iA Sketchbook

Fast notes and cheap shots

Google, Yahoo, Bing: Beyond the Hype

The story is quite clear: Yahoo is going down. Google is going up, Bing is insignificant. It's becoming quite clear who the real winner of the Yahoo!-Microsoft deal is:

Compared to their competitors, Bing doesn't do that well on usability either. As for Yahoo!--the latest UI changes on Yahoo! (and the Microsoft deal?) significantly hurt their page views/user rate:

Note: On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! appointed Carol Bartz as its new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors. How long will she be able to hold that position if it goes on like that? So far their stock is still doing well--because of the Microsoft deal that gave Yahoo! a lot of cash. But what is cash good for if you your clients are running out of your shop?

Picture 9

According to Carol Bartz Yahoo! is doing really well with the Bing! deal. Really? Maybe it all makes sense, if you don't look at what she says but at what she does. Carol Bartz is selling her Yahoo! stocks. Well played, Mrs Bartz!

Newspaper Design Presentation (96MB, 170P)

<img src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2647/3971369464_850234db39.jpg" />

You can now download the full 17-page presentation for the Tages-Anzeiger pitch we did in January 2009. It's the exact presentation we held at Tages-Anzeiger. News paper design guru Mario García liked our design and asked for more info. So we send him the presentation. We would now like to share it with all of you:

-> Tages-Anzeiger pitch presentation (95MB PDF)

It gives you a rare insight how we present. It's very visual and it contains the design process. It's in German, but I give you the English translation down below:

It's subdivided into 3 parts:

I. THREE PREMISES

  1. The Masses are not Wise ...but the have become much more powerful.
  2. The Reader now is a User ...she is in control.
  3. Newspapers need to Change ...user experience is (the) key.

II. Three Guidelines

  1. Improve Readability ...and make the newspaper scannable.
  2. Stay True to the Medium ...with optimal reading typography, big images and prominent info graphics.
  3. Mary Print and Online ...because Brand=UX

III. Design Process

The secion presents our (very) unorthodox method: Instead of saying: "This is it, eat or die, we tried everything." When we present a share the whole design process with all its flaws, so the customer can see THAT we really tried. iA usually produces 100s of screens and variations. We figured that there is nothing wrong with showing variations, if you show ALL of them.

IV. The Final Concept

  1. Typography: Reduce everything to Frutiger & Frutiger Serif
  2. Vertical Grid: 5 columns for front, secion top pages and hard news, four columns for opinion and panorama, dynamic (mixing 4 and 5 columns) for sports
  3. Horizontal Grid: Minimal header, 1 big picture per page, big reading optimized leading
  4. Front Page: Reduced sky boxes, grouping information that belongs together (metatext like date, price etc), footer with content overview and eye catching funny articles, reader pictures and info graphics. Small header for section pages
  5. Logo: New, vectorized, 3 dimensional and with more impact.
  6. Section Pages: Reduced header and one massive info graphic or picture
  7. Article Pages: No mosaic principle. Simple structure top left bottom right.
  8. Opinion: 4 columns, lots of white space, no blue links, ragged.
  9. Print Links (we called it "Print-Tagging and Scann text"): Key words in blue. Replaces URL-Chaos and allows quick text scanning. Better reading efficiency. Exact Color tone needs to be tested.

Please keep in mind that this represents our know-how as of January 2009. Of course, in the mean time we'd have a lot of new, more exciting ideas. If you plan to redesign your newspaper and like what you see, don't be shy to give us a shout. Enjoy!

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Beach ball browser freeze trouble with Snow Leopard: Is there a workaround?

I made this screenshot on my private machine (a brand new 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB PowerBook Pro). Since I upgraded to Snow Leopard (10.6.1). I get the beach ball spinning whenever I use the Internet (Safari as well as Firefox). Sometimes the whole machine freezes.

Snowleopard-problem

Good we didn't install Snow Leopard at the office. Is there a workaround?

UPDATE: Apparently it's Flash that causes problems. Installing a flash blocker (Safari | Firefox) seems to be the only way around the beach ball party right now.

Free Posterous Sketchbook Template V0.1

Click here to download:
iA_Posterous_Theme_01_ORN.txt (25 KB)
(download)

Not quite there. Quick and very (very) dirty. A sketchbook theme coded in sketchbook quality. How it works:

  1. Download the .zip file
  2. Replace the XXX in the text with your twitter/domain info
  3. Go to the customize my site section, click on advanced
  4. Create a new custom theme and copy paste the code in the text file
  5. Publish


Note: I'm just throwing this out as it is. Enjoy. Leave a comment if you offer updates to the template or if you find solutions to the CSS in the Javacript elements (comments) that I didn't figure out how to configure. Yes, the code is terrible. And: don't expect me to answer any technical questions. :)