I’m not entirely sure what the story is behind the Effing Typeface, though on Alex Merto’s website the description is as follows: “Fan Letter:Twenty-six local, national, and internationally-based designers and artists give a two-minute ode to an alphabet letter or typographic character.” In any case it’s fun to look at.
In 5 Reasons Why Landing Pages & Forms are More Valuable than Homepages they dig deeper into an article from Google’s Improve your web-forms and increase conversions. The points outlined make sense due to their contextuality and their focused consideration. But I also wonder about the mobile implications. People are more likely to do a transaction with their phone than with their normal computer. Is it possible that part of the reason why is that when a mobile person opens an app or site it’s rarely the homepage?
Great point made by David that designer’s think about optimal conditions that they’re products are going to be used, not necessarily when conditions aren’t so great. He describes a great story about going through that kind of experience first hand with Design, Disruption, and Drunk Usability Testing.
I think it is the right time to be asking about brands and how they broadcast to the outside world. Of course there’s the thinking that a brand isn’t what they think they are, but what people think the company is. That a person’s perception of the company is what the brand really is. So I was interested in what Ana had to say when she posted about Why Brands Should NEVER Think Like Media Companies. Conventional thinking would be to take the best of what media provides in terms of communication and roll those tools into an advantage for the brand. But just because a brand could create original content—should they? Ana talks about Chanel and how they could use what people have already created. Seems like a good idea but if you were to read what Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist has to say about Burberry’s Art of The Trench.“Once a brand gives over part of its vision to the customer it loses a part of its control, something especially pertinent to Burberry”… So once it becomes a tug of war between controlling perception which is pretty tough or create a structure to facilitate unknown advantages.
Looking at Young and Brilliant’s site today I noticed that she pointed to one of my favourite logo’s that now has become a 3 dimensional model of itself. The Google Android toy comes in a couple different colours and versions. And in case you’re wondering where inside Google came the actual character, you can take a peak of it on Irina Blok’s portfolio site.
Photo taken by Ashley Simko during the recent fashion week held in NYC.
Stack America is a great idea in the making. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of a private magazine club where you get a selection of curated magazines mailed to you that you may not have ever known about before. It is bimonthly and will end up costing you $72 in the US. It’s a bit more in other countries…
Internationally recognized design firm Duffy & Partners has launched a new gallery on their ‘Fresh Ideas’ section of their Web site inspired by the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. The gallery features products, designs, colors and ideas with Olympic ties that are impacting design and tastes globally outside of the Winter Games. Take a sneak peak behind the scenes of Duffy to see what makes these great designers tick.
Check it out at: http://www.duffy.com/index.aspx?page=837
Great commentary from Hipster Runoff about Animal Collective’s poster. “The poster is marketed as a ‘high level piece of art’, similar to how people in screen printing classes treat their prints.” I still remember the good ol’days of design school…
Who doesn’t want to see an image of a Dog with a pipe?
