Website / Guardian Unlimited
This rocks. Check out the redeveloped Guardian Unlimited website. Each section is completely independent with dedicated context-sensitive IA and amazingly tight and sexy adherence to the overall grid. Wicked site and so so tight.
Blog / The BBC’s Fifteen Web Principles
I was going to link to these, but thought they’d be good to reproduce in their entirety. They’re taken from Tomski.com - Tom Loosemore’s Blog, an employee at the BBC. They form part of the BBC2.0 Project.
1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)
2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)
3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.
4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.
5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.
6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.
7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.
8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.
9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.
10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.
11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.
12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users
13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site
14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale
15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.
Website / The Identity Archives Project
The Identity Archives Project is a keyword-searchable database of logos and brand identities for designers, brand managers and marketing professionals. The aim is to grow the database (no need to register) so that it becomes a complete and valuable tool for the brand identity design community.
Video / Photosynth demo - AMAZING
This will blow you away… guaranteed. A video demo of Photosynth, the likely product to transform the way we experience digital images - think spatial and relationship modelling of all things visual.
Article / Learning to love the pixel: exploring the craft of icon design
Makes for an interesting read - talks about crafting something relevant, usable and attractive as opposed to simply ‘prettying things up’. Read the article
Video / Digitas show-reel and future of advertising
Interesting QA session with digital agency execs. The Digitas show-reel runs from 03:30 and Chris Clarke the Global CEO of Nitro gives an interesting vision from 10:00.
Watch it at Scribe Media
Article / What Does Rich Mean?
Interesting article that has a tendency to get a little convoluted at times. “Amid the current hype of Web 2.0, rich has become the de facto buzzword suggesting fresh, sexy digital products, often marked by glossy buttons with AJAX-driven behaviors. But what does rich mean to a UI (user interface) designer who wants to craft intelligent, compelling, and memorable interactions?”
Check it out at Boxes and Arrows
Article / Experience IS the Product…
Great article talking on the value experience delivers to consumers.
“Flickr is driven by explicit experience strategy. Two in fact, written right there on its About Page:
1. We want to help people make their photos available to the people who matter to them.
2. We want to enable new ways of organizing photos.”
Website / TuneGlue
TuneGlue is one of the latest online offerings venturing into relationship visualisation. In this case, TuneGlue maps the links between various artists and genres of music from Last.FM and Amazon. Type in the name of your favourite singer or band and the mini-app generates threads of similar artists, albums etc. From here you can drill down to albums and tracks.
All the data is pulled from the EMI owned Last.FM which adds credibility to the offering and once again shows the faith and commitment EMI have to the digital space - read their press release on the issue here.
A similar offering named LivePlasma has been around for quite a while and although not as slick, does a better job of visually representing the relationships. The addition of size to the generated nodes and multiple linkage paths gives depth and relevance. Try searching for the same artist and see what happens.
Website / Endless Shoes and Handbags
Endless is a recently launched (still Beta - like most web 2.0 offerings) new shopping site from the US - restricted to US localities at present including their prisons! The differentiator for this site is the inclusion of a nice set of search tools including visual devices such as a colour picker and drag-able sliders for setting price ranges. It’s not the most visually appealing site in the world and the ‘Endless’ brand really confuses me (why endless - what’s the tie, why the crap logo etc.) but the functionality and sensationally tight CSS control makes up for it.