web

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!

When a website defies both logic and easy description (e.g., Scanwiches), you know you're in for a treat, and so it is with the "I Can Read Movies" Series by Mitch "Spacesick" Ansara. The growing collection of film-based book covers designed with a Saul Bass/Alvin Lustig flair imagines "novelizations of major pictures" such as Ernest Goes to Camp, Space Jam, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—in Japanese (English subtitle: "Mr. Wonka! Just Punisher of Coddled Children"). Click on each cover for a bonus comment/film quote. In the case of Wonka, it's "You're going to love this...just love it," which should be said with a maniacal Gene Wilder gleam in one's eye.

Is it a cheese? Is it a font? You decide, in a new online game that presents players with a procession of names to categorize as the province of the dairy case or the type foundry. Sounds simple, right? You know your Goudy from your Gouda and would never set a block of text in Manchego nor snack on a block of Helvetica. But watch out for the more tricky ones: Rudelsberg, Gabriel, and Beaumarchais have emerged as particularly challenging. Click here to see how your skills stack up against the site's approximately 180,000 visitors so far who have made three million guesses—about 57 percent of them correct.

Want to recreate your grandmother's flowery tablecloth or put your own spin on a classic Alexander Girard print? Head to Spoonflower, a website that allows users to print their own designs on fabric. Launched last year out of an old sock mill in Mebane, North Carolina, the site has rapidly attracted a crafty fan base of 15,000 users. The process is simple: upload a file (JPG, TIF, or PNG), select from multiple placement options, and check out. Prices range from $5.00 for an 8" x 8" swatch to $32.00 per yard of upholstery-weight cotton sateen, and designs are printed (using eco-friendly, non-toxic pigment inks) within five business days. Textile design veterans and amateurs alike can enter the Fabric of the Week contest, which is voted on by Spoonflower users. Winning designs are offered for sale as limited-edition fabrics at Spoonflower's Etsy shop.

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).

San Francisco-based graphic designer Stephen Gose has a thing for the ampersand. "I think it is often the most attractive character of them all," notes Gose on his blog, The Ampersand. Created in May 2008 as an attempt "to give this humble ligature the respect it deserves," The Ampersand is a chronicle of ampersand sightings, whether on signage, book covers, tote bags, jewelry, cookies, pet cemetery gravestones, or a polo shirt worn by a waiter in the Galapagos Islands. Photos snapped by Gose and submitted by readers from around the world reveal backwards ampersands, graffitti ampersands, treble clefs masquerading as ampersands, and permanent ampersands—the freshly inked "&" tattoos of die-hard fans.

A new online database promises to help designers avoid cases of mistaken identity. The Identity Archives Project (IdAP) aims to be "the most complete online keyword-searchable database of logos and brand identity designs from around the world." Developed by San Francisco graphic designer Gabe Ruane, IdAP is a free resource that relies upon the contributions of designers and branding gurus. Active or antiquated logos, logotypes, icons, brand identities, brand marks, and corporate identities are all fair game, providing that they were approved by the client, have been used publicly, and are submitted by their creators. The key, however, is in the keywords, on which the value—and searchability—of the database will depend. Ruane advises those submitting designs to consider subjective and conceptual aspects, including the emotions a logo conveys, whether it's masculine or feminine, and what it represents. "Don't hold back!" He notes on the site. "The more info you can associate with the logo design, the better!"

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.

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!'").

Packaging design is like nuclear power or a pet chimpanzee: easy to take for granted until it goes terribly, terribly wrong. Striving to minimize both its environmental footprint and customer complaints, Amazon.com created "The Gallery of Wrap Rage," a collection of customer photos and videos of frustrating packaging in action. Scroll through to see a baby in tears after a first run-in with twist ties, a couple of Spanish-speaking gentlemen struggling with cheese marked abre facil (easy open), and the meta-frustrating The Amazing OpenX (pictured at left), a device designed to cut through plastic clamshell packaging that comes wrapped inside one.