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If you're going to spend big bucks on a Super Bowl ad, your site better be ready to stay up

I didn't watch the Super Bowl last night, but my many design and ad friends on FaceBook did, and through their posts I caught a glimpse of what ads were running in near-realtime. I had a look at the Acura (and NSX-specific) sites after the NSX ad ran, and saw this little gem pop up on my phone:

Same sort of thing when the Fiat Abarth ad ran:

…but not Honda:

From experience, I'd imagine Honda did a static mirror of their automobiles subdomain, up in the cloud, with not much in the way of content that could be modified by the user (no comment boards, applications which used uploaded content from the user, etc.). This meant it was stable, and was spread out in enough places across the internets to load (quickly!). Acura and Fiat? Not sure what happened there, but I would guess they were running on their usual servers, which were overloaded by thousands of guacamole-fueled car fiends wanting to see more shots of those sexy cars after the ad ran.

Or, maybe Ferris Bueller holds less street cred than he used to, and Honda's CRV ad didn't get enough traffic to crash their site.

Describing a visual process demands an infographic.

Saw this yesterday out on the internets. It's a nice visual explanation of how to set your side-mounted rearview mirrors to avoid blind spots. Worth sharing here because it's a great example how how pictures can often tell us more than words. Sure, you could explain the same thing in a couple of paragraphs, but for this situation, where you are describing a visual process, with visual outcomes, an images makes a lot more sense.

via Boing Boing, pulled by them from Lifehacker, originally from Car & Driver.

Fun typographic video Friday

While the Pulp Fiction monologue from Samuel L. Jackson was probably the most noticeable progenitor of this, Cee Lo Green's "It's OK" typographic video is a nice example of the genre. The stylistic breaks between verse and chorus are nice, although it would have been nice to see the bridge get a different treatment as well.Check out both, below (Cee Lo's is mildly NSFW for one word; Say What Again is extremely NSFW unless you work for a crime boss or with other hit men).

Cee Lo Green's It's OK, 2011.

Say What Again, by Jarrat Moody, 2007

Circles

Some days designers get to actually design. And make things that support the design. Today was one of those days for me.

One of the concepts I'm working on for a non-profit client centers around the Ensō, a symbol of absolute enlightenment, strength, elegance, and the void, among other things. So today, I practiced my ensō painting:

Here's one of my favorites:

The act of painting Ensō is more the point than the actual Ensō itself. Which, actually, is how I approach my photography and most of the rest of the art I create. It's nice to apply that practice to my work as well.

Only Furries can Prevent Forest Fires

I can only imagine what this ad says to a particular portion of the internet that likes to dress up in furry costumes for the purposes of, um, super-happy-fun-time.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. I'm just saying that maybe the Ad Council copywriters might want to reach out to more than just furries when educating people about forest fire prevention.

AT&T's cheaper unlimited data plan for new iPhones are now but a memory

Yes, yes: Apple fanboy that I am, I preordered an iPhone 4S this morning, via AT&T's website. And, while the rational part of me knew this was coming, I was still a little shocked to get this message:

If you're upgrading to new iPhone hardware, no more of the unlimited voice AND unlimited data combo plan for you. The cheapest data plan available is a 200MB per month option for $15. I checked my monthly data usage patterns over the last year, and only once did I go above 200MB (last December, when I guess there were a lot of LOLCat Christmas videos going around or something). So I opted for the cheaper plan, and will cross my fingers.

What I'm really crossing my fingers on, however, is that the projected delivery date of October 14 will become an actual delivery date. I know I'm not the only Apple fanboy out there preordering the latest toy today, after all.

UPDATE: A friend who purchased his 4S through the Apple store told me he was able to keep his unlimited plan. So shop around!

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: It seems that AT&T may be either trying to scrub the outdated "Data Unlimited" plan out of it's database, or is just getting us all confused with some semantic nonsense. You see, While the "Data Unlimited" plan is no longer available (at $30 per month), you can replace it with their "Unlimited Data" plan for (guess how much?) $30 per month. Whether this is just a Fuji Apple-for-Gala Apple switch, with little or no difference to the consumer, remains to be seen. Whatever the case, it's caused a lot of iPhone upgraders some headache and worry over the last twelve hours. Hopefully they will straighten it out soon.

Insanely Great

Growing up, I was a Commodore Kid. I learned to type on a Commodore PET, and we had a VIC-20 and a Commodore 64 in the house. But at school, we had these cool machines called the Apple IIe, on which I first learned BASIC and LOGO (remember that little turtle?) Later, in high school, The Macintosh hummed along in our English classroom while we worked on our literary art magazine. In my senior year we made the transition from sending our type to the typesetter to setting the type ourselves, on our Mac. If you're old enough to remember sending type to a typesetter, you'll understand how big a deal this was. The fact that the screen resolution of the Macintosh was 72 dots per inch, which correlated to the 72 points per inch in typesetting, was an amazing detail to us. It made setting type truly a What You See Is What You Get affair. That Apple insisted on making the Macintosh a graphics, design, and art-friendly tool was amazing to me. It would be like the head of Sony insisting that the Compact Disc format be able to hold all of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (which, in fact, he did). It was a case, as Jobs put it in an interview, of bringing a liberal arts viewpoint to computing.
This was Very Cool.

In college, I had a friend who was really into video, and he had tricked out a Mac IIx with some super-powered video cards to render computer animations, of all things. In the photo building, we learned about this new tool called Photoshop. It was Very Cool.

Fresh out of college I worked on a Mac IIfx and the big daddy, a Quadra 950, to scan photos for clients and do digital retouching. No longer did you have to have a Crossfield retouching station to remove scratches from a transparency, or stop signs from an architectural photo. Doing stuff that used to take hundred thousand dollar machines now only required about $5,000. This was also Very Cool.

My first real graphic design job had me creating concert posters and real estate newspaper ads on a Mac LC and a IIci. These were so fast that I didn't have to go make a cup of coffee while waiting for it to print a proof (on an Apple LaserWriter, of course). Later on the G3 and G4 series Macs would make it even harder to sneak away while Photoshop files rendered their filter applications. Working on 200 megabyte photo files became routine.

Many, many years later, Apple started doing something weird: they began to make things that weren't computers. I got my first iPod almost as soon as it came out, and was amazed that I could take nearly all of my music with me, on this tiny little device. And how cool was that rotating wheel? I also remember the envious stares from jaded business flyers when, on a trip to an AIGA conference in 2001, I pulled out my first-generation PowerBook and played a DVD on it during the flight. How cool was that?

Not too long ago, in 2008, I got fed up with my crappy Motorola cell phone and bought an iPhone 3G. While I was excited that it did more than make phone calls, I had no idea just how much more it could do. I tracked my progress home from the Apple Store with the Maps app and was floored.

Today, we have a couple of MacBooks, a couple of iPhones, miscellaneous iPods, Airports, an iPad, an AppleTV and who knows what else with the Apple logo on it here in the house. It is not exaggerating to say that these products make my professional life possible, and my personal life richer. And without Steve Jobs to have started Apple in his parents' garage back—when I was still in short pants—I probably wouldn't be doing what I do today.

Jobs, along with the amazing team he brought to Apple (people like Susan Kare and Jonathan Ive), created products that insisted on making good design an integral part of the user experience. If it wasn't designed well, and designed to be intuitive, it had no place at Apple. Jobs helped to bring design back into the discussion of what makes for a good user experience.

So, thank you, Steve Jobs, for making things that were Insanely Great, and in the process, making our lives Very, Very Cool.

Feature overkill: the new Facebook interface

Hating on Facebook for adding "improvements" is a common internet pastime. And once again Facebook has given us some fodder. They added a redundant right rail of status updates, which often duplicates what you see in your Wall or stream or whatever you want to call it now...plus the chat status has been given more visibility. This has also pushed the ads over away from the right edge of the browser viewport and into a middle column orientation. So what was once a more conventional three-column interface is now four columns, only one of which contains information most Facebookers are there to see. We've blocked out the interface elements to visualize the components below:

As you can see, the red area in the middle is where one traditionally looked for status updates, LOLCAT videos, and so on. Now this area has competition, in the form of the far right column, which is new to this version of Facebook. Here, Facebook has taken the live feed approach that Twitter centers much of its user experience around, to create a distracting widget that updates on the fly. And since the main content area (represented here in red) is also updating on the fly, there tends to be duplication. The rightmost column also has a list of friends available to chat. Because none of us have text messaging, email, phones, Google Chat, iChat, or AIM for that.

To see the area that most people are really looking at in Facebook, here's an even simpler view:

The primary content area within the Facebook interface is only about one third of the total area. I am sure Facebook has their reasons for all of this contextual noise, but I have a feeling if people had their druthers, they'd prefer something simpler. What are your thoughts?

BordoBello 2011: another gr8 sk8 deck design extravaganza

Creating art from skateboards for a good cause is a heck of a lot of fun. Last year was an homage to Joseph Beuys. This year, it was a tribute to the west side of my beloved Denver metro. There were some great skateboard decks there, and I picked up two:

Sean Adams' "Spicolli"

Evelyn Wilder's Momentum

Mine sold for a respectable $70. Yay! Here it is:

There was much fun to be had, such as the breakdancing:

I almost had the winning bid for Chip Kidd's board, but there was another gentleman hovering over the bid sheet obsessively, and I wasn't prepared to turn this into that serious an event:

You can see shots of all the boards up at AIGA Colorado's Flickr set.

Congradulations to AIGA Colorado and the whole crew of volunteers who put together such a great, fun, happy event!

Qwikster: a study in brand naming WTF-ery

Netflix has long been a recognizable brand. Those iconic little red envelopes show up at millions of subscriber's doors every day. Netflix just announced that they would be spinning off their DVD-by-mail business to a new business, called Qwikster. Reed Hastings of Netflix said of the new name: "We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery." Hmm.

This is what Quikster makes me think of:

Netflix is a nice mashup of "internet" and "Flix" (movies).....Movies via the 'net. Very nice. Even when it was DVD-by-mail, you went online to request movies, arrange your queue, etc.... Qwikster does not hold the same easy mental connection between the Name and the Thing. Sorry, guys, I'm not sure which C-level person thought this was a good idea, or what focus group work you did to justify it, but it's a bad name. We love you though, so how about a do-over?