Bret Victor’s site shows some amazing flair when it comes to web design. The way you navigate around the site is more like looking at pieces of paper on a table than clicking through pages on the internet.

What’s interesting is that he’s managed to achieve all this without resorting to Adobe Flash. While these days Flash seems to be generally disapproved of within the design communities, that’s an argument for another day… We just wanted to share this innovative design.

Luckily, the heavy use of graphics and animation is not overpowering – there is always a chance of a website looking very naff if too many dynamic and colourful elements are added!

From a technical point of view, it’s exciting to see more websites being unafraid to use new web technologies (such as CSS 3 and CSS Transitions). Pretty soon, most people will be using web browsers capable of presenting such websites… so people shouldn’t be afraid to experiment!

http://worrydream.com

Nike Better World
This is a lovely site, with a very print-like approach. The minimal content works very well – and most importantly, it has an absolutely awesome scroll effect.
www.nikebetterworld.com

Diesel – Fresh and Bright Superheroes
Here’s an example of how to take a good print campaign and implement it amazingly well online. A fun idea that milks the comic book concept for all it’s worth and had me looking at girls in their underwear for longer than is strictly healthy.
www.diesel.com/freshandbright

Comic Sans Criminal
A nice little site that pokes fun at the comic sans criminals potentially lurking in all of us.
www.comicsanscriminal.com

Exposition Monet 2010
This is a beautifully crafted site – right down to the very smallest detail – which also sets the standard for how Flash should be used on the web.
www.monet2010.com

W3C HTML5 Logo
Celebrating the framework that pushes the modern web to it’s full potential, HTML has been given a brand identity to gather designers and developers alike in the spirit of camaraderie. There are even stickers and t-shirts for the über geeks among us.
www.w3.org/html/logo/

Presenting the iPad. Coming soon... keyboard, additional screen, mouse and desktop unit.

As the iPad nears it’s launch date, coverage is starting to focus on the content, or lack thereof. It seems that several apps are missing for reasons that seem obvious to professional app producers (like us) and perplexing to others.

The simple reason is space. The iPad can run iPhone apps in a scaled up version. The issue is that (forgetting the pixelation if there is not a HD version of the app) the original apps were designed for a screen substantially smaller. Increasing this proportionally will disporportionally increase white/ negative space in the app. And that is just going to look bad. Real bad. This is one of the reasosn why we are working with clients right now in parallel development of their iPhone and iPad apps.

So let’s put aside personal views on what the iPad means for consumers, Apple and web developers and focus on the facts that it will sell. As a branded app content owner, you (the client) need to make an informed decision regarding the ROI value (even if just PR) of developing an iPad specific version of the app because it is not going to be a straight copy of the iPhone app, though unfortunately, that’s what we can happening right now as people look to save money on a quick port.

Why not also read our developers viewpoint on the iPad.

EDIT***

John Gruber has touched on this same point on his blog.

The Topman trouser shoot did not go to plan.

We’ve been working with Topman on their social media and developed their profiles from a standing start to thriving communities providing rich consumer insight and sales. One of our recent projects for London Fashion Week was identified by Yahoo! as the most viewed and searched show during the period. This is a great example of how involving the community demonstrates real value, providing more impact and exposure than competitors. Independent pat on the backs from brands like Yahoo! are always welcome but we also have our own way of tracking results – just ask about our social rating tool.

The press release is below but we think it is a powerful testament to our social work when our male only campaign trumped unisex campaigns by other brands.

***TOPMAN REIGNS SUPREME ON LONDON FASHION WEEK’S CATWALK***
Men’s Growing Passion for Fashion Revealed By Yahoo! Search

Friday 26th February 2010.  As the curtain falls on London Fashion Week, Yahoo! Search has been looking at who reigned fashion supreme as King or Queen of this season’s catwalk.

The Yahoo! Search data over the last week revealed the Topman Design collection made the greatest impact and buzz.  Proving that consumers still have a passion for high street fashion the show generated the highest search reaction and greatest keyword spike of the entire London Fashion Week.

Usually incorporated into the successful MAN event, this year’s AW2010 showcase is the first time Topman Design stepped out on its own.

Following on the smartly polished heels of Topman’s premium collection, the ever popular Vivienne Westwood and Burberry collections ranked in runner-up positions.

Top 5 London Fashion Week Collections by Popularity

1 Topman Design
2 Vivienne Westwood
3 Burberry
4 Jaeger
5 Jasper Conran

We at Neoco have always liked to embrace new technologies and whenever something new or exciting comes out we naturally get excited. This happened with the iPhone, which we now make applications for, and this is bound to happen with the iPad.

The rumour of an Apple tablet has existed for over a year and now that it’s soon to be reality, developers must look at ways they can create applications or adapt their current ones to best fit the new format. Thankfully, the iPad runs the same operating system and contains the same frameworks as the iPhone and iPod Touch so many developers can immediately get to work. The transition, however, may not be as simple as might be suggested by the fact that they both run iPhone OS.

It runs iPhone applications doesn’t it?

It’s well known that the iPad will run most current iPhone applications. Some won’t work due to hardware differences, some because of changes to the underlying frameworks.

The lack of a camera, which many expected to be included, means that all the fun photo adjusting applications become boring (since you must use an old photo form your library) and augmented reality applications (like those that point you to the nearest Tube stop as you look through the camera) obviously cannot work. GPS seems to only be included in the 3G model, so again like with the iPod Touch, this rules out turn-by-turn navigation programs for many people.

Some changes to iPhone OS 3.2 have curiously broken code from past versions. This is presumably an effort to improve the range of functionality, yet in the past they managed to find ways to do so without forcing developers to re-write their programs. Case in point: the Media Player Framework. It’s not clear whether this is just an iPad issue or whether it will affect all devices upgrading to 3.2, but essentially, the mechanism to play a video won’t work. In the past, the only way to play a video was to launch a full screen player. Now you will be able to play videos in smaller boxes, but you have to do so in a different way. Fortunately even if your application featured heavy use of videos, this should be easy to correct.

Then there is the size. Yes, it can run iPhone applications at their native resolution and, yes, it can scale them up to fit more of the screen, but both forms result in an appalling user experience.

At first it might be tempting to just increase the window size to take up the entire screen and leave the rest of the interface in the much the same form, but it should be pretty obvious that this will not make for an attractive application.

Because of these points and more, it is clear that users will expect developers to make iPad-specific applications. In fact, not just iPad-specific applications, but universal applications that work across the range of Apple mobile devices.

Design and interaction

For all their systems, Apple publish Human Interface Guidelines that describe how they envision all application user interfaces and behaviours. For the iPad they say that a few things need to be different from the iPhone/iPod Touch paradigm:

Orientation

If you spin the device round into any orientation and the interface must follow – this happens in a few iPhone applications, but far from all. Curiously, it sounds as though Numbers form the iWork suite for iPad will only work in landscape.

UI

You shouldn’t just make it bigger. As stated above, with such a large and rich screen this would make your application unappealing on the iPad. But it’s not just a case of aesthetics – Apple want applications to look more like the things they act model from the real world. Their Contacts application, for instance, is modelled after a pocket address book. Naturally this won’t make sense for all applications, but Apple is trying to encourage designers to think slightly beyond the traditional iPhone OS interface elements.

• Downplay controls such as buttons and drop-downs
• Avoid full screen transitions – present information in place where possible to improve the overall visual stability
• Use high quality, physically realistic graphics
• Present lists and their detail views together – e.g. the mailbox list and email preview are on the same screen side-by-side in Mail on the iPad
• Reduce modal interfaces (these interrupt the user flow) – e.g. avoid alert message pop ups by presenting responses inline

Having said that, developers shouldn’t attempt to make desktop-style applications – Apple still maintains that across the iPhone OS family applications should each perform one main task in a clear and concise way. I.e. an application shouldn’t sprout new features – only a new interface – and shouldn’t deal with a file system model of opening and saving files (all changes made to something should always be preserved, and only loss of data such as deletions should ask for explicit confirmation).

Actual Multi-touch

The iPhone and iPod Touch have had multi-touch technology for years, but in very few applications, beyond games, is it used. This is probably because there are few situations where it can be put into practice in a meaningful way on the small screen. With the iPad, Apple is encouraging a more touchy-feely approach to applications.

The crux of this? Lots to redesign for existing applications, lots more thinking/sketching/prototyping before making new applications.

Another worry is the increased fragmentation of hardware and capabilities of the devices an application is expected to run on. Fragmentation is one of the much maligned facts of the Android platform. There are so many Android devices with differing screen sizes and system resources that it is hard for developers to accommodate all forms. The beauty of the iPhone OS family used to be that it was simple but now you have 3 iPhones, 3 iPod Touches and 2 iPads, all with varying capacities. With new models coming out almost yearly, it’s foolish for developers to only focus on the latest systems and cut off the millions who bought one just last year.

What exactly is it for anyway?

All in all, Apple’s choices for the iPad suggest that they’ve carefully thought through what sort of niche the device sits in. The fact that it runs iPhone OS is great for developers as there’s not too much to learn and great for users as it will feel natural to those who have used iPhones or iPod Touches. They haven’t overloaded it with hardware features and focused on the software. Despite being both a hardware and software manufacturer, Apple have explicitly stated that it’s hard to compete in hardware – they will be matched very quickly by others. It’s software where they can claim to stand out above the rest.

It’s a little less clear what this niche is though… The iPad is too big to carry in a pocket / have with you always. In contrast, an iPhone would barely leave your side. The iPad isn’t the most convenient things to hold and you probably can’t use it with one hand or on the move. In contrast, you can type a text message on the iPhone with one hand while walking. Its giant screen will wow you, but will your eyes get tired of the bright light and colours after reading more than a few pages?

So be certain of one thing – the iPhone is going nowhere and will remain popular. But will the iPad succeed? We think so if the developer community can build great applications as they have done for its predecessors.

“Every major browser is about to support the ability to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page display with the typography you expect. For designers and developers, this is a significant step forward. No longer will you need to trap your content in images or Flash just to express yourself visually. Pages will be more usable, accessible, and indexable. This is a massive upgrade for the web.”
(http://blog.typekit.com/2009/05/27/introducing-typekit/)

this is all well and good, but what about the legality of this? All fonts are protected by copyright, and very few allow you to link to them via CSS. However, a new application called Typekit (http://typekit.com/) has come onto the scene that claims to have “been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.” This is all very exciting and has been causing a bit of a stir in the web design community. As Andy Clarke puts it “Typekit will revolutionize the way that we work with, and purchase typefaces in the same way that iTunes revolutionized the way we buy and listen to music and the App Store opened the doors to millions of iPhone/iPod customers for their developer community.” (http://forabeautifulweb.com/blog/about/why_typekit_will_change_everything)

In the wake of the buzz about typekit, there have been other services that have been popping up promising to provide a similar solution to web typography, and this is going to have a major impact on the way that designers are going to be designing, using and paying for fonts. Typotheque (http://www.typotheque.com/) have put together a bespoke solution handling fonts from their own foundry, and it could be that others follow down this path.

Whilst this per-foundry approach could find an audience, the ideal solution is one like typekit that has a more uniform solution covering multiple foundries. One other solution that is gathering some interest is Fontdeck (http://fontdeck.com/) a solution being put together by Clearleft (http://clearleft.com/) and OmniTi (http://omniti.com/), and with those heavy-hitters behind it, could be the one to watch.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions, such as what kind of pricing model these services will employ, and what kind of reliability and speed we can expect from the service, but With the arrival of these new services the future appears bright for online typography.

Fred Flade – The Private Life of Digital Typography. This event hosted by The Typographic circle tomorrow night (Thursday 20th November @ 7pm) is something we at Neoco are really excited about. It’s a must for anyone interested in typography or digital design. Fred Flade, of digital creative agency De-construct, will be talking about typographic design in the digital space and celebrating exceptional examples around today.

This is an event designed to explore communication through type in an environment with shrinking technical limits and flourishing creativity. The Typographic Circle is also a client of Neoco’s and we’re proud to be responsible for their website and email management. A group of us will be heading down to Knightsbridge for this event and not just for the free drink!

Why not come join us. You can still book a place by emailing info@typocircle.co.uk

Tickets are £15 for non-members, £10 for members, and £5 if you’re lucky enough to still be a student.

Watch this space for our review of the evening’s events…

So I got my magazine debut earlier this week, in none other than the Computer Arts ‘Round table’ discussion panel. The question: ‘What’s the value of a design degree? So, regardless of being the token graduate in the group (despite the fact I graduated over a year ago) I quite enjoyed my 15 minutes of fame. The only mood dampener was the fact that I felt my opinion was only taken into account as that of an ex-student, rather than a professional designer – though perhaps this was to do with the fact that I’m (1) a female, and (2) a junior in a – shock horror – (3) DIGITAL agency. I mean, come on guys, it’s a digital magazine for crying out loud, yet there were lengthy discussions about the negative effect technology has on design education and how students shouldn’t be allowed near a computer (most of which wasn’t printed for obvious reasons).

Computers encourage a generation of ‘mac monkeys?’ No degree worth their salt churns out graduates like that, but in an industry with a rapidly merging skillset there has to be a level, surely? Not many agencies can afford to employ a student that faints at the sight of technology, no matter how great their ideas are. Even in a print agency nothing’s done on paper anymore!

However, as my opinion on this matter wasn’t exactly sought, it was hard to get a word in edge ways! Though I do appreciate the unfortunate pull out quote I got about my old course at the UCA

My tutors would be proud I’m sure (!) or at least they would if they took an interest in digital design. Should I be worried?

duck and cover artwork from the old nuclear bomb warnings... yes, the Government advice was to Duck and Cover

Duck and Cover have recently re-focused their branding, which now has a modern and industrial focus. The website redesign will incorporate this within the look and feel, whilst also implementing a community focused concept that we have developed – building a community and lifestyle around the Duck and Cover brand. The site will be enhanced by a raft of ‘2.0′ functionality including a YouTube channel, Flickr book, Twitter feeds, social bookmarking and more.

The site will re-launch with its new Neoco design in Sept ’08, to coincide with the launch of their autumn/winter range ‘08. We will be sure to keep you posted when it’s live so you can take a look! And keep checking back because this is one site that is really going to evolve.

duck and cover logo - the current one

The pitch win means Neoco will be working with Duck and Cover on seasonal campaigns for the remainder of 2008 and throughout 2009, including the evolution and launch of their Flagship retail store in the next 12 months, delivered by Me, Him & Her. Future projects will include a B2B customer site with stock re-ordering functionality and a B2C viral campaign, so watch this space for more info on these…