"Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." - William Morris
Core77 posits that a designer backlash is upon us, as increasingly people are either overwhelmed by design choices that become ‘yet more landfill’, or become ‘designers’ themselves. Is Stark to blame or the savior of design?
Nicholas Felton, aka Feltron, has created the most wonderful report of his year: The Feltron 2006 Annual Report. In it, with great style, he documents his life around Manhattan including the four plants killed, ratio of social to alone dinners (1.15:1) and 2,721 photos taken (of which 5.8% were posted to flickr of which most are amazing American car logos).
Oh, and by a strange coincidence we were both at Daedelus’ APT gig back in July. It’s a small Interweb sometimes.
A few years back Douglas Adams made a program for BBC2 examining what he saw as the necessary future evolution of TV into two way communication – parts of it are very dated, but it’s great to see where things came from that we now take for granted. Watch it now if just for some great ‘interactive’ narration from Tom Baker. (From Metafilter)
Picture the scene: you’re happily browsing through a site, built with fast loading HTML, good CSS techniques and maybe a small amount of well placed Flash. The information you want is coming up quickly, your browser – optimized for such things – is behaving itself. Sounds idyllic doesn’t it? But all too quickly this everyday scene can turn to tragedy as you visit a site’s news and PR section, click on a normal looking link and suddenly you’re loading a PDF. Your browser stops dead as Acrobat Reader is loaded. The PDF turns out to be 300k instead of the usual 3k, so you sit waiting for it to load, with no option to cancel. Your mind spins.. how did this happen? You had no warning. It just came out of nowhere!
Eventually the PDF loads and you read it – feeling more frustrated than a few moments earlier, or you kill off your browser and start again, this time avoiding the fatal link.
All this pain can be avoided: just indicate on a link that you are downloading a PDF using a standard document icon. Or better yet, never link to a PDF as a normal link in a website – have a PDF option next to the link, or on the HTML page of the document itself.
Thank you for listening.
Threshers, a large UK high street based supplier of alcohol, are bracing themselves for unexpected waves of customers after discount voucher was spread rapidly round the web. The 40% voucher was intended for trade partners of Threshers only, but the web mob got hold of the offer and told their friends – now the voucher has been downloaded almost a million times.
Threshers have no idea how much this will cost them – but hopefully for their sakes the 40% discount still gave them a slight profit. In the meantime, it’s a great cautionary example to the rest of the world to never expect any good offer released on the web to stay within the intended group – so be prepared for a) the hoardes of people who may take up the offer, and b) the media backlash if you handle it badly. For an example of how bad it can turn, remember that Starbucks got sued for one of their online vouchers being refused. Never good press.