Hoefler & Frere Jones always have something interesting to say. Their recent article On the Death and 441-Year Life of the Pixel waves goodbye to the pixel as monitors using utterly unpronounceable acronyms for their technologies achieve higher and higher resolutions. One of the obvious benefits is we should expect to see a vast improvement in on-screen typography as we’re no longer having to hint at the subtleties of type as if seen through the compound eyes of an insect. We can also look forward to laughing at outdated websites designed for 640×480 monitors sitting in the corner of our screens like letters to Lilliput. The downside is of course no longer being able to take a preview image from ghetty, crop off the watermark and still have a sizable hero image for the homepage, ahem.
In general design is always about overcoming challenges and in web design the challenge has always been how to convey all the information you’d find in a magazine, brochure or catalogue but on something the size of a postage stamp or business card at best. Soon that problem will go away for good and web designers will be faced with the rather more frightening challenge of learning how properly to use all that extra space. Web designers now have a lot to learn from print designers.
I do wish H&FJ had wheeled out those old embroidery patterns a bit sooner.

…and fail, it would seem. At least, I can’t get it work in Firefox or IE on Windows XP.
The idea is that you create 3d chat rooms where you can share pictures, video and music. These rooms can then be embedded on your webpage.

www.lively.com

I’m not sure exactly when this happened but you can finally watch the news online without having to wade through outdated technology plugin hell.

For example, Bush getting heckled yesterday:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7491278.stm

They also have a live streaming news channel:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7459669.stm

We still have many clients who refuse flash, and the most compelling reason was the lack of search visibility. The boffins at google have fixed that with some form a SWF decoder. Worth a read for developers and a reassessment of the reasons not to have flash…

 Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.

One key limitation is that the robot does not execute javascript,  so you might have to carefully select what flavour of flash detection you use to ensure the flash files are visible.

Link to the Google webmaster post

Google favicon revamp

Originally uploaded by hobart65

If you are of the typographic nature, you might have noticed the google favicon went lower case sometime in June. Here’s the backstory from the Google blog about the revamp . Google badly need some form of graphic device or framework to unite its ballooning set of services. Interesting that they start with the favicon, something most branding companies would do last.

” You may have noticed that Google has a new favicon, the small icon you see in your browser next to the URL or in your bookmarks list. Some people have wondered why we changed our favicon — after all, we hadn’t in 8.5 years(!)”

Link: one-fish-two-fish-red-fish-blue-fish

As part of the daily ‘what’s going on out there’ scan, I checked the top two stories on Digg. I’m not going to describe each of them but just provide the links.

1. http://tinyurl.com/65fgzs

2. http://tinyurl.com/462qc6

The unbridled dissemination of information. Both are highly provocative. Both provide visceral and intellectual responses. But in totally different ways.

I was automatically taken to the new-look Netvibes this morning following a scheduled service outage. And there are some extra bits and pieces from Coriander but nothing on top of the original launch of Ginger (Activities – who’s doing what, Contacts – who’s reading your stuff).

The only change is that Universes are now referred to as public pages e.g. build a page and share it with others. Thank goodness for the rename.

Shameless-plug-of-my-own-stuff alert.

I wrote another article (last one here) for mad.co.uk and it’s gone live. Titled Why is integrating digital into the agency so awkward? it discusses some of the problems that agencies face when trying to ‘go digital’ and how they might be solved or avoided.

Worth a look for the awful photo if nothing else. Enjoy.