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Posted by Richard Ziade on September 30, 2008, 10:47AMA Guide to Choosing Colors for Your Brand
Usability Post has a handy article giving a quick primer on choosing colors for your brand. Nicely illustrated and informative.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 29, 2008, 09:38AMBoards Of Canada + Processing = Perfection
Glenn Marshall, a computer artist, has married the awesome electronic sounds of Boards Of Canada and the wonders of the Processing programming language. The result is magic:
Music Is Math from Glenn Marshall on Vimeo.
I’ve wanted to put up a blog post listing out the best music to code or design to for awhile now. Boards of Canada would definitely be on that list.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 25, 2008, 09:08AMArc90 Lab : Yammer PHP Client Library
The kids at Arc90 are liking the Twitter-gone-enterprise vibe of Yammer. Yammer won the Techcrunch50 Top Prize. Of course, rather than sending “Congratulations” cards, we at Arc90 tend to express our enthusiasm by writing really well-documented client libraries. Hey, to each his own.
You can grab the Yammer API Client Library by visiting our lab. Kudos to our very own Matt Williams for giving birth to this bad boy. Matt is also the brains behind our popular Twitter API client.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 20, 2008, 08:43AM3rings : Architecture & Design Blog
Nice content and nice design. 3rings is an architecture and design blog.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 19, 2008, 10:09AMGoogle, Billboards And The Threat Of The Side Streets
Here are a couple of snapshots showing off Internet Explorer’s new Visual Search capability.
I pulled both off of the IEBlog. Their most recent post explains how anyone can integrate Visual Search results by pointing the way to an Opensearch Description file.
What struck me about this feature is how truly dangerous it can be to the likes of Google (well, really just Google, there are no other relevant search engines out there). I use Google search all day long. I spend an average of 5-15 seconds on Google search results. Google, for me and for many that use it, is just a trajectory point. It’s a brief trip on the speedway before we jump off to the next exit: our real destination. Those few seconds are precious to Google. By rendering themselves indispensible to getting to where you want to go, they’ve assured millions (or billions) of travelers will use their highway.
Nick Carr put it nicely:
For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes.
Google’s “main business” is search ads. Plain and simple. So long as you need to travel through Google’s highways, you’ll be barraged with billboards that make up Google’s bread and butter. Of course Google would love for you to stick around longer and rely on them for more than search. That’s why you have a wide array of Google services out there. But let’s not delude ourselves, Google nailed search and search is their cash cow.
But what if the highway went away? What if I
didn’t need to navigate through Google to see search results? What if the search experience – an experience that is very transient to begin with – became a desktop experience, or an edge-of-the-browser experience? In that world, where would the ads go? In short: what if we don’t need the highway anymore?
There’s an additional dimension to “do online” that I think Nick fails to cover. Today, “being online” pretty much means being inside your web browser (and a bit of instant messaging). But as the Internet evolves, and as we shift from the page-based paradigm to a packet-based paradigm (think Twitter and RSS) and as developers build more custom-tailored services that live outside of the browser, that highway becomes less relevant. What if I could just take the side streets? Without a highway, where will they put the billboards?
So how does Google keep you on the highway? Well, one way is to provide destinations of their own as mentioned above. Another way is to get on your desktop…somehow. Google Desktop has been around for awhile. Google Chrome (Google’s new browser) is another attempt to have a hand in dispersed content and services on the desktop. Google isn’t shy about staying involved in your online life, and they shouldn’t be.
Google may end up in an odd spot. They may find themselves fighting against a technology trend because it threatens their core business. That’s an awkward place for a technology company to be. Just ask Microsoft.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 17, 2008, 11:32AMObama's Inbox
The Onion peeked into Obama's Inbox. Hilarious. Be sure to also check out his Trash and his draft to MoveOn.org.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 15, 2008, 09:18AMThe Weird And Wonderful Flash Art Of Hans Hoogerbrugge
Flash as a medium is still relatively young and is rarely treated as it's own creative platform. Design You Trust pointed me back to one of my favorite Flash artists, Hans Hoogerbrugge. You can find his oddly entertaining Flash work here. What's great about Hans' work is that it doesn't serve any other end other than to entertain you. It's not navigation. It's not informational. It's a mildly interactive form of art that is both stylish and engaging.
Now all Hans needs to do is make his "pieces" embeddable so we can share them alongside all those inane Youtube videos.
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 10, 2008, 11:10AMArc90 Wallpapers Theme : Brooklyn, Guns And Technology
One of the fun little traditions we have here at Arc90 is the semi-annual unveiling of oddly-themed T-shirts. We've had three designs done so far but the first design is the most interesting:
In essence, it's a shirt with a gun on it. I wanted to do another run but we opted to view it as a rare commodity and leave only 20 or so existing in the world (don't be fooled by imitations being sold in Chinatown).
So what's the gun and military-style font all about? I'm not entirely certain. It's partly a reaction (with a bit of a snicker) to where we've ended up: from an apartment in Brooklyn to the monolithic glass towers of Midtown Manhattan.
Above all else, the "gun" shirt is about disruption. It's about challenging convention and questioning the typical groupthink that plagues most traditional tech shops or IT departments. Back in the day (the "day" being four years ago), Arc90 formed its philosophy: a bold reaction to the stagnant, follow-the-nonsense-you-read-in-eWeek world where CIO's scrutinize gap analysis reports of which bloatware they're going to buy and "implement" next. We embraced and welcomed new, creative ways to build great technology.
Now in the spirit of all this, I'd love to give every one of you a t-shirt, but that's obviously not going to happen. Instead, I whipped up some desktop and iPhone wallpapers that attempt to capture some of that grittiness. It's a nice contrast from our fairly conservative corporate web site. Simply click on the image below to download a zip file with all these images:
The Awesomer - A Lifestyle Blog For Guys
"The Awesomer is a daily blog filled with awesome stuff for guys." Beautifully designed and very pic-centric. It's rare that you'll find me leafing through more than pages like I did here. Very nice (via The Presurfer).
Posted by Richard Ziade on September 3, 2008, 05:16PMMobile Web Version Of Your Site In Minutes : Mofuse
Mofuse does a nice job of skinning of your blog or website for mobile viewing. It takes only a few minutes and an RSS feed.