Noted by flow14
I watched a few minutes of Adult Swim tonight and I was exposed to a whole crop of new (to me) commercials.
Given the political season and an inability to distract myself from the up-and-downs of the day-to-day drama, this spot easily caught my eye. After checking out each candidate’s site (kitten, baby) — I still have no idea what’s in store, but I’ll probably check it out on October 21st. It’s hard to top the absurdity of real-life politics, but it looks like they might come close.
In the last month’s issue of STEP Inside Design, their closing column, Room 650, issued a challenge to rethink Corporate logos. Given the political season, I thought it might be fun to rethink the RNC logo, so I mashed it up with the old Sinclair logo, fired it off to STEP and promptly forgot about it.
Flipping through this month’s issue (Sept – Oct), I was pleasantly surprised to see my logo gracing the pages.
For those who hang on my every sporadic word via a feed reader, you may want to take some time to peruse the new site. I’ve put a fresh coat of shellac on the little bugger, with special attention paid to the popular fonts and portfolio pages.
My goal was to push the boundaries of traditional web layout and apply a magazine-style grid to bits of the site, which was relatively easy to achieve with the help of the handy Blueprint CSS framework. As time allows, I hope to push the blog format in this direction, too (à la JSM).
In Other News
Never to be outdone, IDEO beat me to the punch by about a week with the launch of their new site.
They’ve done an superb job of bringing a massive amount of fascinating content to the foreground while maintaing an easy-to-use, eminently browsable interface. Inspiring all around.
*regarding the title of the post, totally kidding.
A List Apart has posted their 2008 survey for people who make websites*—I took it and so should you.
*people who make websites include: all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, etc.
You can find the 2007 survey results here.
This is a pretty incredible microsite for Coke Zero built by the gang at North Kingdom. It’s a really smooth integration of rich streaming video combined with basic controls that add up to a surprisingly playable set of games.
If you can pull yourself away from the games, North Kingdom has posted a nice behind the scenes look at the production.
It’s very reminiscent of Dragon’s Lair — if Dragon’s Lair actually worked. It only took 25 years to get it right.
I just finished an uneventful upgrade to WordPress 2.6. I was a little nervous as I’d heard some bad things about this version, but the whole process was as smooth as silk for me. It’s a nice update, so I’ll probably upgrade a few of the other sites I manage over the weekend.
In semi-related news, I’m putting the finishing touches on a new site design, which gives me an excuse to test 2.6’s media mananger…. stay tuned.
Links, ideas and other ephemera that have caught my eye recently:
Magnetic Movie – the incredible visuals in this video prompt my internet skepticism to kick in. Even if it is some kind of trickery, it’s amazingly cool. More info here.
Speaking of internet trickery, I stumbled on a CSS hack I’ve never seen before: Overriding Inline Styles from a CSS file – useful if your CMS-using clients get too crazy with the WYSIWYG text editor and destroy your precious design.
The founders of Flickr are leaving Yahoo, and Stewart Butterfield wrote the oddest resignation letter I’ve seen. He must really likes metaphors.