The current issue of International designers Network is a gem. Its focus is infographics and this issue contains some wonderful examples. The infographics section contains the work and short interviews with 14 designers and I highly recommend picking up the magazine. It is filled with inspiration, and not just for infographics.
Archive for September, 2008
Infographics in IdN
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Partner Project Launch: The North Face
Monday, September 15th, 2008
One of our partner agencies, San Francisco-based Fluid, just launched the new website for The North Face; a project on which Unit Interactive played a substantial role. This site represents The North Face’s first foray into eCommerce, where before they did not sell merchandise directly online (rather, they sent you to one of their retailer’s sites).
Fluid’s team, led by Cody Lindley, designed the site and coordinated this enormous project. Our part of the project was to build the xhtml/css for a large portion of the site’s pages, and Unit Interactive principal Angela Conlon did virtually all of those honors.
Working with Cody and his team was a joy and we are thrilled to see the launch of this great-looking site. The site employs some cutting edge functionality and technology implementations, which made the pages buildout veeery interesting. It is certainly a site made for fast connections and fast processors, but the results are really impressive. Screenshots follow after the jump? (more…)
Verification for Ampersands in URLs: The Movie.
Thursday, September 11th, 2008Scene 1:
The road is abandoned except for one bold soul careening through the twists and curves of asphalt, his engine crying in mutiny against the silence of the hazy morning. In the man’s rear view mirror, lights flare up out of nowhere in a lively sequence of blue and red that might seem almost festive if they weren’t attached to the roof of a state cruiser. They pull over to the side of the road. Each footstep sounds more contemptuous than the last as the trooper approaches the side of the vehicle.
“Sir, are you aware that you just blew right through 92 validation errors back there?” The trooper says, grimacing as he adjusts his weighty belt.
“What? I mean no… no I wasn’t aware. S-sir.” The man wonders why his reflection looks so scared in the trooper’s sunglasses.
“Seems as though you have a bunch of ampersands that need to be converted to their correct HTML entity ‘&’.” The trooper’s teeth are gritting.
“No… No sir, I wrote everyone out by hand! I promise!”
“Bet you didn’t think to check your href’s… how about on that link you generated off of Google translate? Or on that link from your website host? Leaving the ‘&’ unconverted could cause the link to be broken when the query happens to be an HTML entity as well, like ‘§’, and such. You see, the browser translates ‘&’ to ‘&’ so the server will only see ‘&’ and not ‘&’ in the query string.”
“Shoot, officer, I didn’t know you’re supposed to convert those too.”
“Only every time you use ’em,” scolds the trooper, sounding fatherly. The man feels sorry for whoever might be his kid. “I’m gonna let you off with a warning this time. But don’t let me catch you making the same mistake.”
“No, no, of course not,” the man says, searching for his license and registration. “Never again. I will always be sure to convert any ‘&’ to ‘&’ in the future. Especially in my URLs.”
The man turns back to the window to hand the trooper his information, but the trooper, and his almost festive lights are gone.
New Project Launch: Publish2
Monday, September 8th, 2008
Not long ago Publish2 went into public beta (for journalists only, though). While it is still very much in the beta phase, we can show off some screenshots from this project. As the founders describe it, “Publish2 is a web-based newswire that makes it easy for journalists and newsrooms to gather, publish, and distribute links to the best news on the web. Like traditional newswires, the Publish2 newswire is a cooperative effort?tapping into the collective editorial judgment of newsrooms and independent journalists, distributing links across the newswire and driving traffic to high quality journalism. Our mission is to help journalism survive and thrive on the Web by promoting the practice of link journalism.”
We worked with the Publish2 team to create their logo and to design the user experience and user interface for this robust site and application (but did none of the markup, programming, or CSS). We continue to work with Publish2 to expand and improve the features and overall user experience.
Publish2 is free for professional journalists who agree to maintain Publish2’s strict editorial standards. (more…)
Radio Frequencies
Thursday, September 4th, 2008Every morning on my drive to work, I pass the time with a little help from my radio. Its usually just background noise that helps me make the short transition from home to work, but lately, I’ve noticed an alarming trend in radio commercials, at least in the Dallas area, to use car horns as part of their advertisements. I cry, “Poor design!” and here’s why:
1. The purpose of a car horn is to communicate with fellow drivers on the road, especially in a dangerous situation. The horns in these ads are crying wolf and undermine the importance of and desensitize us to the actual sound.
2. I am sure the creator of the ad intended the car horn to act as a way to catch the listeners attention and make their ad stand out, hopefully in a positive way. At least for me, this has the opposite effect. I get so irritated when I hear a horn misused on the radio that I immediately turn the station without listening to the rest of the ad and if I do happen to catch the name of the advertiser, I have negative feelings toward them for being so irresponsible.
3. C’mon poeple, be creative! How much more predictable can you get than using a horn sound effect for a car dealership commercial. You are not distinguishing your brand from any of the other hundreds of car-related business out there.
So please, Mr. Radio Ad Producer, spend some time to thoughtfully design the ads your clients are paying good money for. The result might just be an ad that actually works.
New Site Launch: Settlement Perspectives
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
Nathan just launched the weblog he’s been crafting for one of our clients, John DeGroote. John is an internationally-respected settlement negotiation specialist who came to us with plans with plans for laying the groundwork for the second phase of his career. Helping him to realize a part of that plan, Nathan crafted the Settlement Perspectives logo and weblog design for John, and Unit launched the site this week.
Congrats, John and Nathan!
Unit PNG Fix Fix
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008The Unit PNG Fix has gotten pretty popular, with close to 15,000 downloads and 1,500 saves on del.icio.us, so we thought we should probably make sure it works as best as it can. Labs has been recently updated with a new version of the fix (the latest is from 08/31) that should solve most of the problems that have been reported. Most notably, the absolute position bug should be fixed.
We want to give a big thank you from Unit Interactive to everyone who wrote in about bugs, concerns, suggestions and adulations. Please, keep them coming. We are always looking to improve our scripts and will continue sharing them.