scion Speak, Everyone's a Designer Jonathan Adler Loves a Doric Column! BusinessWeek Thinks Hulu Has the Design to Succeed Spitzer Lesson #1: Don't Trust a Prostitution Ring Using an Unsightly 'Web Design' Front Designing A Replacement for E-Mail? Introducing Chumby: Will People Surf the Internet on a Beanbag? Playing Ball with Don Hamerman Yahoo Pink Slips Entire 'Design Innovation' Team Blueprint Subscribers Receive Little White Postcard of Death Judging Obama and Hillary: Mac or PC? New CRIT Blog Debuts and Steven Heller Exhibition Goes Online David Airey Returns Full Force, Launches New Logo Blog Layer Tennis Finals: Be There! Meeting Adrian Holovaty, the Brains Behind EveryBlock Finally! Emigre Becomes a Blog! Kinda. Not Really. No, Not at All. American Craft Crafts a New Website The Scoble-Facebook Ban, Maybe Not Such a Bad Idea? Piers Fawkes and PSFK Fight Back After Anti-CES Post Cooper-Hewitt Launches John Maeda-Designed Google Gadget In Which We Blog About Lynn Yaeger's Imaginary Blogging About the Met's Blog-Driven Show #1 on Our Year-End List of Most Interesting Year-End Lists: Album Visualization David Airey Harnasses the Power of the Internet, Regains Hacked Site When Harold Met Blogging: Museum Enters Blogosphere via Costume Institute Show The Continuing Absurdity of Web 2.0 Naming |
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