GigaOm Redesign Launches

Om announced the launch of the GigaOm network redesign last night. Congratulations to Om, Paul, Jaime, Shane and Peter, and the whole GigaOm team! I was delighted to help out with the redesign, and I’m even happier to see it live.

The redesign gave me a chance to work closely with friends old (Jaime Chen) and new (Shane Pearlman). Starting with some up front research, we solicited and consolidated feedback from editors, the ad sales team, and Om and then translated it into achievable goals for the redesign. We worked to hammer out the universal elements of the interface that we could distribute across network properties, prioritized functionality, and laid out content in a way that presented it in the most readable, attractive and engaging manner.

The redesign looks sharp, and that is entirely due to the heroic efforts of Jaime and the sheer talent of Shane and Peter. It was a real pleasure to work with such a dedicated and capable team. I’m very happy to see all their hard work pay off.

One Case Where Prior Art Shouldn’t Be A Problem

You have to admire the sheer chutzpah of the geniuses at Microsoft legal who filed a patent for Edward Tufte’s sparklines.

[via Waxy]

Lethem On The New Yorker’s Font

I’m reading Jonathan’s Lethem’s latest novel, Chronic City. The first chapter is a quirky, compelling read, focused on the burgeoning friendship of two very different men in a Manhattan that creeps into every bit of characterization. And while I love a good opening, there’s a ton to admire in the way Lethem broadside of The New Yorker and its audience:

In our talk marijuana confusion now gave way to caffeinated jags, like a cloud bank penetrated by buzzing Fokker airplanes. Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn’t any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine, the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, no with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself.

The Perfect Client

Ever since Letters of Note published Mick Jagger’s commission of Andy Warhol for cover art, it’s been getting circulated around for the amusement of those toiling away in the design salt mines.

I’ve received this in email, seen it on Facebook, Dropular and FFFound… it’s the feel good hit of the autumn. As impressive a piece of history as it is, though, the thing that seems to compel everyone is Jagger’s attitude, embedded in just a few phrases. “I leave it in your capable hands,” and “please write back saying how much money you would like,” and most amazingly, “[Al Steckler] will probably look nervous and say ‘Hurry up’ but take little notice.” [ed. note: !!!]

These are the words any creative professional longs to hear from a client: I trust you. Money is no object. Take your time to do it correctly.

A Million Little Pieces

I read over at Brand New that Siegel+Gale did an overhaul of Pfizer’s corporate identity. I like it a lot, for some of the same reasons BN did… but did S+G really need to create a messaging element that looks like a hundred tiny little pills?

Death and Design Choices

There are way too many professionals in design fields who believe their work is a matter of life and death, but there are at least a few for whom this distinction is true: bridge designers. This was reinforced yesterday when a trucker died having plunged his truck over the side of the Bay Bridge here in SF.

While there’s plenty of uproar due to the frankly bizarre temporary S-curve that retrofit designers incorporated into the East-bound span, Cal Trans officials are denying it had anything to do with the design:

“We don’t believe the roadway design is the issue,” he said. “There’s just a small percentage of people who choose to ignore the posted speed limit.”

Thankfully, two of the better designers I know, Mike Monteiro and Dan Saffer, quickly put that perspective into context:

 

Augmented Reality or Just Arrrggh

Warren Ellis weighs in on his frustration with the current batch of augmented reality applications for smart phones:

Now fuck off and make something that’ll do useful work on a phone in a village, instead of something that’ll get you laid in fucking Hoxton. Make something that has meaning outside a major metropolis.

He has a point. I’m thankful that Ben Fullerton and Jenn Bove were able to talk me out going down the augmented reality angle for a proof of concept I’m working on.

One of the (many) good points they made was that I was over-thinking the solution rather than addressing the core problem. It could just as easily be stated that augmented reality is a lovely whiz-bang solution in certain contexts, but not-so-surprisingly inappropriate where the local terrain doesn’t cast a very deep shadow of data. Anyway, go through to the link; I left the two best punchlines out of the blockquote, and they’re worth the quick read.

“List of Things That Will End Badly” entry #4081

Murdoch: We’ll probably remove our sites from Google’s index

Rupert Murdoch has suggested that News Corporation is likely to make its content unfindable to users on Google when it launches its paid content strategy .

Let me know how that works out for you.

fake steve jobs on the growing irrelevance of microsoft

I’ve been enjoying Dan Lyons’ media analysis of last Sunday’s NYT hit piece on Microsoft. Today’s post is quality, and even contains a nice little summary of how Microsoft got itself into this position:

But what happened after that? This is what we were wondering. Larry says two things happened. One, the Borg got slower. They got big and fat and bureaucratic. Two, everyone else got faster. Look at Google. They got so big so quickly that there was no way for the Borg to claw them back. Same for all these other Web businesses. Amazon, Ebay, Skype, Facebook, Twitter. They came out of nowhere, and what they were doing was free, so the Borg couldn’t just do a crappy knockoff and sell it for less. They were up against free — the Web companies were using their own strategy against them.

Another difference was the customer set. In the old days you were talking about selling to corporate America, and consumers just followed suit — remember the marketing shit about how you want the same stuff at home that you have at the office? Selling to corporates was easy. You have lots of levers you can pull to make them do what you want and pay what you tell them to. We all had a playbook — we just studied what IBM had been doing for decades, and we copied them. (Larry stopped and chuckled a little bit when he said this, and for a moment just stared out the window with this glazed, happy expression on his face.) The Borg’s other customer set were hardware OEMs. Again, easy to coerce, and no messy dealing with end users. Perfect.

But on the Web things changed — now you were selling to consumers, and the Borg had no way to coerce or control consumers the way they could coerce corporate accounts.

recommence signal

This is the Second Verse, resuming broadcast. Good afternoon.