Last summer a controversial concept for a rebranding of American Airlines popped up on the internet. Now, just minutes ago, American Airlines presented their new and official branding. It’s a patriotic approach, especially when you have a look at the airplanes. I quite like the idea but I am not sure about the use of gradients. What do you think?
This is how the airplanes will look like.
I hardly play video games on consoles. I never owned a game consoles and still prefer my computer for gaming. But I am very impressed by an idea from Microsoft called IllumiRoom. It looks like a really cool improvement of Ambilight, a technique for TVs developed by Philips. Microsoft says IllumiRoom is “designed to push the boundary of living room immersive entertainment by blending our virtual and physical worlds with projected visualizations”. I definitely would be interested in buying a console if this feature is part of it.
“The effects in the video are rendered in real time and are captured live — not special effects added in post processing.”
Last year when I was in London I spotted some new packaging designs of NIVEA products using a new logo. In my article I asked if Beiersdorf, the company behind NIVEA, will introduce these packages worldwide because I couldn’t find any official informations. Yesterday, Beiersdorf published a press release with the announcement to roll out a new global design language.
I like it a lot and love the reference to the blue tin: “The blue tin has embodied NIVEA’s brand values since 1925. It is the brand “face“ that consumers around the world associate with trust, closeness and expertise.”
It has been a pretty great and interesting year here at FRONTAND. I will provide you with some stats and insights next week. Today I want to say thank you. In order to do so I will give away one copy of the Velocity. The book is a dialog between Ajaz Ahmed (founder of AKQA) and Stefan Olander (Vice President of Digital Sport for Nike). I read this book in summer and had the chance to hear Ajaz in London during my time at AKQA. If you are interested in the future of brands and advertising in these digital times I would definitely recommend this book.
To get the copy you just have to click the “Like” button under this post and write a short comment (with a valid email adress). I would like to hear what you like/dislike the most about this blog or what do you want to see on FRONTAND next year.
I will identify the winner on December 24th at 1pm.
Good luck!
UPDATE: Congratulations Vincent!
” I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think we’ll lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. “
“The big problem that is holding back Linux is games. People don’t realize how critical games are in driving consumer purchasing behavior.”
“We think touch is short-term. The mouse and keyboard were stable for 25 years, but I think touch will be stable for 10 years. Post-touch will be stable for a really long time, longer than 25 years.”
Let’s Talk About Soil is a video explaining the issue “of soil resources around the world, covering the issues of degradation, urbanization, land grabbing and overexploitation; the film offers options to make the way we manage our soils more sustainable”. The 3D low polygon style and the great attention to detail impressed me a lot. Awesome work.
Another week has passed. Time for my weekly recommendations:
Follow me on QUOTEfm to see all my article recommendations.
I’m a big fan of these short documentaries about crafting and people talking about their passion. I could watch them all day long so I decided to collect some nice examples and recommend some good channels. Enjoy!
xkcd.com about Infinite Scrolling
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t question the infinite scrolling technique in general. The problem is, in most cases the implementation of the alternative to paginations is really bad. So bad that I left websites (with excellent content) several times because of a terrible scrolling experience.
Be careful. Even though it’s a common way of replacing paginations, we still see a lot of broken and bad implementations of Infinite Scrolling. It’s definitely possible to use it in a good and practical way. But it depends strongly on the context it is used in. With the rise of mobile internet we have to differentiate. It might be useful in some applications and it could enhance the user experience on devices. Think carefully about the value it adds. Don’t implement it just because it sounds fancy.
I would recommend Infinite Scrolling for pages/services with a lot of small content elements (like Pinterest) and not for text/image heavy content. Best Practices: Google Reader/Mail/Images, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram.
Another interesting discussion popped up in the last days because Apple added Infinite Scrolling to the latest version of iBook. It’s a bit different because I think we can’t compare books and websites but if you want to read more about this topic I would recommend these articles:
*Google: “Therefore, to improve the user experience, when we detect that a content series (e.g. page-1.html, page-2.html, etc.) also contains a single-page version (e.g. page-all.html), we’re now making a larger effort to return the single-page version in search results. If your site has a view-all option, there’s nothing you need to do; we’ll work to do it on your behalf. Also, indexing properties, like links, will be consolidated from the component pages in the series to the view-all page.”