Category : Various & Sundry



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In all likelihood you probably read the first five (or perhaps only two) words of the first paragraph before skipping down to here. Many of you can probably recite the first line off by heart, but most likely all of you know what the text's name and primary usage is. Used as placeholder…

You'd think this wouldn't be the case, but it's an awkward truth about SXSWi that darn near all of the interactive materials designed for it are pretty bad. They don't look good, and they usually don't work very well.

Case in point: The SXSW iPhone app. I guess it's supposed to serve as my SXSW HQ while I'm in Austin. It's a modest little app, comprised of a scheduler, GPS map, newsreader, electronic business card, and micro-messaging app rolled up into one neat little cluster of a package. Oh, and it's really slow. And I'm in Indy right now. I can't imagine how it's going to perform when the geek-horde invades Austin.

But don't worry, there's a web app to save you from that app! It's called…

Rapportive is a new Gmail plug-in that replaces ads in messages with information about the sender, or anyone else who was copied on the message. Rapportive pulls information from RapLeaf, a company that scours the social web for open information and builds products and analytics on the data it finds. Sources include Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, MySpace, and more. The Twitter piece will even show you a list of recent Tweets. Very cool. If you're a Gmail user, check it out.

Longtime KA+A client ExactTarget announced in December that they had been named a leader in email marketing in Forrester's 2009 Email Marketing Service Providers Wave report. They were called a "leader of the pack," and received perfect scores in six categories, including: Strength of Management Team, Executive Vision, Product Roadmap, Total Employees, Vertical Strategy, and Customers Most notably, ExactTarget was the only ESP to achieve a perfect score in the Customers category. According to the report, "with high satisfaction scores and online community, ExactTarget can successfully meet marketers' complex business needs." That's particularly exciting for the KA+A team, since we had the opportunity to work with ExactTarget on the creation of their user community, 3Sixty. With over 16,000 members, 3Sixty has become a model of what an…

Typographic literacy is on the decline, and subsequently a whole host of errors are now accepted as ‘the norm’. Below is an exploration of some of the biggest typographic faux pas, and the ways each should be corrected.

Double Spacing This convention harks back to the days of monospaced typewriters where it was common practice to insert a double space to distinguish the beginning of a sentence from the surrounding single word spaces. When using proportional fonts this really isn’t necessary, and is, to be brutally honest, just plain ugly.

‘Dumb’ Quotes Typewriters are also responsible for the introduction of ‘straight quotes’, non-specific quote marks designed as a space-saving measure for…

Can you see what’s wrong with the statement above? Bad typography is everywhere. It can be found in magazine articles, outdoor signage, restaurant menus, billboards, newspaper and TV advertisements and all over the internet. Spend just 30 seconds looking it’s easy to find a whole host of typographic faux pas—incorrect hyphenation, ‘dumb’ quotes, double-spacing, widows, orphans, poor kerning… the list goes on. Typography is something every designer should deeply care about, which is why it pains me to see it abused so profusely. Typographic literacy seems to be on the decline, and as many designers who are not well-versed in typography move into teaching, they pass on little typographic knowledge to their students…

Surprise, surprise. IE6 is back in the news. After hackers exploiting a weakness in IE6 launched an attack on Google and at least twenty other companies in China last week, Microsoft has issued a "critical" patch for it's dated web browser. Actually, this isn't so much news or a surprise really. When is Microsoft not fixing vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6? We can probably expect this sort of thing to happen for the next 4 years, until Microsoft stops supporting its abomination in 2014

The reason this specific incident is making headlines this week is because French and German officials are now making recommendations to not use Internet Explorer anymore, regardless of the version. Bravo. Microsoft instead…

A curated collection of blog posts and web links that address branding, user experience, and interface design.

William Poundstone has written a great book on pricing practices called – Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value. For anyone interested in crafting brand experiences pricing strategies should be an area of deep study and reflection.

We'll try not to get into the habit of posting blog posts that point to other blog posts, but The Most Relevant Identity Work of the Decade, as chronicled over at Brand New is worth a gander.

Online retailer Zappos has figured out how to actually productize their culture and market their business model to other retailers. It can be yours for just $4,000.

Andrew Chen makes a pretty compelling argument for the virtues of Low-Fidelity prototyping.

In this thoughtful post, …

A curated collection of blog posts and web links that address branding, user experience, and interface design.

Check out Mag+, a concept video on the future of digital magazines by BERG. This concept is killer in its own right, but what really impressed me was the quality of the product visualization itself.

This is a really cool tumblr site that offers up a comprehensive showcase of Rich Internet Applications.

Pentagram is hard at work proving that "traditional" design firms can compete in the user experience arena. Check out the work they did for litl.

UserPlus.org has created a pretty cool forum for web designers, developers, information architects, interaction designers, and usability specialists to share their design best practices.

Google Labs just…

When I last blogged about webfonts back in March 2009 there was no clear-cut direction that type foundries or browser developers were headed with regards to using real fonts on the web. Designers were fed up with using the same short list of system fonts on their websites, and the only options at the time that allowed the use of non-system fonts were using images or Flash/JavaScript-based workarounds. In the last few months there have been many interesting developments, with two options currently leading the race.

@font-face and WOFF
The @font-face rule has been around for over 10 years, first making an appearance with CSS2. It has remained largely under-used due to differences in each browser’s font…