design

Digital Editions by Google Fast Flip

September 14th, 2009 | Posted in Blog, news | No Comments
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Google Labs is making a play further into the digital publishing sector with Fast Flip. The Google News Blog reports that Google partnered with three dozen top publishers in a revenue share program to build the service platform. It’s a different type of digital edition. The digital images provide a fast viewing experience across many publisher website web pages. In my opinion there are implications here on what may come in the future. Fast Flip certainly supports the digital edition presentation concepts popular within the magazine publishing community today. It’s all about content, usability, and design folks.

google-fastflip

Today we’re adding a new experiment to Google Labs: Google Fast Flip, accessible at fastflip.googlelabs.com. Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers.

via Google News Blog: Read news fast with Google Fast Flip.

Google Fast Flip

Design is important! As we move back to the important of design and graphic communication, I believe that publishers doing well (especially magazine publishers) in this area will benefit from visual presentations. My first question every time someone walks into my office with a new eReader, ebook, or mobile app is, “does it display graphics?”

But Fast Flip requires publishers to showcase more of their content than a simple Google News listing requires, which could allow readers to completely skip clicking through after getting the gist of the story from the first few paragraphs. On the other hand, a more attractive presentation of the story could attract more clicks than a single headline might. – cnet News

In addition to the browser version of Fast Flip, they also created a mobile version. http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/mobile

Martin Nisenholtz, the NYT‘s SVP of digital operations, cautions against reading too much into the revenue sharing—or the relationship. “There’s no grand plan here, nothing more to this other than learning,” he told paidContent. “This is not about any kind of large strategic relationship issue.” – paidcontent.org

The Fast Flip site is fastflip.googlelabs.com

Take a few flips and let us know what you think!

IKEA font now Verdana

September 5th, 2009 | Posted in Blog, design | 4 Comments
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Who doesn’t like a good debate?  Since I work with many designers but am not a designer myself, I really appreciated the comments on both sides of the debate.  At issue; IKEA’s switch to a font that provided them better international brand consistency.

Some comment highlights from idsgn.org “After 50 years of the iconic Futura typeface, IKEA has made a switch to… Verdana?” via IKEA says goodbye to Futura: idsgn (a design blog).

doug Aug 26 2009 3:43 PM

What horrible timing to adopt a web-font in their branding. With typekit and similar and css3 support for better typography on the web coming soon, it seems silly to finally move to verdana. 10 years ago it may have made sense, but today they could just bide their time a little longer and get the typographic quality of real fonts on the web…

Sarah Aug 27 2009 4:43 AM

Okay, I just got the catalogue and I noticed a lot of differences… I’d say that the design is more reserved and conservative (less spreads of decked out apartments / shagadelic bedrooms / etc) but come on people, there is an AIDS epidemic in Africa, children are starving, and people are killing whales for crying out loud.

Ciacci Aug 27 2009 4:59 PM
Designers are way too opinionated.
I hate working with them.

Ciacci Aug 27 2009 4:59 PM

Designers are way too opinionated.

I hate working with them.

My favorite:

Brian – Aug 26 2009 1:26 PM

Ikea should have kept Futura, altered it to match their needs, and called Furnitura.

DailyFinance and other news stories are putting more attention on this story:

While Ikea’s signature font, a customized version of Futura, was attractive and distinctive, it didn’t work in every language, and was unwieldy for many uses. Consequently, the company recently decided to switch to Verdana, a typeface that Microsoft distributes for free. The new font works across the globe, and translates into an endless array of alphabets. Unfortunately, it also infuriates many of Ikea’s customers. – DailyFinance

And now a petition has been started allowing the undersigned to declare, “We, the undersigned designers, consider this to be a mutilation of Ikea’s long admired design philosophy. It is sad this is happening, and it undermines Ikea’s design leadership. Please bring Ikea Sans/Serif back, or get a proper typeface instead of Verdana! “ http://www.petitiononline.com/IKEAVERD/petition.html

I’ll get the new IKEA catalogue soon, but, sadly, there will be one reason less to enjoy browsing it. As they say, it will be just business—nothing personal. – iancul

iancul_IKEA

Visit Iancu Barbarasa’s blog for all the details – Ikea Post

Do you have passion for your font?