Volkswagen’s new Beetle: Clean design, no flower power

Here’s a photo of the new Volkswagen Beetle, updating the design of the last model, which has been around since the late ’90s. It looks … aerodynamic. Clearly, someone forgot that the Beetle has to look lumpy. That’s what the Beetle is! A lumpy car! source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

Earlier this week: Gap The Gap, an ultra-iconic, ultra-basic brand of basic clothing, decided to redo its logo to look like every other logo on the Internet. People hate it. The company tries to crowdsource a new logo. People complain about that too.
Today: MySpace Apparently looking to up the ante, MySpace takes a cue from AOL and redesigns their logo in such a way that it can use secondary art. Too bad they took out the word “space” and replaced it with a madlib. source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 0 Comments • Permalink

Is this what people want their web to be? It strikes me as an anti-Craigslist, an anti-Google. It’s a magazining of web content beyond anything we might have expected. It’s attractive! But it’s also a whole lot less.
The Awl writer Choire Sicha • Writing some pretty harsh words on both the recent New York Times opinion page redesign and the beta version of Gawker currently floating around. Maybe we’re more designerly than writerly, but an evolution away from Craigslist and Google is probably a good thing for the Web. That said, we’re bigger fans of the NYT opinion page than Gawker, which comes off a little too busy with that standing ad/menu design. The way that stories were listed before made us feel like we weren’t missing anything. (Disclosure: For what it’s worth, after months of iPad use, we find the format of Pulse to be immensely more useful than that of Flipboard, mainly for the reason Sicha suggests.) source

Posted by Ernie Smith • 2 Comments • Permalink

18 Apr 2011 10:26