simonb.com: a 35mm comedic short about a man

Atkins has won an international competition to design a five-star resort hotel set within a beautiful water filled quarry in Songjiang. Wow!

Baseline Mag has an overview of how MySpace coped with rapid growth. Basically a good lesson in how not to build a dynamic database backed website. 

A voyage from idea to realisation across an ocean of compromise.

You’re given the task of designing a logo for City TV - the annonying TV channel played in Shanghai taxis. (There shall be no quiet places.)

Do you:

a) Flex your creative muscle and design a new logo. (How hard can it be right?)
b) Bastardise a cultural icon.

Before you answer remember you’re in China.

Mmmm. Text shadow effect.

More nuggets from Seth Godin

Marketing pothole (#1 of 3): I’ll know it when I see it

Marketing pothole (#2 of 3): I’m too busy

Marketing pothole (#3 of 3): What will the boss think

I love number 3 - we live with this everyday.

See also Bessemer VC’s list of investment they turned down but turned out to be great successes.

Seth Godin has a piece on 13 things clients can do to make themselves popular with their design team. My favorites are:

“If you want average (mediocre) work, ask for it.”

and

“You can’t tell me you’ll know it when you see it.”

2006 IDEA Awards

Color wheel demo of differing foreground and background colors and how they affect accessibilty.

Here’s a link to another Spore video from E3. In this demo Will Wright brings on Robin Williams towards the end to build a creature. Funny.

What’s the different between this

<tr> <td> <img src="..." /> </td> </tr>

and this

<tr><td><img src="..." /></td></tr>

The answer is: nothing unless you are IE. The World’s Worst Webrowser treats them differently, adding unwanted vertical space in the case where there are spaces between and inside the tr and td elements and their contents - newlines are just as bad btw. Grrr, debug hell.

By asymetrical subscribe/unsubscribe I mean a web service that has one way for subscribing and another for unsubscribing. Typically subscribing is easy - you input your credit card details on a web form and you’re done. If you can subscribe via a web page you should be able to unsubscribe via another web page. But a few online services make it very hard to unsubscribe - I think for obvious reasons. This only serves to annoy users even more - hence making it unlikely a user will ever re-subscribe. 

I first encountered this with audible.com: I was subscribed but I did not have the time to listen to all the books I had downloaded. So I tried to unsubscribe. There was no obvious way to do this from their web pages so I emailed support. “You have to call us...” they tell me. “But I’m in China and I could subscribe via the web why can’t I unsubscribe via the web?” I reply. “OK. We’ll cancel your account.” they say. Apart from the hassles of cancelling my subscription (and their ridiculous URLs) I really like the audible.com service.

My latest encounter with this kind of “customer service” comes from the charlatans of xdrive.com. Again very easy to subscribe. Very easy to give them your money. This was about a year ago. I used the account about once and forgot about it. Looking at my credit card statement recently I noticed a charge from xdrive.com. They had renewed my account - I didn’t ask for it to be renewed nor was I warned via email that this was going to happen.  Again there is no way to unsubscribe from their web site. If you can find the “help” this kind of thing is not even mentioned. So I email them to ask them to cancel. The reply from xdrive.com is “You have to call us...” So I reply that I’m in China etc. “You have to call us...” is the reponse. I try calling them but guess what? Their support is only 9:00AM - 6:00pm their time. How convenient for them! That is the hours when I am mostly asleep.

When are people going to realise that if you offer a service on the web your customers are all over the world in all timezones?

Now, if you have a field in a form that only accepts certain values don’t you think that it would be a good idea to tell the users of the form what those values are before they’ve filled them in? I am sick of the “invalid email” error after a form has been submitted. Why is so hard to indicate what valid values are beside the field? Or why can’t this be validated in JavaScript? It’s simply a lack of thought by the page designer/programmer.

According to this article there is a link between brain development and your surroundings. Dull surrounding == no brain growth. Interesting and changing surroundings == new neurons. This has long been held for baby development. But now it appears that the same is true for adults. So escape your cube, open a window, tear down the latest HR brochure and head for the hills.

Monochrom asked Austrians to draw logos from memory. Meanwhile
http://www.allthelogos.com/ is a database of over 90,000 logos

Very cool video of multi-touch interaction from NYU.