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.

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”.

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.

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

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!

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.

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!

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.

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!

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?!