Posts filed under “Critical Analysis”

When it comes to pop art, the following video is nothing short of astounding. It's the animated intro for the new video game The Beatles Rockband.

Pop artist extraordinaire, Banksy once said:

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

Hate it or not the central statement there is, and for the most part always has been, true. Art has always had patrons, whether it be The Vatican, a video game studio or Hollywood may or may not diminish the art your mind, but you can hardly argue with the pedigree of commercial artistry in the video above. Personally it's why I like advertising. Gorgeous art with a purpose becomes design in my eyes. It's communication backed by reason, which I love. Art with no purpose is lost on me.

Make sure you watch the high-quality version here at the official site. (Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with The Beatles Rockband in any way. Although I am now lusting after an Xbox 360.)

F is for Fail

An utter and complete failure in the customer experience design department from his local ISP (screwing up everything from web from usability/security to phone support) led Douglas Mezzar to take things into his own hands. After 3 months, wasted hours and dollars, he exploits a weakness in their web form to do something he should have been able to do from the start.

Although Douglas Mezzer’s housemate had moved out many months ago, there was one recurring reminder of his prior residence: the monthly DSL bill from iiNet. Though Douglas had been paying on time every month, Douglas thought it’d be best if the bills came addressed to him instead of his former housemate. He figured it’d be a simple change that could all be accomplished through the self-service account management website.

After logging in, however, he ran into a bit of an issue. While he could change the address, phone number, email address, date of birth, and several other fields, the Firstname and Surname were disabled.

Not a big deal, Douglas figured, they have the customer service number listed right there.

An hour and a half of customer service calls later, he finally got a hold of someone who could help with the name change. After verifying his date of birth, mother’s maiden name, and inside leg measurements, the rep cheerfully informed him that they could change the name on the account.

“Of course,” the rep added, “there’s a small fee of $59, but we’ll just bill that to your account.”

“Wait wait,” Douglas interrupted, “$59 for a name change!?”

“Well yes,” the rep explained, “it’s a standard fee. There’s a whole process, you understand.”

Douglas begrudgingly agreed. After all, he did just tell iiNet that his housemate moved out; saying “thanks but no thanks, he’s actually moving back in now” didn’t seem so believable.

A couple weeks later, the bill duly arrived with an additional $59 “name change” fee attached. Its addressee, however, was still Douglas’s former housemate. No big deal, he figured, I’m sure the next one will come to me.

The next month’s bill came and it was still not addressed to him. Okay, fine, he thought, they’ll waste my time. They’ll take my money. But apparently, making the ten-second change is too hard!? He had no choice but to call back; it was now a matter of principle.

When Douglas logged back on to the customer portal to find the appropriate service number, a thought popped into his mind. What if, he thought to himself, hmmm… what if they were incredibly lazy in putting this web app together? Could I just edit the fields myself?

He loaded up his trusty Firebug plugin and Inspected the Firstname field. He clicked “Edit HTML”, replaced Joe’s name with his own, and removed the “disabled” tag.

He followed suit with the Surname field and clicked Save Changes. Surely this won’t work, he told himself, they’re an ISP; they wouldn’t be that stupid, right?

To his surprise, there were no errors and the fields now read “Douglas” and “Mezzer”. Figuring it was some goofy persistence thing, he logged out and logged back in. The account still said “Douglas Mezzer”. Could it have actually worked?

Yes, apparently. The following month’s bill was addressed to “Douglas Mezzer” and there wasn’t a “name change” fee to be found. Though, he did consider them sending them a bill for doing their job.

Get the full story, including screenshots, here: Connect Betterer - The Daily WTF

From Graphjam:

It's all too-easy to get tunnel-vision during a design project and screw it up with some piece of minutia that falls through the cracks because it lays outside your field of expertise. The more trivial mistakes end up being the wost, because they're so glaringly obvious to some subset of the population that does not include you. A subset like... astronomers. (Or 3rd graders in science class.)

Moon Movie Poster - Sam Rockwell

Duncan Jones' upcoming "Moon" is definitely on my must-see list this summer. It looks like a great Sci-Fi thriller. And the production and collateral design is tightly integrated. This gives the website, the trailer and the poster real power when it comes to creating a brand/identity. But... they screwed up on the poster when it comes to checking their facts. Whoever designed this did a fantastic job nailing a unique style that looks modern and classic at the same time; they also clearly had no idea how far the Moon was from Earth.

The tag line says "950,000 miles from home, the hardest thing to face... is yourself." That sounds great, it's intriguing, it even has a twist right at the end, but the moon is 240,000 miles from Earth. According to Bad Astronomy, the only thing 950,000 miles out is a telescope or two and maybe some space dust. Yikes. Considering the movie's tag-line is such a key element to the design, it certainly would've been worth vetting before going to print. A quick Google could've avoided the problem.

Having said that, they've already gone and done the next best thing besides getting right in the first place; they quickly corrected the poster and changed the tag line to "250,000 miles from home, the hardest thing to face... is yourself." You can check it out here in all it's glory: Ain't It Cool News - Moon Movie Poster.

Bravo! Admitting a mistake and moving to fix it immediately is the most sensible reaction to situations like this.

Every single (even moderately successful) web browser's logo has been round... Why?

HIstory of Web Browser Logos

The  most obvious explanation is that Internet Explorer had a round logo and, considering it enjoyed a 95% market share in 2002, everyone else fell in line (Netscape switched to their round logo after IE had already made massive gains). Secondly, with the importance of putting forth a world wide web vibe it seems logical that you would end up with a bunch of globes.

But what about Internet Explorer itself? Why are the IE and NCSA Mosaic logos round? Was it on a designer's whim? Considering these products were mostly if not entirely the work of engineers; it's a bit more practical than that.

When NCSA Mosaic came out in the 90's it was the first graphical web browser. With an accessible UI design, and killer features like icons, bookmarks and pictures, it's what really kick-started the online information revolution. It had a status indicator which was the logo itself. This indicator had to display indefinite progress, so it was basically an elaborate spinner. (e.g. the current Mac OS X beach ball or Windows spinning hourglass.) Spinners are circular in concept and dynamics, otherwise, they would be a progress bar or something else non-cyclical used to indicate definite progress.

Netscape and Microsoft followed suit with their graphical browsers. They implemented logo-based spinners in the upper-right corner of their browser interfaces to indicate page loading progress while we were staring at blank screens hooked to dial-up connections. That way you knew something was happening. The logo-as-spinner element has taken a backseat since then, but it seems like the marketing vocabulary for the web browser was set.

It's interesting to note that Opera, with the widest departure from the globular design trend (the only one with no blue, as well) is also the least successful of all the browsers here, despite recent gains on current fringe platforms like Nintendo Wii and mobile devices. A similar observation can be made about Mozilla's browser: eking along in obscurity for years, until finally releasing it's rounded-logo browser version. With it's new globular look, it quickly became the only serious challenge to Microsoft's dominance of this space. (Obviously these are cases of correlation, not causation. However, looking at the list with a designer's eye, it's hard to miss.)

It will be interesting to see what the first major web browser without a globular logo design will be, bu if the current slew of upstart browsers are an indication, we're in for quite a wait...

new-browser-logos

Oh, and apparently blue is just as worldly as the globular shape. ALL the logos in this post, except for Opera, contain blue/green of some sort. In fact, it's by far the dominant color in nearly all of them. Is this more IE worship? Probably: subconscious or blatant, imitation is still the sincerest form of flattery.

After all, what company wouldn't like to replicate IE's 2002 95% market dominance of the browser-space?

Links to the Browsers listed in this article:

• NCSA Mosaic
  
• Netscape Navigator
• Internet Explorer
• Opera
• Safari
• Firefox
• Chrome
• Flock
• Konqueror
• xB Browser
• Maxthon
• Camino

Bad Signage - Erection In Progress

The translation itself actually works, soliciting only mild snickering from my repressed teen-era sensibilities. The accompanying graphic, however, puts it over the top. [via wikimaniacs.com]

I don't know what it is about me, but I love seeing before and after shots of just about anything. I mean anything. It just so happens that I love checking out nice logos as well. What happens when these two things combine? The 2009 ReBrand 100 Global Award Winning Brands.

Cat photo from the wonderful icanhascheezburger.com

37 Signals AB Split Testing

Jason over at Signal vs. Noise is sharing some really interesting data from an copy writing A/B split test.

Writing Decisions: Headline tests on the Highrise signup page.

They basically discovered that short, punchy copy, combined with assurance of a low-cost of adoption spurs more sales. These are things that any copy writer worth their salt knows anyway, but now they have empirical data that proves it.

Burger King Facebook Campaign - Whopper Sacrifice

Burger King's new Facebook app rewards you with a free Whopper coupon when you get rid of 10 friends. The campaign is Whopper Sacrifice and it smartly taps into one of the largest problems social networkers face over time: friend creep. If you want to ditch that guy you hung with for 6 hours at your college orientation weekend the time is now; you'll receive a delicious fat-filled flame-grilled sodium-bomb from America's perpetual #2 burger joint for your efforts. This is a truly brilliant use of social media marketing via mutual benefit. Burger King is getting Facebookers to try their product and expose their friend list to the Burger King brand. In exchange, they help them fight friend creep in a way that is humorous and rewarding.

Be warned though. The friends you sacrifice will know it was for a Whopper...

Burger King Facebook App - Whopper Sacrifice

I don't know when this new Facebook App launched, but when I started writing this post, 30 minutes ago, the counter on the App's site showed 13,150 friends had been sacrificed. In the time since, it has jumped 16% to 15,260. Looks like a hit to me. How high will the flames go?

I'm sure many of you MySpacers out there, including myself, have signed up for a Facebook account over the last year and are using it more often than MySpace. I was personally tired of the slow page loads among other usability issues. Not using my MySpace account very often over the last few months I only recently realized that MySpace released Profile 2.0 in mid-November. It seems that most of the feedback I've been reading about has been negative. I, however, am a huge fan. Stan Schroeder at Mashable mentions some of the new features …

As far as new features go, the new profile should above all bring speed and better privacy options. New profiles are optimized better and should load faster than the old ones. Furthermore, if the user isn’t satisfied with load times of their MySpace page, he or she can hide certain sections of the site or optimize individual modules to display less items: 5 comments instead of 10, for example.

I'm really just all about the fast page load. That alone would get me to switch to Profile 2.0.

I can't forget to mention that your MySpace page will still be fully customizable in Profile 2.0. Going about that might take a little patience and exploring, but once you get it, you'll never want to go back to Profile 1.0. And a few minor, but notable features I like are the ability to preview your changes before publishing your page and the fact that it's fully W3C compliant.