I’m excited to report that I have successfully received my Google Music invite and got it rolling. Currently it’s automatically uploading my iTunes library, including playlists and album art. As you would expect from Google, the UI is form over function, and leaves much to be [aesthetically] desired.
But c’mon. Having all of your playlists available and up-to-date from any machine on the web… Who the hell cares what it looks like?
Cassette tape insert cards: We’ve all had them. We’ve also all ignored them. And We’ve also all throw them away, drew on them, put stickers all over them, set them on fire, and got annoyed at them every time they slipped out and wouldn’t go back in correctly unless you used the tape to push it down.
But I’m confident in saying that we haven’t done, is enjoyed them as pretty sweet design pieces with some awesome typography.
Well guess what folks, the time has come. This guy Jubu (mostly because of his awesomeness I assume), released a pretty rad set of 84 scanned cassette tape inserts on flickr.
I don’t know if anyone was paying attention, but idsgn had a fun little April fools joke for us this year. It was a slick new font family; Sonoran, and was going to replace Helvetica as the go-to hipster font. Obviously, this was not true (duh, no font can be more hipster than Helvetica). But I love font family sample graphics. I think they’re sexy. So even though this is actually Arial, it’s still awesome.
Dorothy is working on a fun project that’s been catching a lot of well deserved web-buzz lately. They call it “stripping famous logos back to their basic graphic form,” I call it a fantastic experiment in brand recognition, and an affirmation of all the work that goes into something that seems so simple in the end: Color, and form.
Check out the rest of the pieces here: http://www.wearedorothy.com/news/you-took-my-name/
Seriously, what do I even need to say about this?
Information is Beautiful launched a fun flash app to survey what peoples opinions are about what consciousness really is. As you would expect, the designs in the app itself are super sexy.
For the record, I got “Functionalistic Pan Psychic Higher Order Thoerist”
I see this a lot. The infamous one-shot line height, where every line takes up the same level of vertical space. This works great, and is often used in CSS to set the height of certain elements like buttons, list-items, headers, inputs, and other block and inline-block level elements within a website. The problem, however, arises when attention isn’t paid to detail (big surprise there), and that universal line height bleeds over into textual elements.
In a scan-and-skim generation where users will often absorb everything they can on a website within the first 5 seconds, and then decide where to go next, the relationship between information is arguably as important as the information itself. To put that into perspective, let’s say you have the follow pieces of information on a page: A brand name and/or element, a catch phrase, a navigation of some sort, the name of a product, a picture of the product, information on the product, an up-sell for the product, some social links, a phone number, and a contact form. That’s 10 things, which incidentally gives a user only half of a second (500 milliseconds!) to locate, identify, decide on importance, and then (hopefully) retain each one of those 10 pieces of content. Now what does that mean? Well, it means a lot. But what it means right now, is that you have no time to waste on someone doing a double take.
Now for the example. I recently came across this problem on one of the largest and most used file hosting websites on the internet: Rapid Share (sorry Rapid Share. I love you, but I have to make an example out of you). If you’ve used Rapid Share even once, then you’re all to familiar with this screen. But for those of you who aren’t, I’ll give you a quick rundown: Rapid Share offers paid and free/public accounts. If you end up on Rapid Share and try to download something with a free/public account, you’re required to wait for your download, during which time you’re bombarded with excessive, intolerable, and sometimes even intentionally confusing up-sells. This is one of about 4 on any given page.
So what’s wrong with this? Sorry, that’s a trick question… there’s a lot wrong with it. But what we’re talking about right now, is the giant error in line height, which forced me to do a double take, and wasted my time as a user and potential customer. That’s right: the “list” is the culprit here. Aside from the text being centered, every line has the same height. Including the last line, which should not, for any reason, have the same height as the others. Why not? Well… it’s not a new list item, yet due to the line height conventions established by the former list items, you’re forced to read it as if it were a new bullet. Which of course is not legible, because it’s a continuation of a bullet point, and not a new one.
As you can see, simply lining the bullets up and not forcing every line to have identical height allows for a much more scannable chunk of information. While this is still not perfect, it’s a good example of how easy it is to drastically improve readability and user experience across a large scale website.
Don’t fall prey to line-height-laziness.
Edits by Edit put together a pretty awesome set of prints. With the collaboration of 13 different artists they released an amazing set of posters, each using only one element and one typeface to depict a certain genre of music. The result is 13 amazing minimalist depictions of genres. These would go great along side the minimalist music video and movie posters set, and minimalist album covers set.
Seriously though, make sure you look at them all. They’re freakin awesome.