We are not in the business of passing judgment on people, but there is nothing to stop us from enjoying it from afar. Such is the case with this short post over on Airbag, which we were pointed to by way of Andy Rutledge. It's about the failing of PodTech, an internet startup who was given oodles of venture capital money, but spent hardly anything on design or branding, which their celebrity employee, one Mr. Robert Scobble, said wasn't a very important thing to care about at all. So the Airbag piece is something of a "oh really?!" sort of response to this lack of design understanding, which we enjoyed mightily and hope you will too.

Having infiltrated deepest Brooklyn with its low-priced homegoods and cafeteria meatballs, Swedish retail juggernaut IKEA is taking its show on the road, with the help of...Illeana Douglas? That's the word from our techie sibling blog, MobileContentToday. According to MCT, Douglas (who utterly charmed us with her Factory Girl turn as Diana Vreeland) will be starring in IKEA's new scripted web series entitled "Easy to Assemble." The first of the videos, which will be viewable on mobile phones as well as online, is slated to debut in September and will showcase IKEA's fall products. Be sure to tune in for celebrity cameos and valuable insight into how to pronounce the name of your dishes ("LJUVLIG" doesn't exactly roll of the tongue).

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 on to become twitterers ourselves. A couple of weeks ago, with the help of some Eadweard Muybridge photos (see above), we debuted our official UnBeige Twitter account—your source for terse and downright laconic breaking newsbites, event snippets, and links of interest—and today the mediabistro.com tech team has worked its magic to add to the sidebar at right a handful of our most recent word bursts (limited to 140 characters). Now to test our hypothesis that the longest day of the year will also be the most Twittered. Sign up to follow all of our twittering, and start twittering yourself at twitter.com.

A great read sent in by Steven Heller: his latest piece for the NY Times' Campaign Stops blog, "The Hardest Words." In it, he's once again taking a look at the presidential race from a design perspective. This time around, he's looking at a banner the Obama camp put up after Hillary Clinton dropped out of the running, thanking her for all her work in, well, trying to beat them? But any direct and obvious politics should certainly be pushed aside, as Heller wants an interesting conversation about how to interpret the visual cues given off by the image, so he makes a few remarks, then asks a handful of designers for their opinions. Here's one from an old friend of ours:

David Barringer, a designer and a novelist, thinks the "ice-cold blue" is odd. As an alternative to this banner "I'd do an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in a Political Drama," he says.

When embarking on a rebrand of a site about branding, things can get confusing, but Brandweek has completed the task, today launching its expanded website (on the heels of relaunched versions of Adweek.com and Mediaweek.com). Why redesign now? "To more efficiently enhance the capability of our web-based platforms to connect with and facilitate interaction with our core audiences," of course, or such were the buzzphrases (what? no synergies?) assembled by Brandweek publisher Tom Woerner in response to the query of our brother blog, PRNewser. As for how the new site can efficiently enhance your capabilities, check out the newly published Superbrands issue, fronted by the Target-y cover pictured above. Among the Superbrands content available free online for the first time ever are the list of America's Top 2000 brands, ranked by full-year 2007 national media expenditures, and in-depth analysis by category.

In his letter introducing the issue, Brandweek editor Todd Wasserman emphasizes that, "people don't buy products for their utility and quality; they don't even really buy products at all. They buy stories." And he signs off on a rather chilling note. "It reminds me of the joke Woody Allen told in Annie Hall about the man who thought he was a chicken, but his brother didn't want to tell him he wasn't because he—the brother—needed the eggs. We will all be in a lot of trouble on the day when the consumer finds out he is not a chicken." On the bright side, the realization may do wonders for the ranking of the brand currently coming in at #1494, Tyson's frozen entrees.

By way of Andy Rutledge (who, by the way, has a great personal piece up right now on his site about turning down clients), we were pointed to Publishing 2.0's interesting story "What Newspapers Still Don't Understand About the Web." It focuses on the issues some newspapers are still dealing with in design, or rather, information architecture. Scott Karp, the writer of the piece, decides to focus on a scenario he ran into when the power went out in his DC office. He eventually found a cornucopia of information on the Washington Post's site, but only after having to dig around and navigate blindly through miscellaneous pages. So while the information was all readily there and was more than he could ever want, the tasks involved in getting there were frustrating and poorly planned. It's a really great example of something sure to be super familiar to nearly everyone, and a problem that needs working out, should newspapers want to stop getting beaten up around the web.

We may be averse to the likes of FaceBook and MySpace (and the Orwellian buzzword "social networking" for that matter), but our mediabistro.com blog brethren have convinced us to join the Twittering classes. That's right, just last night, we debuted our official UnBeige Twitter account, where we'll post up-to-the-minute newsbites, event snippets, links of interest, and free candy (OK, we're still working on the physics of that last one). That said, we do worry that the people of the future will one day unearth Twitter messages and wonder why 21st century types communicated in laconic mini-missives of 140 characters or less. Below, a sample of our recent Twitters, including some from last night's opening of the Sculptural Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) fair, which runs through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory. Sign up to follow our twittering, and start twittering yourself at twitter.com.

Well, now that we've gotten to know you, we feel like we've got to start making these posts short, sweet and immediately to the point. At least that's the case if you go off Jakob Nielsen's latest web usability report. In it, he says that web users are getting "more ruthless and selfish," meaning that they want to get onto a site, get what they need, and get right out. No dilly-dallying, hunting for information on a site, or waiting for those super-exciting, animated pages to load. He also reports that people are getting more savvy with the web as well, no longer getting duped by ads or marketing tricks at the same rates they had before. What does this mean for you? Start living by a mantra of simplicity and substance and you should be fine. For the rest of you: maybe a new animated gif on your Geocities page might work. Here's a bit:

"The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment," Dr Nielsen told BBC News.

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

This makes them very resistant to highlighted promotions or other editorial choices that try to distract them. "Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so," said Dr Nielsen.

The first two speakers in yesterday's Mediabistro Circus session on User Experience Design came armed with formidable lists. For Google's Jon Wiley (pictured above, at left), it was "Ten principles that contribute to a Googley user experience," while Shiv Singh (at right), director of strategic initiatives at Avenue A | Razorfish, offered up a compact set of five trends that are now profoundly impacting how and for whom designers work. When overlaid, the enumerated ideas described an increasingly fragmented yet community-hungry global world of web users that crave simplicity, power, beauty, and that all-important human touch.

Wiley began with a lesson in the history of user design — the opposite placement of the propeller and throttle on two WW2 bomber planes, akin to varying by car model the position of the gas pedal and brake — and then discussed how Google's design team embodies the company's mantra: "focus on the user and all else will follow." While Google conducts oodles of field studies and user lab testing, Wiley also emphasized how "understanding the user experience can lend a lot of value early in the [development] process," when the possible design solutions are plentiful and the cost of changing one's mind is still blissfully low.

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California sixth grader Grace Moon beat out 16,000 K-12 students from around the country to win Google's 2008 Doodle 4 Google competition, which this year called for doodles around the theme "What if...?" Featured today on Google's homepage (and pictured above), Moon's design depicts a rainbow-hued utopia she calls "Up in the Clouds."

"This new world is clean and fresh, and people are social and enlightened," said Moon of her design. "Every person here is treated as family no matter who they are. The bright sun heats this ideal place with warmth, love, and brightens everyone's day." Hmm. Add in some free gourmet food, rubber balls, and on-site oil changes, and Moon's world sounds a lot like Google headquarters. She got the opportunity to compare the two this morning, when she visited the Googleplex and chatted via satellite with Matt Lauer and the crew at TODAY: