Gleanings: IA, design and brand

IA MATTERS creating trust in cyberspace iacandy a bunch of truly beautiful odd new visualizations.. information design and […]

IA MATTERS
creating trust in cyberspace

iacandy

a bunch of truly beautiful odd new visualizations.. information design and IA are one.

plumbdesign thesaurus/
and the story behind it
www.thinkmap.com

more
http://inxight.com/
more
smartmoney
from
http://www.smartmoney.com/intro/tools/

more
http://www.artandculture.com

hey, anyone going to any of these?

BRAND
The Evolution of Brand Strategy
The Changing Roles of Identity and Navigation Design

Uncanny
The Art & Design of Shawn Wolfe
Published by Houston
Best known as the man behind Beatkit, the ubiquitous “brand
without a product,” Wolfe was deconstructing consumerism and
brand fetishism since before he knew that’s what he was doing.

See the cover image at:
http://www.emigre.com/CBUN.html

NEWS

Did you think that you can stop worrying about downloads?

Fast Company: Why the Long Wait?
Latency, says Reed, directly affects the quality of users’ experience on the
Net. Although ISPs aren’t blind to this issue, too few of them agree that
latency is the defining metric of their networks’ performance.

Napster cannot be killed.

Industry Standard: It’s Not Dead Yet.
Kevin Werbach. Rather than delaying a resolution of the major issues
surrounding online music distribution, the Napster injunction has accelerated
it. The injunction raised the stakes and also brought Napster tremendous
mainstream publicity.

yeah, these guys are the victims. sure.

Wired News: States: Labels Fixed CD Prices.
Thirty states filed suit Tuesday against the five biggest record companies and
two music retailing giants, accusing them of conspiring to fix CDs prices —
an act that the states say cost consumers millions of dollars.

the war between design and usability
USABILITY VS DESIGN

DESIGN MATTERS
A little while ago I asked what designers have against capitalization. Mike
of biggerhand.com has been kind enough to let me share his response to me
with you.

me: “What “do* designers have against capitalization?”

mike: “they get used like exclamation marks: Too Often And For Emphasis!!!!!
(usually the emphasis is that the copy sucks, but we’ll build around
it with exclamation marks, or “bangs” in marketinguese, and caps.)

in the event of cap & bang bloat i usually strip them all out and get
the client to put them back in. they generally put back about 25% of
what I took out.

In one particularly dire situation I talked marketing down by telling
them that caps added significant overhead in k-count. We then came to
the compromise that we would capitalize the first word of every
sentence and the CEO’s name. To give them a “warm fuzzy” I agreed to
capitalize the first word in every paragraph too.

I like making people happy! (<--bang)" NEWS BITES from tomalak Business 2.0: Five Questions With Mike Mulligan, CEO of MapQuest.
And while they’ve got a brand that people know, it’s a brand that’s not
relevant online. It’s like Brillo. Everybody recognizes the brand Brillo,
butit doesn’t do you any good online. And everybody recognizes the brand Rand
McNally, but it doesn’t do them any good online.

and for more on Rand Mcnally’s struggle to play catch-up (also one of gleanings favorite
topics)

Business 2.0: World to Privacy Sites: Now or Never.
Looming legislation threatens to make many of their current functions
obsolete, and recent high-profile embarrassments have forced many of the
sites
to reconsider their entire raison d’être.

Business 2.0: The Perfect PR App.
The other day, I received a routine press release. It wasn’t time sensitive.
It wasn’t interesting. There was absolutely no way I or anyone else here
would’ve written about the contents of the release. Yet, it came in a FedEx
envelope sent via the highest, and most expensive, priority.

Computerworld: States formally object to proposed settlement between Toysmart and the FTC.
The objection was submitted by Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly,
who said in the filing that the effort to sell the customer data “is a breach of
Toysmart’s promise and constitutes deception pursuant to the Consumer
Protection Act of Massachusetts”…

more on the napster wars