Written on April 23, 2008 – 11:31 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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Some sessions at the Web 2.0 Expo cover really broad subjects, like the one I’m attending right now: “Global Design Trends“. Instead of covering the whole story, I decided to pick an interesting subject that was part of the discussion.
Moderator
Aaron Marcus weared his open cultural communications hat
Erik Hersman represented the continent of Africa and shared some surprising insights. He grew up the son of linguistic missionaries in Africa, bouncing back and forth between Sudan and Kenya until he left to the US for college. He is now an independent strategy consultant who writes about high- and low-tech change in Africa at AfriGadget and White African.
According to Hersman, developers should consider power availability, mobile access, connection possibilities when developing a service. “Obviously”, Hersman said, “There’s more low-hanging fruit in other parts of the world”. Though he concluded that there are opportunities in the continent. So, what factors should you take in account as a designer?
He used a screenshot of professional East-African portal Zunguka to illustrate the differences between western and African design.
For starters, the design of Zunguka is plain, simple and far from fancy. “The site lay-outs in Africa are very basic, as the connections Africans use are generally really slow. Most people log in from internet cafe’s with low-bandwidth connections. You might also notice that users don’t have to specify an e-mail address when signing up. Since this is not a digital identifier in Africa. Instead of that, the service asks for a cell phone number. Mobile phones are the pc’s of Africa.”
Written on March 24, 2008 – 2:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Our Next Web Tipr in Israel, Yaniv Solnik, is a great guy. He sends us many tips and is generally very nice. Today however, he seems a bit angry. He’s talking about an Israeli company that is ‘bound to crash big time and make many investors loose their money’. What’s going on here?
Yaniv discusses Modu, a very ambitious venture that has developed a mobile phone that consists of one smart CPU and many totally different and good-looking covers - or jackets. So these three different-looking phones have the same CPU with all their personal and mobile info stored on it:
It’s an idea of the well known and successful entrepreneur Dov Moran. Before Modu, he was the founder, Chairman and CEO of msystems. A company that invented USB Flash Drive and FlashDisk amongst other things. From scratch, Moran build a 1 billion dollar company in 18 years. It was acquired by Sandisk for 1.6 billion dollars. So to say the least, Moran has an impressive track record.
That probably helped when he was looking for some funding. So far he has received investment funding from SanDisk, Genesis Capital, and Gemini Capital Fund Management totaling 20 million dollars. Moran hopes to secure another $100 million this year and he probably will. He’ll start selling his product in October with three service providers in Russia, Italy and Israel.
So the investors really fancy his phone-morphing idea. It doesn’t really surprise me, since it’s a trendy product that looks astonishing. And of course, the business model is also pretty simple: Moran expects consumers to keep buying new jackets. Yet isn’t the product launch five years too late? The mobile world is raving about new smart phones, the iPhone and the all-in-one Nokia N95. Why would people walk around with these little and cheap devices?
Dov Moran
Moreover, according to my loyal WebTipr, this is not the first time that an Israeli company is trying to pull this kind of mobile centric device. “A quick look at IXI Mobile, another Israeli venture that burned millions trying to do the exact same thing with a bluetooth centric device, gave up long time ago and is now focusing on a ’smartphone for kids’ named Ogo.”
While we are being very negative here, Mr. Moran himself thinks he’s working on a revolution. “It’s not like the top five companies where everybody makes devices similar to the others, we’re going to change the cellular market,” he said to Reuters. Guess I would say the same thing when I was in it for 5 million dollars.
[WebTipr: Yaniv Solnik, Israel]
Written on March 4, 2008 – 5:31 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Remember the post I wrote about Wordpress NOT being the next social network, just because it’s too complicated for the larger public? I still think about it the same way, yet I see more and more initiatives that show that Wordpress is becoming an even larger player in the field of web publishing.
The most inspiring post on this subject is written by Raj Dash on the blog Performancing. He describes 48 unique ways to use Wordpress:
As someone who has both written small, custom CMSes from scratch as well as evaluated million-dollar professional CMSes for large corporations, WordPress’ robustness never ceases to amaze me.
According to Dash, the key to the many ways Wordpress can be used lies in five components: custom theme, custom code tweaks, custom or widely-available plugins, custom fields per post and custom code to use the custom fields. After making this clear he sums up some interesting Wordpress-powered sites, like city guides, webcasting stations and web portfolios.
Yet the simplest idea strikes me the most. Developers like Charlene from Essential Keystrokes use Wordpress as an easy content management system. Have a look at Furniture Warehouse, this simple website is build with Wordpress, not that you can tell though. It’s perfect for small companies that want a good-looking site that is easy to customize. They used to hire a web master or pay a huge license fee for a complicated CMS, now they can just ask an experienced blogger to install Wordpress with a good looking theme.
It might not be a bad idea if Wordpress would start to exploit this new usage of their publishing platform. With some minor adjustments - like a function that disables the comments functions - Wordpress could easily evolve to a popular content management system as well.
Some useful links
Written on February 28, 2008 – 1:22 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Yesterday TechCrunch reported that LinkedIn would launch its new lay-out today. Mark Hendrickson wrote that ‘these updates feel like an attempt to mimic Facebook’. Well, LinkedIn is not just using Facebook as an inspiration for the design, also some marketing techniques are copied.
You might remember that Bill Gates joined Facebook a while ago, but left as he was overwhelmed with friend requests - around 8,000 per day. It created a good buzz, and that didn’t go unnoticed by LinkedIn.
Because, surprise surprise, the Microsoft Chairman has now asked a question on LinkedIn:
The answer is of course: stay on Facebook and talk with them! Before you go ahead and answer the question, you might want to check out this demo of the new LinkedIn features. Since whether they copy marketing techniques or not, they’re still a good service for professional networking.
[WebTipr: Yaniv Solnik, Israel]
Written on January 19, 2008 – 8:04 pm
Sjors Timmer, Front-end web developer
Not long after the phrase Web 2.0 emerged, also Web 2.0 design appeared. An unwritten set of guidelines that demanded that a decent webpage should have gradients, round corners, some mirror effects, a badge, and the important stuff should be in a font size of at least 48px came to existence.
I’m still not sure what they were thinking back then. Did the designers really think users where that stupid that they needed big letters screaming at them? Was it all about showing off Photoshop skills, or had it something to do with the idea that Web2.0 should be clearly recognizable as something different, something totally not Web 1.0.
Well let’s no longer talk about the past, and bad examples, let’s search for good ones that are available to us now. Because I have the feeling that we’re slowly moving to a new set of design guide lines. I’ll present you three websites, that - although they are different - have a lot in common too.
First:
Flickr.com probably one of the oldest Web 2.0 companies that didn’t go along with the bling hype. The interface is clear and simple, but still looks shiny cool.
Second:
Cnn.com, got a new fresh design last year, and is one of the finest examples of how to make a site without gradients and without drop-shadows behind each box.
Third:
Hulu.com, only around for a few months now, and a living proof about designing a good site that mainly exist out of white space. (It It is still in beta, but you can get a login within a day, check for some more screenshots here)
three ways to go beyond Web 2.0 design
So what is it that all these site have in common?
1. Grids and white space
Order your site with mathematical precision, create a grid where each column has a certain width, and stick to that format. Another thing is making things stand out not by making them really big, but by adding a lot of white space around it, some things on Hulu just needs to be clicked because there is noting else that catches the eye. Mark Boulton wrote a good tutorial about it, Khoi Vinh wrote a blog post accompanied with a pdf for it.
2. Typography.
There is a lot more into typography than only choosing which font you are going to use. Without even changing the font you can already differ two text blocks from each other in different line-height, different grey scales, and different sizes. Once again Mark Boulton wrote a wonderful series. Another good point to start with is Oliver Reichensteins article about typography.
3. Colors, and shades of grey
I already mentioned the use of different shades of grey to differ texts in importance, and especially sticking to one or two colors and grey can be easy tools to create an attractive yet clean site. Flickr especially manages the grey tones pallet very well. Veerle wrote a good article and ColorLovers and Adobe’s Kuler are worth visiting too
To sum it up: master your grey skills, keep your distance, and get some mathematical madness for order running through your blood. And you will be on your way to go beyond the drop-shadows and big starry things with text in it.
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