Click on the picture above to see a chart with a full breakdown of the iPhone, Palm Pre and Android. I was kind of surprised how similar all three of them are in terms of features/specs. I see now that AT&T is definitely sticking it to me for the voice/data/messaging plan I’m on. Is it me or does the Pre look pregnant?
I went and did a little user testing this past week for a new startup based in Midtown called Hapnin NYC. The site hopes to be the place to go for stuff to do in New York City and I think they are on to something good. Lately I’ve been playing around with FourSquare which has tips submitted by users for stuff to do around where you are. Hapnin’s a little different in that they’re trying to show you everything that’s going on around you from art openings to happy hours. They want to help you plan your night on the fly. I’m looking to see them add more content in the near future but so far, so good.
WhatTheFont is a great website that helps you identify fonts. You just upload a picture with the font you want to identify, single out the letters and wait for the results. The software has now been ported over to the iPhone. You can take a picture with your iPhone, crop the image, identify the letters in the picture and in a few seconds the app will return the results. It’s like Shazam for typography.
Google announced a nice upgrade this week for people who have duplicate content on their sites because of catalogs. Often times the same content will appear more than once depending on how you searched for something. So you may get the same content for a pair of brown shoes by filtering down to shoes>brown or shoes>men’s. You can now add a tag <link rel=”canonical” href=”"> inside the <head> tag and Google will understand that all of the duplicate pages refer to this url. This will also help shore up PageRank to this one particular page rather than it being diluted to all of the pages with the same content. You can read more about the particulars on the Google Webmaster Central blog.
Came across this site today called favikon. Just upload your image and if the dimensions aren’t quite right use the simple cropping tool and your done.
(thanks web resource depot)
The video of Sol Sender from MODE talking about the conception of the Obama logo seems to have gotten lots of play in the last week or so. What I didn’t realize was that their was a second part where Sol talks about the actual implementation of the logo throughout the campaign.
Found this link today to a French design blog with some truly beautiful fonts that were developed this past year.
(thanks design you trust)
This past week I attended the Future of Web Design conference at the Roseland Ballroom here in New York. Being able to attend events like this is one of the reasons I wanted to move here. There were a few really standout speakers which included:
I’m not sure if I would shell out $450 to go next year but it was definitely an interesting day. I also got to see a Microsoft Surface up close and while the technology behind it seems really cool the applications for it were underwhelming at best. There were about 20 people standing around and four people sitting at the Surface, one on each side, and they were playing PONG! I couldn’t believe that the people at MS couldn’t come up with anything more creative for four people to do sitting at this table.
I’ve been working on some $10k+ a month AdWords campaigns in the last month or so which has required me to spend some time doing a little research to try to maximize the potential of these campaigns. I found this great article on writing AdWords copy earlier this month. There are some great tips here on how to manipulate your ads to get higher CTR and conversions. In just one example they show how changing the headline from “Meditation Music” to “Music for Meditation” doubled both conversions and the click-through-rate. The example above shows the difference and ellipses can make. If you deal with SEM this is definitely worth a read.
Over at Mark Simonson there’s a great post about the typography in Mad Men – from the office to the house to the fake grocery store. At the end of the article he takes note of how old and decrepit many of the authentic vintage props look. I hadn’t thought about that before. Here’s some commentary on the Sterling Cooper sign seen above:
Then there is the Gill Sans (c. 1930) problem. Gill is used quite a lot in the series, mainly for Sterling Cooper Advertising’s logo and signage. Technically, this is not anachronistic. And the way the type is used—metal dimensional letters, generously spaced—looks right. The problem is that Gill was a British typeface not widely available or popular in the U.S. until the 1970s. It’s a decade ahead of its time in American type fashions.
This makes great reading for any font dork or fan of Mad Men, for extra reading there’s a similar post on the use of Arial in the closing credits at the end.
