Watching post-debate coverage of the Democratic party in South Carolina, the format/misenscene of the CNN news floor– young, attractive, female reporter; laptop-as-product-placement; HD TV in the background– looks like the set-up of a video blog (see below).
this set-up does look much different than rocketboom and other shows.
This sure seems sinister to me, but perhaps the confluence of alternative media and cable networks cannot be entirely negative. It also may workout that the surface design of these programs has more to do with the influence of the creative people, designers and so forth, who work on these programs. (I have no idea if the big networks relinquish this sort of control.)
Last night, I also noticed, watching the actual debate, how gratuitously CNN uses their logo, branding, and the colors red, white, and blue. The Daily Show, and others, have noted how absurdly often CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (is that his real name), and the other network anchors say that they “have the best political team on television”: the current frequency is twice per minute. Yet, in CNN’s case, the repeated use of their logo is even more outrageous. It looks as though they may also be going for the myspace tiled background look (also see below).
Compare CNN’s logo use with some guy’s cute myspace background.
The ostensible plan here is to make sure that every shot of the candidates contains a CNN logo. Of course there’s always the logo in the right-corner of the scroller, as well. Maybe CNN could get some attention grabbing ideas from the Web’s Worst Backgrounds
The past couple winters, when I’m reading or working on a cold weekend morning, I’ve found myself siting next to the radiator in my apartment, so I can continually warm my coffee mug on the radiator.
This designer has extended such a practice:
More at Yanko Design
Creative Commons has refreshed their look,
Actually, I’m not reading the hard-copy yet, but I’ve started to read Michael Beruit’s book Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design
Beruit writes at Design Observer, and is eloquent in his observations.
After reading a short post at Shebanation I’m inclined to agree with Shebanow’s conclusion that consistence between applications is less important that consistency within them.
Shebanow discusses the decision by Adobe to place window minimize and close buttons on the right-side of OSX windows (a unconventional move) in creative Suite version 3. Shebanow concedes that the change may be initially jarring, but worthwhile if it allow for Adobe users to better use the overall application. The reason its OK, he continues, is a reflection of design guidelines being opened by diffuse, evolving Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).
The problem of adhering to, redefining, and ignoring conventional design formats is quite like the rules of writing. When does a useful metaphor become cliche? Some icons/symbols are culturally-specific idioms? The virtual desktop has more purpose that the hard-wood desktop for many– so how should this metaphor evolve. Just as language, graphic communication evolves, and partly so by the action of those using it.
I just read an interesting article by Bill Higgins on how the concept of the “Uncanny Valley” (the idea that humans will interact positively, normally to robots up-to the point when robots are to human-like, whereby humans become uneasy about the interaction.) applies to web design.
The concept really doesn’t apply to software design squarely, so Higgins extends to concept to the sort-of unfamiliarity that people experience when they expect a program to look or work one way, but it does not.
So the problem here is how to build upon and improve a paradigm, say operating system design, without compromising the environment users have come to expect:
The Uncanny Valley of User Interface Design
I been looking into some css solutions for creating web bars. A css solutions is desirable over animated GIFs or embedded flash for several reason, primarily because of load efficiency and the ability to control the animation.
Using a single background image or sprite image makes loading of the progress bar image quite efficient. The background image or sprite image can be moved using background image positioning:
#progress
{
background:url(’images/progress.gif’) -8em no-repeat;
height: 12px;
width:130px;
margin-top:14px;
margin-left:7px;
position:absolute;
}
The progress position is changed by adding a class for each position:
#progress._10
{
background:url(’images/progress.gif’) -9em no-repeat;
}
#progress._20
{
background:url(’images/progress.gif’) -8em no-repeat;
}
#progress._30
{
background:url(’images/progress.gif’) -7em no-repeat;
}
So the -em position (-9, -8, -7) represents the inverse of the percentage value (10%, 20%, 30%). At it scales properly!
