Design

Is Adobe rethinking how Flash should be used?

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Adobe Home Page

Ever since Adobe acquired Macromedia, just about every page at adobe.com has been thick with Flash content. Their home page, especially, always had lots of motion and giant interactive flash banners. Recently, they’ve been doing some redesign work on the site, and I was extremely surprised today when I noticed that the entire site is almost completely void of any Flash content. Flash is used very sparingly (and tastefully). And, the home page currently has no Flash at all.

Given Adobe’s past use of Flash, and their very public feud with Apple regarding the quality, stability, and usefulness of Flash, I found this new, subtle use to be very uncharacteristic of them.

Now, I’m not complaining at all. I personally think the site is better without all that overuse of Flash. But, it does make me wonder if Adobe is rethinking exactly how and when Flash should be used.

I was actually kind of surprised when Adobe starting adding all that Flash to their site in the first place. Many years ago Macromedia tried to convert their entire site to Flash, and it was a dismal failure. One which they spent months undoing. I would have thought that Adobe would learn from Macromedia’s mistake.

So, is Adobe rethinking it’s position on how Flash should be used, or have the Flash designers simply not caught up with the web designers, and all that Flash will be back eventually? Only time will tell.

San Francisco Typographic Map

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San Francisco Typographic Map Overview

San Francisco Typographic Map Detail

Axis Maps is custom cartography company located in Hewitt, Texas. Among a variety of other services, they’ve also made some super-cool maps made entirely of type. They’ve had typographic maps for Boston and Chicago, and they just recently released one for San Francisco. It looks very cool!

The map is available through Zazzle.com. There’s four sizes to choose from, ranging from 16″ x 11″ ($14.95) to a colossal 78″ x 52″ ($195.25).

via Laughing Squid

Design a Cover for “Project” Magazine

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Project - iPad Magazine

If you’re unfamiliar with, Project, it’s a new iPad-only magazine from Richard Branson. The publishers are having a contest to design a future cover of the magazine. It could be a fun project (no pun intended), but bragging rights will be your only reward, as there are no actual prizes – other than having your design published.

TUAW has posted all the details, including a link to the design assets you can use in your cover. If you’re interested in giving it a shot, don’t delay, as the deadline is December 15th.

If you want to check out the premier issue of the magazine, you can download the Project App for free on iTunes. The actual magazine is a $2.99 in-app purchase.

Type-Face Portrait of Steve Jobs

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Steve Jobs type-face portrait

Here’s an amazing portrait of Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, done almost entirely in type. It was created by Dylan Roscover. The portrait is formed by the text from Apple’s, Here’s to the Crazy One’s ad campaign of the 90’s, and it uses fonts found in Apple branding and products. The image above is just a slice of the portrait, I recommend checking out the full size version to really appreciate it.

If you like this style of typographic-portraiture, here’s 45 more portraits to look at.

via YayEveryday

Noma Bar’s May 2009 Limited Edition Spock Cover for Esquire

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Spock, by Noma Bar

I just love this illustration of Spock for the May, 2009 (limited edition) issue of Esquire Magazine. It’s by famed illustrator Noma Bar. His work is really wonderful.

I can’t find a site for Noma, but you can see more of his work by doing a Google image search. He also has a book available at Amazon.

via YayEveryday

Career Evolution in Advertising

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Career Evolution

I couldn’t agree more. I learned a long time ago the higher up you go in any organization, the less technically-savvy the people become. I love how the Executive Creative Director only knows how to do email. (That’s the Microsoft Entourage (Mac) icon for all you PC people)

There’s actually another lesson i learned many years ago that directly relates to this… the higher up you go in any organization, the crappier their computers become.

I remember several years ago I was working for a company that was doing a big pitch to Amazon.com. The person behind the project was convinced that the Amazon Executives we would be dealing with were very “sophisticated” people, who would have all the latest equipment, and well-versed in how to use it. He decided that our web component should be built at 1024×768, which at the time was considered high resolution. After we sent everything off, we got a call from an Amazon VP who was having trouble viewing the site. It turned out he was using a 640×480 16bit display. Of course, he had no idea that’s what he was using. We had to guide him though checking his monitor resolution over the phone.

I remember another time where we sent a CD-based presentation to the owner of a medium-large size company. When we got him on the phone he said he hadn’t looked at the CD because he didn’t know how to put it into his computer. His secretary normally took care of “computer stuff”, and she was on vacation.

Lessons learned. :)

via Swissmiss

Excellent Sprint Now Commercial

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Lets face it, most TV commercials pretty much suck. But, once in a while, one comes out that’s a real gem. This commercial for the Sprint Now Network is a perfect example. It’s extremely well done, and it actually made me laugh out loud when I saw it on TV tonight.

The commercial was produced by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, here in San Francisco. They’ve also built a pretty interesting website to go with the campaign.