David Emery OnlineAmbient Inspiration
I’m a heavy user of tabs in whatever browser I call home – Safari at the moment. There’s always a bunch of sites that I keep open all the time: Google Reader (using Helvetireader of course), this site, the visitor logs for this site, the server stats for this site (I may be sharing too much here…), my Flickr stats, Facebook & Last.fm. They can be split up nicely into: News, Blog+Stats & Social Networks.
In the last couple of months I’ve added another site into that last category, which slots in very nicely right next to Flickr: Dribbble.
So what is Dribbble? In short, it is to design and creativity as Twitter is to a blog post; as a member of the site, you upload little snippets of what you’re working on, limited to a 400×300 pixel canvas. That’s actually pretty much it; everything else has a vague twitter-ish feel around it so you can follow people, have followers and all that jazz. It’s simple, and all the better for it.
It’s just come out of a lengthy beta period so now non-drafted players (it uses basketball as a hook to hang all of the interface metaphors...
Read more ➔Popular Science+
In December, we showed Mag+, a digital magazine concept produced with our friends at Bonnier.
Late January, Apple announced the iPad.
So today Popular Science, published by Bonnier and the largest science+tech magazine in the world, is launching Popular Science+ — the first magazine on the Mag+ platform, and you can get it on the iPad tomorrow. It’s the April 2010 issue, it’s $4.99, and you buy more issues from inside the magazine itself.
BERG seem to be doing some incredible work of late, and this is no exception. Unlike some of the iPad magazine demo videos that have been going round in recent weeks this is grounded in reality; no crazy custom video elements, just the existing magazine content repurposed brilliantly for a touch based, animated environment.
Visit ➔It's Not the Pay, It's the Wall
...the issue I’m interested in is whether it’s possible for a news site to exist behind a wall of any sort. Anyone who runs a relatively well-trafficked website will be able to tell you that it’s typical for the majority of traffic to be fly-by visitors from search engines and organic website referrals. A relatively smaller percentage of visitors arrive at your site by purposefully navigating directly to it (keying the URL, hitting a bookmark etc).
Drew hits the nail on the head here; there is nothing wrong with paying for content online, but putting a block between you and most of your visitors is never going to work on the web.
It’s not so much that people will actively choose to go elsewhere, more that they won’t be driven there as no-one will link to it.
Contrast that with the App store (which will soon be an Apps+Magazines+Newspaper store) where links don’t matter; what matters is popularity and familiarity. Existing print offerings have both of these in spades.
Visit ➔Times and Sunday Times websites to charge from June
The Times and Sunday Times newspapers will start charging to access their websites in June, owner News International has announced. Users will pay £1 for a day's access and £2 for a week's subscription.
I just can’t see this working – how can you charge when more competitors then have ever existed are giving it away for free?
On the flip-side though, I can completely see £2/week working for an iPad version – the medium is important, as is the payment and distribution model.
Visit ➔The Re-Designer
My name is Bryan Veloso, and I am a re-designer. I do not create, I improve. I do not envision what is new, I envision how something that already exists can be better.
I can relate to this a great deal; I think I’m best as a designer when working with pre-existing elements, illustrations and the like.
Visit ➔Blocked
There has been an surge of interest recently on the topic of ad-blocking, spurred on in part by this post on the popular tech-news site Ars Technica:
There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. […] My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love.
It makes for a very interesting read; an obviously passionate direct plea to their readership to help out, behave differently and make a difference.
As I was reading it I got a strong sense of deja vu; I’d heard this all before, somewhere else…
…replace ‘ad-blocker’ with ‘file sharing site’ and ‘content’ with ‘mp3’ and I think you might recognise it too.
I find it quite interesting that the march of ‘progress’ is of such a pace that a technology site can be threatened by the very kind...
Read more ➔Designing for the Web. On the Web.
Last week, after a lot of thought and a heap of work, we released my book, Designing for the Web, online. For free.
Well worth a read.
Visit ➔NPR, WSJ plan Flash-free Web sites for Apple iPad
In addition to new App Store software, National Public Radio and The Wall Street Journal also plan to create specific versions of their Web sites completely devoid of Adobe Flash for iPad users.
This week Peter Kafka with MediaMemo revealed that both NPR and the Journal will convert at least some portions of their Web site to load properly on the iPad. The custom-built sites will feature the same content and run concurrently with the traditional and iPhone/mobile-friendly versions of each Web site.
I wonder if this is going to be easily available to non-iPad users, and also whether they’ll be the normal website with the flash elements replaced, or some form of iPad specific version with a different UI.
Considering the apparent rise of flash blockers, it would be pretty smart to have a version without flash that gets fed to those users (iPad browsers included). Of course, that begs the question: why have the flash version in the first place?
Visit ➔Interview: David Emery, Head of Digital Marketing, Beggars Group
In his role as head of digital at Beggars, David Emery has worked on digital campaigns for albums such as Radiohead’s In rainbows, Vampire Weekend’s Contra, and most recently the debut album from The xx. Sandbox picked his brains on the full gamut of digital marketing, starting with artist websites.
A brief glimpse into where my head’s at currently with regards to things like artist websites, Facebook, apps et al.
Visit ➔Ambilight for video tag
At first it looks like an average video player, the kind that loads standard HTML5 video. As the video plays, you very quickly notice what’s happening at the edges. The plugin automatically grabs the average colour in each area, and spreads it across the bounds of the video.
Incredibly cool – makes me very excited about what the possibilities are for doing crazy things in HTML and JS with video.
Visit ➔