06 February 09
Looking to sound smart in front of clients or at cocktail parties? No problem. The books that can help you are easy to spot at your local bookstore. The serif typefaces give them the a scholarly look. The no-nonsense white canvas says “I mean business” and makes the buzz-word titles easy to spot. The sound bite on the cover gives you the immediate satisfaction of feeling smarter before you’ve even opened the book.
We laugh and we cringe when someone quotes from one of the white books. Yet we can’t stop buying them.
I usually find it quite pointless when magazines try to recreate a print experience online. NEWWORK is one of the few exceptions I’ve seen. The site is a simple side scrolling experience with an elegant semi-translucent overlay of the issue number. The large-format pages actually reduce down very well, and the site does a great job of letting the viewer experiencing the magazine in a totally different way.
Visit http://www.newworkmag.com
05 February 09
Faith 47 is a street artist based out of Cape Town. The immersive panoramic samples on her website demonstrate her incredibly wide range. Some of her work is beautifully documented in this video.
Source: Wooster Collective
This past Tuesday Microsoft confirmed that it has no intention of making the purchase of the highly anticipated Windows 7 any less confusing that purchasing Vista.
The product SKU’s are as follows:
- Windows 7 Starter
- Windows 7 Home Basic
- Windows 7 Home Premium
- Windows 7 Professional
- Windows 7 Enterprise
- Windows 7 Ultimate
The only thing you can intuit from this list is that the Enterprise edition is clearly for enterprises. But, what’s the difference between Starter, Home Basic, and Home Premium? And what’s the difference between Professional and Ultimate?
While retailers will mostly be carrying Home Premium and Professional, online retailers carry more. And a lot of us are purchasing software online where the abundance of product selection and bundles can be quite daunting.
Why does Microsoft seem determined to require consumers to spend hours of research to understand feature sets? This move firmly keeps Microsoft’s brand in the “we don’t get it” camp.
The Internet is afire with negativity at this announcement, which is an unfortunate backlash to all the much needed positive buzz Microsoft had around the beta release of Windows 7 these past few months.
Engadget has a breakout of the feature sets.
04 February 09
Edmunds.com has incorporated an interesting UI innovation with their breadcrumbing where the breadcrumbs also act as a sort of search filter.
This approach works particularly well in situations where you’re browsing product catalogs. In the case of Edmunds.com you can easily toggle between years, models, and makes. I could also see it having interesting implications on search results pages.
Beware applying this to breadcrumbs across the board. My team at Sequel tried this technique with a large corporate site and it didn’t quite translate. It ended up feeling superfluous.