Simian Design, by Tony Stephens

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    • Label Placement on Forms

      When creating a web form, one of the many choices you must make is how you are going to align your labels with your inputs. This is not a trivial decision, as this placement affects the readability/usability of your form, completion rates, speed of completion, and ultimately the satisfaction level of the users trying to get through your form.

      August 5 at 12:44 pm
    • A Scenic Night in Binbrook

      July 5, 2008 I had the pleasure of observing and photographing the stars at a local conservation area and dark sky site in Binbrook, Ontario, Canada. I imaged this scene with an unmodified Canon 40D, Sigma 17-70mm lens (17mm @f2.8) and standard camera tripod with no tracking. This is a stack of 15x20sec exposures @ ISO 800 on the Milkyway down to the tree line, and another single 20sec exposure on the rest of the landscape below to create a two frame composite. Stacking was done in Deep Sky Stacker and processing was done in PS with layers. I was really lucky that the the water was beautiful and still enough so that the stars casted a nice reflection in the water. In this shot you can also see Jupiter, various nebulas in the MilkyWay, Rho Ophiuchus and the light dome from a distant town. Published: NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day SkyNews Photo of the week #349

      August 5 at 12:35 pm
    • Concept Ships

      A great site with a collection of space ship designs, art and concepts. Great for the inner geek in you.

      August 5 at 12:26 pm

How to create Advertising the really Sells.

38 things that Ogilvy & Mather have found that helps when creating Advertising that just flat-out SELLS.  Ogilvy & Mather have been giants in the advertising world for a while, and they know what they are talking about.  David Ogilvy has written us this gem of an article that articulates these 38 things.  It’s a great read if you’re at all interested in advertising.  Highlights are listed below.

1. How should you position your product?  This is by far the most important decision.
2. Create a large promise, a benefit for the customer.
3. Brand image.
4. Big Ideas.  Big ideas are usually simple ideas.  “THe problem, when solved, will be simple”.
5. First-class Ticket.
6. Don’t be a bore.
7. Innovate.
8. Be suspicious of awards.
9. Psychological segmentation.
10. Don’t bury news.
11. Go the whole hog.  This is a great point.  Don’t attempt too many things, you’ll achieve nothing.  Boil your strategy down to one simple promise, and go the whole hog in delivering that promise.

They also have 12 points in what works well in television, and 13 for print. It’s a great list, and I’m just loving digging through this genius.

32. Yes, people read long copy.  Readership falls off rapidly up to fifty words, but drops very little between fifty and five hundred words.(!)  “The more your tell, the more you sell”.  This is fascinating.  That’s a HUGE number, fifty and five hundred with a minor drop-off.


OH GOD NO.

Xerox, another classic logo destroyed.  That’s right, Xerox recently had it’s classic logo redesigned.

Xerox Old

Horrific, isn’t it?  They changed the color, the shape, added 3-D.  BLEECCCH.

I’m putting a fair amount of blame at the feet of Intrabrand, who designed this monstronsity.

“The new Xerox logo is now a lowercase treatment of the Xerox name — in a vibrant red — alongside a sphere-shaped symbol sketched with lines that link to form an illustrative “X,” representing Xerox’s connections to its customers, partners, industry and innovation, and designed to be more effectively animated for use in multi-media platforms.”  -Official Press Release

Words just fail me.  This is full of fail.  You suck Xerox, and you suck Intrabrand.

Okay, rather than end it on this awful note, I’ll leave you with a utterly fantastic logo I ran across yesterday in my surfing.

It’s for a recycling center in Taiwan.  I _love_ the use of negative space here. Note the lack of 3-D, X’s, animation or other useless crap.

Identify links with CSS and Icons.

Poolie Studios has a nice collection off icons that he uses to iconify links.  This process is a fairly lightweight, unobtrusive way to show what your links are.

a[href$=".pdf"] { BLAH BLAH } is the core of the it all.  This CSS selector object (easily done via jQuery for older browsers) allows you to showcase exactly what your links are.

I’m not 100% positive that this is always a good idea, but this is a nice collection of icons that fit the link sizes, and thus I’m linking it to you.