A blog by Ben Gilman

This article from Techradar makes some interesting points about Apple’s success in interface and product design - primarily that pleasure is the key to interfaces and that is the base ingredient of Apple’s success.

For me, one section jumped out discussing the original Mac team’s approach to design:

“Rather than survey a bunch of users on every decision, the Mac team decided each issue among themselves, invariably going for the option that might amuse a user the most, that would give a user the most pleasure, and therefore imbue the Mac with personality.”

As one who has a love-hate relationship with user workshops and focus groups this is music to my ears - confidence in your own abilities over those of the crowd. Clearly the problem is that those self-sourced decisions have to be resolved correctly. Undoubtedly other companies have taken this auteur approach and failed miserably where Apple have succeeded. Equally companies have released products fully backed by a panel of target audience users that have failed. Apple’s magic-touch is indisputable and ongoing. Surely not, though, impossible to replicate.

“…it’s one thing to be, uh, “creatively inspired” by what other companies are doing, it’s quite another to have a philosophy that enables you to do it first.”

Which leads me to two conclusions:

1. Believe in the vision of your product
   The designers and engineers on Apple products seem to believe completely in the vision of what they’re building. More importantly than that though, that belief runs through the whole company, all the way down from His Jobs himself. That belief has to be above all things - the team will make the right decisions as long as that remains the case.
2. Create a pleasurable experience
   Every product should be fun to use, even if it’s subject matter is far from it. Online banking could, and should, be fun in some small way - it’s never going to beat playing a game or watching a film but a nod towards enjoyment as well as functionality and security can play a massive part in creating a positive feeling around your product and your company.

Now to quit rambling - back to the kitchen, I have sauce to mix.

Erm…. it’s taken a while but I’m starting to quite like the London 2012 Olympics brand and logo. Despite my desire to avoid the masses, I was firmly in the “huh” camp when it was revealed in 2007.

With the marketing activity kicking into gear I think the brand is starting to show its strengths. Firstly, the shape is so unmistakable no matter what the fill is. As a designer, that sort of freedom with a logo shape is rare and I think it really works nicely in some contexts.

The use of the logo in corporate sponsor’s marketing materials also works well for me - so well in fact that you get the distinct feeling that that was a major factor in the design process. Either way if that was a requirement, the logo is achieving its aim.

Despite my general softening towards the look and feel, there are still errors out there to be made - this, for example, is a step too far in my opinion:

The explanation goes that this is the first time that the Olympic and Paralympic brands have shared a brand identity - it seems to me that in this case they could actually have fully shared it with the quick addition of the Paralympic Games strapline. For me the extra swirls and hatches have totally compromised the bold simplicity of the lines of the original logo.

So what have we learned?

All of this proves to me that whilst first impressions can only be made once they’re not always correct - I think there’s a new-fangled phrase that beat me to this. Brand development is as much about long-term feeling as it is short-term impact.

But how does that sit with user-testing in brand development? What can you learn from immediate exposure to a logo or a colour scheme? Without the courage to weather an initial storm of criticism, the London 2012 brand may have been a far less adventurous one? A brand that didn’t fairly represent UK design on a global stage maybe.

I’ve just been putting the finishing touches to a simple website for an artist friend, Allan Williams to showcase the results of a recent project he’s undertaken to document the people and images of the soon-to-be London 2012 Olympic site in London’s East End.

Take a look at www.beforelondon2012.com to see all the pictures and interviews with the people involved.

From the Southern Electric website…

Nice grass effect, nice button, but I’m not sure that error message and the associated tooltip really give you all the information you need to proceed from here.

I can never resist an awesome primate… logo designer extraordinaire Jon Hicks has followed up his studious Silverback with this cheeky-looking delivery monkey for email marketing application MailChimp.

Jon’s put a cool animated process graph on his blog and the MailChimp blog has a write-up of the whole process. Although, no amount of secrets of the process can help with the initial character sketch which is cool enough in itself!

When we originally launched the redesign for Fool.co.uk I had every intention of writing it up in a blog post - in fact I even wrote half of it. However, there’s nothing like jetting off on a three-week holiday immediately afterward to reduce your desire to write about work! Still, with the dust well and truly cleared and the snagging list addressed now seems like a good time to cover it!

After six months of branding workshops, numerous page concepts, two or three trips to Golden Square to poll public opinion and one stressful release day later the new redesigned Fool.co.uk launched on Thursday 29th May.

Head of Web at Fool.co.uk, Carl Knibbs, covered the background nearer launch day but in a design sense we went from this…

…to this…

Visual design challenges
Fool.co.uk’s latest redesign is intended to build a brand feel that better communicates the values of the company and the website. The new look and feel is engaging, thoughtful and different. We’re also a fair way away from the design styles of financial comparison sites. Fool.co.uk is a thoughtful and informed community and we hope the design reflects that.

Primarily we needed to rationalise our top navigation and site template - whilst the financial product-based tabs of the old site were useful, they didn’t properly reflect the structure of the site or our plans going forward. So out they went, in came a simple five tab arrangement with five specific section front pages. Doing away with the rather bland left nav we’re left with the full width of the template to dedicate to content and functionality.

On the stylistic front we decided to move away from our cartoony icons towards something that felt more contemporary. We also embraced a new typeface, one I’ve been admiring for a while, FontFont’s Olsen by Morten Olsen - we’re in good company, the font was designed for the Denmark Ministry of Education and if its good enough for them etc. Admittedly we’ve ended up using Georgia as an HTML substitute for Olsen but where possible, we’ll investigate ways of getting this key part of the brand onto our online products.

We also pushed on with positioning our tagging engine as a more high-profile navigation method. There’s further iterations of improvement to come on that - and everything else for that matter - that will make our tag hub pages a centre for finding more than just related articles.

A big part of the redesign was also to embrace the wider page widths our browser stats suggested we could get away with and concentrate on regaining control over visual heirarchy. Just 3% of our browser users are using a resolution narrower than 1024×768 so it’s great to be able to offer a better experience that newer technology allows.

Technical design challenges
One of the technical challenges with the redesign was to put the site’s CSS setup in a better position to support future development. A solid grid structure is in place that should ensure page layouts are more consistent and easier to turn out. Whilst we’ve lost the fluid resizing of the old em-based site template the more prevalent white space means up-sized text

This project brought up a lot of challenges associated with large websites like Fool.co.uk. Content going back over the past 10-years in various code formats and standards were all hit by the global template change. This is particularly a case in the code of our rather archaic (and anarchic) Discussion Boards code. Still, in general the new code has held up well and the consistency of design is a satisfying development.

Cool new design elements
Some of the details you may have noticed:

• Creative lead boxes - these allow our editorial staff to promote the content and tools that are most in demand. Putting the editorial content for which The Motley Fool is known front and centre on the homepage and ‘latest stories‘ page. These also throw in some strong photographic elements.
• Blue header and footer - we’ve got the colour heirarchy back with strong footer and header. Having said that on shorter pages there’s a bit too much dark blue going on. Maybe an action point for a future iteration.
• Big article churns - again, we’re able to give our best editorial content the profile it deserves.

Since the redesign…
Over the last three months the design and development teams have been hard at work bringing new features to the site. Writer’s blogs are under way using a custom blogging platform and there’s lots more to come in the near future.

Keep an eye on Fool.co.uk and indeed this blog for news.

It is a fact that band websites usually annoy me - there’s normally the hand of a record company in there somewhere and the personality of the band never quite comes across. I discovered the opposite whilst listening to one of my favourite bands The Notwist and perusing their official website:

Their website is a maze of bizarre and intriguing things utterly in-keeping with the style of their music and the image they portray. There’s also a chance to listen to one of their latest records which is always good.

Go have a play and indeed listen to The Devil, You + Me, their new album or just, or just buy it - you won’t be disappointed!

I love Brand New, at the time of writing it’s one of only two blogs to make my blogroll - along side that of my colleague Carl Knibbs and I see him five days of the week so there was no saying no.

Still, to get to the point of this post…this logo rebranding leapt out of the pages of said Brand New blog primarily for the sad loss of the unique elements that made the old version what it was…

The new typeface is rather unattractive and the new shadowed ball immediately gets me thinking of the first Flash application anyone evers make, the bouncing ball, drawn with one click with the circle tool - I almost want to click the edge and discover that the stroke isn’t connected to the fill, just for old times’ sake.

But then again, if you want your established status to stand out from the crowd of upstart Web 2.0 companies, apparently a red circle leaves you looking pretty unique.

They’ve been busy at Amazon.co.uk redesigning the rather dated topbar - given that this is the largest part of their page design, it’s got to be a big thing when they decide to rearrange it.

First impressions….not bad but not so good. The colours are nice and the search bar is nice and bold. However, visually I think it would benefit from some tidying. Bevel effects are a rather strange choice on today’s web and the various different uneven glows and strokes around the top bar elements jar a little.

Having said that it has now made all of the categories available from the homepage (ala amazon.com) and reiterated their recognition that (surely?) the majority of people head straight into a keyword search. However, I’m not a fan of the left-nav - a very simple improvement would be to make the main menu elements clickthrough to something. This is a real annoyance for me with these sorts of navigation - particularly evident where you hover over the ‘Books’ item and then have to move right to click…. ‘Books’ to proceed.

Still I guess it’s a tough job redesigning these sorts of elements under the gaze of millions of users and it’s hardly going to stop me buying lots of stuff from Amazon and appreciating all the awesome data widgets.

EDIT: Erm, I’ve been known to be rather slow before, has it been like this ages? Yup, it seems I am just very slow given there are blog posts about this from the beginning of last month.

EDIT 2: Ok, maybe I get it now - a surf around some other blogs and it seems this might be an international redesign also being trialled on Amazon.com that has been showing up intermittently for a while for various people. Which actually makes the issues I’ve mentioned more major if this has been decided upon as the future direction for (presumably) all of Amazon’s regional sites.

Erm….ok. So the two-letter logos for all the products in Adobe Creative Suite 3 weren’t exactly imaginative but I don’t get this one either…it looks a little like a demented blue Pacman or a speech bubble maybe…neither of which has much to do with Photoshop. Also reminds me a little of the Open University logo… mmmm, glass with holes.

Good write-up from Brand New over here with comments covering everything, I just wrote - so, not an original thought but still valid I think.

Strange decision, strange logo. Also, where to next? Can we expect one of these for each of their vaguely web-related products…