All posts by Andrew Boardman

Designer.
Design

Apple Redesigns.

Apple redesigned its own website today and there are many kudos to go around. To wit:

  • A nicely unified top navigation with, amazingly, only seven tabs at the top. I can’t imagine how hard it was for Apple’s marketing, sales, and technology executives to agree on these final top categories. There was probably blood on the large, wide conference table up until launch.
  • It’s been predicted for a long time that Apple was going to lose its aqua-look interface and tabs (which Vista adapted in the past few months). Apple did so with its brushed metal theme. But here’s the brilliant part: They didn’t overdo it. The metal shines, just gently, and it doesn’t make its way into every little aspects of the rest of the site. For instance, there’s no brushed metal hanging on to every subnavigational element, nor is there brushed metal gradients on the background of every section or page. I don’t love it, but I do like it a lot.
  • Apple has a whole new section called <a href="Downloads. This is a huge big deal, akin to opening a new store within the site. It puts the company in direct competition with two sites that I visit a bit too often (okay, once a day): MacUpdate and <a href="Version Tracker. Both of these sites detail and track the latest independent and corporate applications developed for the Mac. For Apple to have gotten into this game means that third-party software is now critical to their business model; too, my guess is that it will help further differentiate the company from Microsoft and its Windows operating system in that it directly points visitors to a range of powerful and inexpensive third-party solutions.
  • The new iPhone is front and foremost on the site, with its own little item at the top. I wish that tab well.
  • A lot of things are the same. Same widespread use of the Lucida Grande font, thankfully. Same cute, discrete headlines: “Hello, tomorrow.” “Mail. Think outside the inbox.” Same three column Store.
  • Safari, the native Mac browser, is now available for Windows. More brilliance. If it works as well on Windows as it does on OS X, a few million people are going to have the ability to see what makes looking at websites a pleasure.
  • Downgraded is Apple’s .Mac service. In fact, upon a quick review of the new site, I can’t even find .Mac. Quicktime, too, got whacked.

My first impulse, still unacted upon: buy something. I just wish it could be Apple’s stock.
Postscript: Apple’s Canadian site still has the old look. So does Bulgaria’s.

Design

London Boil.

There’s a been a lot of online hubbub about the new identity of the 2012 London Olympics: in the design world, the dailies world, and even the medical world [thanks D.C.].
Me? I think there are two ways to explain this logo. First, it was designed by a team of novices who didn’t know what to do and came up with something as a joke and decided to see how far they could take it. This little team got it to go all the way to 11, with investment banks now jumping on board the happy bandwagon. Go team! Second, the logo was designed by a very earnest set of designers who were deliberately attempting to break some non-existent mold and ended up delivering just that: mold.
The resulting logo is not only butt-ugly. Worse, to me, it’s illegible and intellectually thin.

Technology

Applications in Need of Applications.

I’ve been really busy with a few smaller projects at work. It’s been great, actually. But I’ve also been thinking about a bunch of technology tools that have been really fun playing with. I don’t know why I’m fascinated with these things and I’m trying to find a good, productive use for them, but, for what it’s worth, here are they are:
Mindjet came out last week with its latest version of MindManager for Mac. It’s a sweet little application that allows one to draw out sophisticated maps of text and images with little stress and strain.
VoodooPad by Flying Meat is a fantastic little Mac desktop Wiki that gets more TLC from its developer than almost any other application out there. The latest version, out today, gives the user the ability to see preview a page just by hovering over a link and holding down two keys.
Then there’s NetNewsWire, the RSS reader created and generously managed by the folks at NewsGator. I’ve tried other RSS readers and this is the best. One very sweet little feature in the new 3.0 version is a mini-screenshot of selected feeds; this is something I’ve long thought should be part of every browsing experience and which can be found in the most recent versions of Opera. [Note: of all of the applications listed, this one is the most readily applicable and I’m including it here because I can.]
Oh, and the really nifty new kid on the block is the unlikely titled Mental Case. I haven’t the foggiest idea what it does. It’s nice and dark gray, though, and the buttons and transitions are nice.

Technology

Apple Runs.

It’s a bit easy and tired to say that Apple is leading the way in terms of digital content. But, in one hour’s time, a visitor to the company’s website can easily see the visionary power of this singular company shaping the universe of content online. Apple just seems to be doing everything now, and everything right.
There are hundreds of brand new (and free) courses at iTunes U, allowing anyone with a pretty good connection (and the free iTunes application) to learn from educators and researchers at schools like Penn State, MIT, Otis College of Art and Design, and Duke. You can also take a look at Apple TV, which is going to very soon have total access to YouTube. The trailers on the Apple site load more quickly (and have far better quality) than any other sites out there; their large, high definition trailers are incomparable to anything I’ve seen. The massive Worldwide Developers Conference is coming up in a few weeks in San Francisco and predictions are wild that Apple’s new Leopard operating system is going to functionally and visually blow Microsoft’s Vista and the current Apple operating system out of the water. Let’s not forget that the iPhone is coming out soon, and though I’m still doubtful people will be willing to pay $500 for a phone, the product has the potential to forever change the way they interact with mobile devices. Oh, and yesterday, Apple announced the launch of iTunes Plus, which will allow consumers to buy completely DRM-free music, play it on any player, and own it forever. I’m convinced that other music online music stores will be forced to follow this model. And if you go to the iTunes Plus page within iTunes, the application will tell you, automatically, how to update your music library to DRM-free (but .30 more costly) songs.
I risk the mild ridicule of technologists and the knowing smirks of Apple afficianados, but all of this, to me, is very impressive for one evening’s visit to one company’s one website.

Design

New Banner Ads on My Yahoo!

During the past few weeks, My Yahoo!, which has remained my homepage for over 8 years despite everything, has changed its banner advertisement style and service. It hasn’t been noticed much in the media, for some reason, but I’ve really paid attention to it.
First, the banners appear to be the same size as a typical, large rectangular banner than you might see on other sites: 728 by 90 pixels. But Yahoo! is serving them in Flash instead of JPEGs or GIFs. This is unusual for banners that are static. It seems to be a waste of resources but I’m betting that Flash is allowing Yahoo! to measure rollovers and other visitor behavior that more static media will not.
Second, these are designed to be modular and similar in style. It looks as if there is a small team of Yahoo! designers that take the advertising specs from a sales person and then build the banners to look alike, but not too alike. For instance, the banner I’m looking at now says “home theatre systems” in large type on the left and “Everything You Need to Know About home theatre systems. Find it here.” And then there is a smaller link on the bottom left reading “home.informationking.net” and a dark arrow points to it. Why is the first part of the sentence in title case and the second part in lower case? It’s either because the sales person didn’t write it down correctly, the client didn’t approve the final copy properly, or the designers are pumping these things out. Or all of the above. Or, it’s just some cool way of writing copy these days.
Third, there are no images in these ads. Because a design agency isn’t art directing the banner ads, there’s no muss and no fuss. No product images, no logos, no fat heads rolling their eyes.
Fourth, these ads use the same typefaces throughout. The font is a bit thin for my tastes but works very well in the context of these banners.
I don’t mean to be critical of this methodology of advertising. Google pioneered (or, actually, simply popularized*) the use of plain text ads. We’ve gotten quite used to advertisements looking the same but reading differently. For Yahoo!, I think it means that they’ve come across a semi-novel way of consolidating their advertisement display while not making it plain text, which necessarily takes the shape of Verdana or Arial these days. Yahoo! is on to something here – keep the banner ads clutter-free and clear but compelling to read because they’re distinctive. Because these ads are unlike anything else, my eye gazes at them, in part thinking they’re news and in part thinking they’re of interest.
What is disappointing about Yahoo is its total lack of care for potential customers. When I click on the “Advertise with Us” link at the bottom of the My Yahoo! page, I’m taken to an outdated (the copyright date is 1994-2004), uninformative, relatively useless page that requests much too much information. It’s no wonder that Google, whose clearly written and constructed advertising page, earned $3.66 billion last quarter.
Yahoo!’s profits during the same quarter dropped seven percent. Couldn’t Yahoo! spend $10,000 to revise its advertising page and hire a couple of copywriters to review their new banner ads?
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* It was Metafilter that got the ball rolling way back in 2001 with its TextAds, a system homegrown by publisher Matt Haughey.
P.S. A little further digging shows that Yahoo!’s <a href="main advertising page is different from the crappy My Yahoo! one. It makes me think My Yahoo! is not being updated or upgraded and that iGoogle and Netvibes really are the future of portal homepages.

Art

Prairie, Prayer.

I just wrote up a five paragraph review of tonight’s Prairie Theatre Exchange’s Carol Shields Festival of New Works. Then, somehow, with my MFA-artist-trained hand-eye coordination, I hit a the Refresh button and deleted the whole damn thing.
Jesus Christ, what a dope. Here’s what I wanted to say:

  1. Tonight was a phenomenal introduction to some of the best theatrical, dance, and performance talent in Winnipeg. I loved watching these performers. Every one of them.
  2. The entirety was inspired. The directors threaded the multiple performances with overt, and sometimes covert, little narrative threads.
  3. I saw ballet dancers perform three song-stories that I think I actually understood. One, the very first one, was about a young man witnessing his life construct his own failure through love. Maybe I didn’t understand it at all. But I liked it.
  4. My friend, Donna Lewis, performed her Leotard Cohen piece, wherein the long lost (and lost) sister of Leonard Cohen comes out of her darkly lit shell. It was hilarious.
  5. I missed a lot of references to Canadian culture. But, as an outsider going on two years, I recognize that Canadian artists, to a large extent, have the luxury of not being burdened with the turgid, violent history that American artists do. It’s not that Canadian history is one of clean hands and squeaky feet; rather, the utter racial and economic pain that many American artists bear does not, thankfully, affect most artists here, nor should it. I may be utterly wrong about this and I’m willing to be raked over the coals, if I have to be, on this one. But my point is that the unstraining humility and self-conscious humor that Canadian artists tend to show is perhaps derived from a less contaminated historical narrative and a less tortured personal aesthetic.
  6. Winnipeg is a small big place. During intermission, I ran into two performing artists I actually know. This is, to me, still shocking.
  7. Coming back to the first point, I consciously realized tonight that I quite literally fall in love with those performing on the stage. I mean, I really, truly start to love the performer. It’s a fleeting love, thankfully.