A blog by Ben Gilman

Strangely enough Barack Obama’s election victory was pretty big news the world over - kindly souls of the internet have collected over 700 newspaper covers from the day after onto one long page.

You can see all the covers here. Apparently though, it wasn’t the story of the day in every corner of the world. Third from last on the page is Newcastle’s Journal - leading with this explosive alternative:

I blame John McCain.

EDIT: 700 front covers and not one of them went for “McCain’s had his chips”.

Ah, a chance to ape the fine Brand New with a rebrand review!

Apparently one of the most tumultuous days in recent world finance history is a good day for UK-based credit-card-company-come-payment-processor Barclaycard to release their new visual identity.

As a first impression I do quite like it, the new typeface is nice and the shade of blue appeals in a finance 2.0 way.

The Barclaycard press release talks about the globe depicting “a world that is calm and confident on the outside, whilst warm and vibrant on the inside.” Unfortunately for me the globe looks a little like it’s falling apart… maybe very prescient given the current situation. Also, as alluded in my blog title, it’s very hard to look at this and not think of AT&T - even over this side of the Atlantic!

Overall though, for me it’s an improvement - it’s maybe a little too shiny and contemporary and it will be interesting to see how it pans out in the future but the new simplicity and clean lines are a definite step forward from its curvy credit card predecessor!

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!

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!

Shuffling through my bookmarks on the lovely new Delicious I stumbled across the first time I’d bookmarked the excellent WalkIt.com.

WalkIt is a route planner for pedestrians. As an example here’s a route between two of my regular Soho beer haunts: the relatively flashy Sun & 13 Cantons and the no-nonsense Green Man on Berwick Street.

The route gives you distance, duration, calories burnable as well as CO2 avoided as well as turn-by-turn instructions. It’s a great little web application planning routes now in London, Birmingham, Edinburgh and more.

Fingers crossed there’s an iPhone version is in the works?!

Wordle is an excellent web-toy that generates word maps based on RSS feeds or Delicious accounts. It found the RSS for my blog slightly troublesome so here’s my Delicious bookmarks mapped out instead.

Wordle discovered via SimpleBits.

From BBC Sport.

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.