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Supreme Notes

Check out these awsome notes by Rachel Smith. 

She has made them on her iPad using Sketchbook Pro from Autodesk. 

Compared to this my own notes look like a gathering of sick pen strokes.

I have downloaded Sketchbook some time ago. But nothing I've made comes close to this. It's all about talent baby ;-)

Tip of the hat to Boetter.

Chrome To Drop http://

Chrome is by far my preferred browser these days. I have practically stopped using other browsers unless my job requires me to do so.  

I have many reasons for preferring Chrome. The main one being, that Chrome simply seems to be faster loading and more responsive than any others browser out there.

Today Mashable reports that the Chrome developers are about to remove the annoying "hhtp.//" from the URL-field in the browser:

When you see some text prefixed by “Http://”, you automatically assume that what follows is a web address, as defined by the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. The question is, since most web addresses are easily recognizable anyway, do you really need it? The developers of Google Chrome don’t think you do, so they simply chose to hide it in a developer version of Chrome.

It would appear that the solution is a bit tricky to carry out in real life. But I like the sentiment behind it: Namely that web browsing should be as user friendly an activity as possible. No geeks required for that ;-)

Get the full story at Mashable

Marketing In the Age Of Attention Deficit

Welcome to communication overload in hyper mode. 

Today with the amount of information flowing our way our obvious choice is to simply disregard the ordinary. 

In this talk from TED, my favourite marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones :-)

Future Of The Magazine

The future of the magazine, and no less is what you'll see here. It is a concept video put together by the design collective BERG and an idea of how a digital magazine might look in the near future, based on a tablet type gadget.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2009/dec/18/berg-bonnier-magplus

User Experience Is Your Brand, Dummy!

I'm loving this insightful article on the clash between corporate branding guidelines and actual user experience in UX Magazine. 

When corporate marketing departments dream of brand design, they only dream as far as they need. The expensive and time consuming process of extending the brand into an interactive concept is usually pushed off until it becomes absolutely necessary.

Unfortunately, by the time some serious rethinking is required, a lot of people have gotten stuck in the mud of static branding. It’s completely natural for companies to resist straying from the handful of predefined styles that were never meant to address web forms, widgets, calendars and menuing systems.

It describes the situation in many organizations spot on and also excels by not solely blaiming the marketing department for this problem. So if your work has the slightest to do with branding and communication go read it.

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Is Adobe Captivate 4 Flawed?

So I've downloaded Adobe Captivate 4 at work to evaluate whether it's the right tool to use for software demonstrations.

I'm still testing it, but I just had to write this warning: If you expect to find a program with the level of usability and stability that you're used to from Adobe you'll probably be disappointed.

The program is just not very intuitive to use. I have used it for two weeks now and still feel like a blind bat most of the time when using it (I am a fairly skilled Photoshop and Flash user).

The other thing, which is worse, is that the program seems to crash a lot.

I'll do some more testing and give you guys a review in detail later.

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Web 2.0 The Longest Suicide Note

Speaking on painkillers, too much coffee and sans power point presentation Ben Hammersley really aimed at provoking his audience at New Media Days 08.

"Web 2.0 is the longest suicide note in the history of media as such," Hammersley said and then set out to argue for the abolishing of user generated content in traditional media.

"As the generally accepted argument goes: Old media is dying and new media is very successful. Therefore we should stop what we were doing before and convert everything into a Facebook application. So that’s what every media outlet is doing," stated Hammersley.

His point was that the content users create isn't very good and that it can never reach the quality of  content written by professional writers.

"Stop moderating the crappy writing of a myriad of users who don't have anything to offer. Looking at user generated content is like taking a trip to the mental hospital to look at all the sick people who think they are Jesus in the vain hope that one of them for once turns out to really be Jesus," Hammersley said comparing web 2.0 to Bethlem Psychiatric Hospital in 18th century London.

If anything Web 3.0 will really be about writers finding themselves and for once concentrating on the art of writing, he noted.

While I do think Hammersley has some interesting points and isn't entirely off track - I also think that he is fundamentally wrong in the sense that web 2.0 and user generated content has never been about good writing. Accusing web 2.0 of bad writing is like accusing a horse of not being a dog. User generated content is about social interaction and relationship. It is not about creating a fine tuned, fact checked reading experience. That is and has always been the task of traditional media. If some of its practitioners have lost focus, I don't think web 2.0 is to blame. In stead blame lack of editorial vision and leadership and perhaps even laziness in tradtional media.

No iPhone Without Contract

Contrary to what you might have read on various blogs and news sites, there is no way to buy the iPhone 3G without a contract (i.e. plan or subscription) in USA.

I recently spend my summer holiday in the States and went to an AT&T and an Apple Store in Boston. At both places I explained that I wanted to buy an iPhone without a contract since I live in Europe and have no need for the AT&T-hook up.

The answer I got at both places was: No can do! The iPhone is not purchasable without a two year AT&T contract - which according to the sales guy at the Apple Store comes to a total of a couple of thousand dollars.

The Apple Store guy even looked at me all puzzled and said: But Sir, the iPhone is available in Denmark, why don't you buy it there?

heh, heh...

Well, Telia which sells the phone here in Denmark seriously over-prices the damn thing - and even charges you extra for unlocking it.  All in all the gadget winds up costing around 1200 dollars compared to the rumored 400-600 dollars for the American zero-contract iPhone. Besides... the Danish iPhone has been sold out for more than a month now.

You have to do a little digging on the the AT&T corporate Web Site but then you'll find a press release indicating that in the future AT€T does plans to sell the phone without a contract. But there is no saying if "in the future" means tomorrow, in the next couple of months or next year!

Carte Figurative

A couple a weeks ago, I attended the conference An Event Apart in Boston, MA.
There I heard a presentation by Jason Santa Maria who talked about the narration of design. He briefly  touched upon the french engineer Charles Joseph Minard and his Carte Figurative (from 1861) showing the progression of Napoleon and his army to Moscow and back in the campaign of 1812.

The chart is famous for it's clear and simple communication of something incredibly complex, difficultly graspable and horrific (i.e. the progressively lower number of soldiers in Napoleon's army in relation to temperature and location).

Thereby the chart has become quite a guiding light for designers everywhere trying to communicate complexity with simple measures.

Another presenter at the conference Jeffrey Veen also referred to Minard's Carte Figurative. He pointed to the fact, that Minard himself said this beautiful thing about the chart:

"The aim of my carte figurative is ... to convey promptly to the eye the relation not given quickly by numbers requiring mental calculation."

Veen - a former designer at Google Analytics - has this insight to offer:

"Well designed sites "convey promptly to the eye" what's possible, while doing so intuitively as to avoid "requiring mental calculation." That's not to say we should treat people as stupid. Rather, we should help them focus on what they're trying to do, rather than struggle with the means for achieving it."

Rules Of Co-creation

Anyone working with on line communication should check out James Cherkoff and Johnnie Moore's Co-creation Rules. The two guys eminently sum up what building a relationship with your customers is all about.

In traditional marketing the aim has been to create a finished piece of work that people will enjoy or find useful in some way. In the modern marketplace it’s more effective to invite people to participate. In practice that means making an offer that is sufficiently enticing for the customer to want to become involved. With modern marketing, you let the customers do more of the talking.

Right, you are.