Earlier this week was Apple’s iPod event and we got exactly what we expected. Our gift from Apple included the 4G iPod Nano, 2G iPod Classic, 2G iPod Touch, iTunes 8, and the iPhone 2.1 firmware update for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The new 4th generation iPod nanos come in nine vibrant colors, and sport a new curved aluminum and glass design - sure to please a lot of skeptics of the previous iPod nano update last year. The new nano features an accelerometer for landscape viewing of movies and the new Genius feature — but more on that later. These start at $149 and are available in 8GB and 16GB varieties.

The 2G iPod Touch brings the design language of the iPhone 3G. While it doesn’t sport many real hardware changes, it also has the new Genius feature and a reciever not dissimilar to Bluetooth for the Nike + iPod extension. These are available in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB (!) varieties starting at $229.

It’s quite obvious that Apple is trying to phase out it’s best-selling iPod, the iPod classic. The 2G iPod classic is more like a downgrade: the only addition is the Genius feature. On the contrary, the available varieties went from 80GB and 160GB to only 120GB. As Apple puts it, “One size fits all.”

iTunes 8 is probably one of the bigger updates of this year’s event. iTunes 8 brings a new “Grid mode”, a real treat for users who keep up with their album art. On top of that is that Genius feature, which creates playlists based on the songs you like. We also got a new Magnetosphere-like visualizer, but it comes nowhere near the quality of the real thing, which is quite disappointing. This isn’t to say it’s not good, it’s just not satisfying.

It was a pretty nice event. Now let’s hope that soon we get some new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Those are really overdue for an update.

This year’s iteration of Apple’s annual event has been scheduled for September the 9th, as expected. Like last year, we’ll more than likely get some sort of update somewhere in the iPod line - that’s what the fall event is for, after all. So what will it be? The rumored Nano redesign or an updated Touch? You’ll just have to wait and see. I’ll report the details in one week, with some opinions.

[Source: Engadget]

Earlier today, Blogoscoped posted an article describing Google Chrome, a new open-source browser being built by Google from the bottom up. The press release (that was released too early) was in the form of a very educational and entertaining comic, which Google has put up for public viewing now that the cat is out of the bag.

The idea behind Google Chrome was to create a web browser for modern times and applications. Since most of the browsers we have today were made mostly at the beginning of the Internet, Google believes they have trouble meeting the needs of users of the Internet today. Their solution was Google Chrome, a web browser built from the bottom up with no prior code — just a groundwork based off of the shortcomings and successes of many of the browsers we use and love today. Some of the more exciting features include an improved user-interface and a unique twist on managing browser processes.

There’s not much that I can say for now, the beta version isn’t out yet so I haven’t been able to try it. There’s not much that I can tell you that won’t be better explained by reading the 40-page comic over at Google Books. I’ll go into more depth soon with a full review when the beta version is released for Windows only (silly silly), with the promise of OS X and Linux versions coming soon.

[Sources: Blogoscoped, Google Blog, and Google Books]

They currently have four shirts and a print up for sale, all of limited availability. I’m currently in a bit of a pinch but I definitely plan on picking up “Lowercase” and “Math Problems” after I get some more funds.

Shirts currently retail at $19.00 a pop. Nothing has sold out yet, but I’m sure it won’t be long until they will. Everything is printed on American Apparel. Pics after the break.

[Link: Ugmonk]

A friend messaged me a while back telling me to look at the new Facebook layout and tell her what I thought. I was slightly confused at first, since I had been on Facebook less than 10 minutes prior and it looked the same. It turned out that they were slowly rolling in the new layout via a new URL. So I took a quick look at it and decided it needed to be spoken about.

I decided that before I could honestly speak about the layout, I’d give myself a bit of time navigating; seeing what this redesign has to offer, and I even went back and used the old Facebook for a few days to draw comparisons. So what did the Facebook redesign have to offer me? Unfortunately, the conclusion was very little.

This is the look of the New Facebook. You'll be seeing it a lot from now on.

The first problem with the design is the free-floating mess of everything on the main page. Quite honestly, to me, it’s nauseating. Since the conception of this article, Facebook added a bar above the News Feed allowed you to sort through different kind of updates. As an anchor, this is helpful, but not nearly enough. Besides that, though, there are very few anchors on the page to plant your eyes and create a sense of beginning and end. This isn’t to say that all websites without definite borders evoke that feeling. However, the lack of fluidity and consequent forced width is really unsettling.

If we were to dissect it, it would go a little like this: The minimum width to see everything clocks in at about 960px, which should be fine if you’re going to abide by the Rule of Thirds - 960 divides perfectly into thirds. Regardless, something doesn’t add up. After a few minutes of looking at it, I was able to figure that there’s too much tension on the sides of the page, contributing to that nauseating feeling that something is not right.

A breakdown of the Facebook Redesign.

That decision doesn’t make much sense from a resolution standpoint. The standard resolution nowadays according to ShortStat, Mint, Google Analytics, and other data-mining tools that I use seems to be 1280×1024. If you auto-align 960px within 1280px is giving you about 160px on the side for negative space -  not enough negative space for that much width, and that many characters. When you consider that many people may not be running their browsers at full screen, you’re looking at a very crunched page. To me, it feels like a page of letters and characters with little to no organization.

One of the only anchors on the page is the “Status” box to the right. Floating there. All by it’s lonesome. It’s a nice improvement from how that information was displayed on the Facebook prior. It needed some friends in that vast sea of words, and the addition of the aforementioned content organization bar was a big help to make it seem more in it’s place.

The profile pages are slightly less of a disaster. They managed to do something I hoped they would - organize the content (read: in most cases, spam) added by various Facebook applications - but they did it in a terrible way. In most cases, this was an unnecessary move; although it was a desire of mine, I didn’t need it. I’m sure many people on Facebook would concur (and they have).

Tabs are great for organizing information, but make sure you organize the right information, and present information to the end-user in the correct order. When I go to a person’s Facebook page, it’s for very few reasons:

1) Most of the time, I need someone’s screen name, e-mail address or phone number to get in contact with them.
2) Wishing someone a happy birthday is very popular, but not a priority
3) I end up there from looking through pictures.

The new Wall/Status Updates fusion is the first thing you'll see when you go to someone's profile.

I imagine that there are much more aggressive Facebook users than me, people who use the Wall feature obsessively, but basic information organization really should be observed more. Present the most basic information first, secondary information second, and tertiary, or optional, information last. This isn’t at play here. The most basic information that you can get from a person’s Facebook page is the static information that they input; the information about them. This should be the most important group of information on a social networking site, as when you meet someone, you don’t care so much about what other people talk about with them opposed to who that person is and what they’re into. So then, why is the “Wall” the first thing I see? Sure, it’s been fused with the “Status Updates” box (we’ll talk about the logic behind this next), which was the previously one of the first things on a profile page, but remember that it’s the “Wall” box too now. That used to be the last thing on the page by default. There’s some serious identity crisis going on here.

Logically, since the “Wall” contains much larger blocks of text, at the maximum, the same rate as the “Status Updates” box, with much less crucial information, this new fusion should stay at the bottom. In fact, they probably never should have been combined. “Status Updates” was always around one line, or a short excerpt of a comment; very brief information complimented by descriptive icons of the action. Meanwhile, the “Wall” contains a back and forth between friends, adding in lots of metadata such as Name, Post Date, and a thumbnail of the Profile Picture. Then you also have people sending links, where you get another image, excerpts of the link, as well as any post text they might have entered as a supplement. That’s a lot more information than a descriptive image and one-line summary. They also are two completely different kinds of information. One set is computer-generated summaries of how you’ve used the site, the other set is human-generated content - a verbal exchange. No matter what angle you take it at, they don’t belong together.

The tab issue is easily solved. The functionality is actually already there. Why not allow people to select an order for the tabs they want viewed first on their page? You can already do it for non-default applications. Hell, surprise me and allow me to choose what information I want to see first on any user’s page. It doesn’t have to apply to every application in existence, but if you let the user choose their own universal default order of the main three applications, that would be a huge step in the right direction.

To avoid being a complete negative nancy, I do like what they’ve done with the actual design of the profile page. Despite their incomprehensible information hierarchy, it looks quite nice. It’s a lot cleaner than the default and doesn’t suffer from the lost-at-sea feeling that the main page gives you. Why? Anchors - most notably, the blue backdrop used to accentuate the tabs. This wasn’t there when I concieved this article and was one of the things I said “Oh!” to, in pleasure, while using the site on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, it occurs to me now that I deleted the proof of this. Regardless, there’s so much information here in the three column layout that it’s really not that bad. Furthermore, outside of those three columns is much more satisfying amount of negative space to either side when viewing in a 1280×1024 browser window.

You can now choose how many friends to display as well as select a specific network. Also, customize your tabs.

The added functionality is also quite nice. The ability to show 6, 9, or 12 friends, hide the mess of Networks, and choose which Networks to include in your Friends box is quite nice. Looking through all of the default tabs, everything is a lot cleaner. The ability to move things from your main page to your box page for that extra-minimalist feel is a great option for all the users that began to feel that there’s still just a little bit too much going on. (Ha ha, that was a joke.) Regardless, I’m quite impressed from the design standpoint. The AJAX employed to quickly load new information without a page refresh is quite nice, and while I’d wonder if it was stepping a bit too far into the future for such a large site to employ AJAX so widespread amongst its features, this is Facebook. They can get away with anything (Another joke).

Another thing that Facebook did quite well was add localization functionality. I’m not sure if this was available before, but if it was, it’s in a much better place now. If you go to the bottom of any page, in the footer, next to the copyright information, is a language. If you click on it, there’s a long list of languages to choose from to localize your Facebook’s interface. It won’t do any auto-translating of Wall posts, but that’s not expected, is it?

Stepping away from the profile page, let’s focus on the last major aspect of this redesign that I feel needs talking about. It’s something you see on every page of Facebook and that you’ll never escape: the header. The technique behind the top-aligned header is not new, it’s something that Binary Bonsai has been using for years now, and they might not have been the first either. Facebook is kind of doing it wrong. It’s got a great aesthetic to it, but it doesn’t match with most of the pages. The only place it really fits is on the Profile page, where you have that nice light blue as a medium between Facebook’s trademark deep blue and the complete white of the background. In all of the other places, it just feels weird. It’s such a sudden transition, and the whitespace between the header and the current page’s information is far too tense. It’s very close, but it needs an extra 5-10 pixels to be perfect.

The way Facebook has redesigned it’s layout is very odd. It has a lot of what it needs to make it a lot more comfortable at it’s disposal, but refuses to use them. The blue backdrop found on the Profile page is a great step to eliminating the nauseating feeling on the main page, and the awkwardness of the header on all subsequent pages. The information hierarchy miscommunication is an easy fix, and you can satisfy everyone by extending the user-organizable tab function. Why leave it at this?

Old vs. New: Putting them side-by-side

The New Facebook, as it is now, feels highly incomplete and very rough around the edges. I’m not going to say it’s terrible - it’s not. I actually think that in most cases it is a step in the right direction; the old Facebook was indeed very far from perfect. The thing is, if you’re going to take a step in the right direction, you need to take a more concrete step than this before introducing something to millions of people worldwide. I think more limited beta testing and listening more to their users could have easily averted this disaster.

Also, if you’re not going to get rid of “People You May Know”, Facebook, at least make it optional. If people that I know aren’t already on my Friend List, 9 times out of 10, it’s because I don’t want to be their friend.

(If you have anything that particularly irks YOU about the New Facebook, or anything you like about it too, feel free to drop a line in the comments.)

Let’s get down to business, shall we?

TYPOGRAPHY SHOP [link]

The guys over at Progresswear have begun a new clothing line of interest: Typography Shop is in the workings to be one of my favorite t-shirt lines. Considering that they’re starting off their lineup with “Neue,” a shirt designed around the varying fontweights of Helvetica Neue, that’s no surprise since Helvetica Neue is my favorite font. For only $16.99 until May 15th, this is a shirt you can afford to love. They informed me that right now they’re taking preorders, but the shirt should be shipping around May 5th. More on this as soon as I get mine in the mail.

THE RATHER DIFFICULT FONT GAME [link]

When browsing the internet recently (late at night in the studio on a weekend, per usual), I came across The Rather Difficult Font Game, and said “Hey, this might be fun.” I wasn’t wrong, but I also didn’t expect it to be so damn difficult. I’m such a nerd. Maybe it wouldn’t be for a seasoned graphic design pro, but for little old me, it was slightly overwhelming.

It’s kind of limited right now: one game consists of going through 34 typefaces and they’re always the same ones 70 typefaces organized to make the game more difficult and less likely to encounter the same font twice. (Corrected by Kari in the comments) There is also an iPhone/iPod touch version I’m sure I’d love if I had the device, and the developer is in talks with two font foundries on broadening the library used in the game. That’s what I’m waiting for: More humiliation, more fun.

My first time around I got 15/34 correct, and the second time 18/34. See? It’s educational!

You can read more about the game, it’s background and it’s future at the Kari Pätilä’s blog, Say It Ain’t Slow.

FONTBOTS [link]

This is just something pretty neat I found browsing digg. Pretty much, they’re robots made out of sans-serif fonts. The designer, Jonathon Yule, did them as a personal project in high school and throughout college. There’s a pretty interesting interview conducted by Jeff Liu of Macroselfian that’s worth checking out available here.

Ok, that’s it for this week. It’s kind of late in the day, so it’s more like Wednesday Type, but be sure to check back next week, because you never know when I might actually get something done on time.

Tomorrow, or later today, rather, Microsoft will unveil its latest additions to the Zune family: the Zune 80, Zune 8, and Zune 4. With a slew of new software and hardware features, is it quite enough to match up to Apple’s iPod monopoly as a competitor? Not quite.

The second-generation Zunes have begun to start implementing features in software that even Apple hasn’t ventured to include yet, which is a good thing, but more on that later. First, the redesign of the hardware. Being about one-third smaller than the original Zune, now the Zune 30, the player has finally reached a somewhat optimal size. Consumers, including myself, found the Zune 30 to be incredibly thick: you can see it through your pocket unless your jeans are extremely baggy. With the size reduction, it may be enough to let it comfortably slide in and out, but still, it’s no competitor to the iPod Classic.

On the hardware front, Microsoft seems to have found a technology that can potentially mimic the iPod’s touchwheel: the Zune Pad. Unattractive name aside, the Zune Pad looks interesting. Its described as a “touch sensitive tactile control” on other websites, and from video, it seems true. You can flick the pad in order to scroll quickly or just press for individual scrolling. Not exactly innovative, but it may prove more publicly-acceptable than the original tactile-only control (which I personally enjoyed). My only concern is whether or not the touch sensitivity interferes with controlling the player from inside your pocket, which is something I did a lot with my Zune. Other than that, the redesign just features a very slightly larger screen and elevated Play/Pause and Back buttons. Nothing special.

Its the software and firmware improvements and business decisions that really wowed me with the Zune 2. The most important, and probably most lusted after feature in the MP3 player business is the ability to sync your music and movies wirelessly. Microsoft has made that dream a reality with the Zune 2, and I expect a big response from customers - if it works well. The technology has its advantages and disadvantages, but no matter what, the convenience of the technology is key. In addition, the ability to play podcasts is a feature we’re now seeing that probably should have been in the first iteration of the Zune.

The interface overhaul really struck me as well. I like it. Bigger fonts and less weight makes for the smooth kind of hip elegance Microsoft aims for with the Zune. There also seem to be animations and simple interface aesthetics that move things around the screen much better than simple refreshing, as seen in the old Zune. For example, when switching between songs, the album art rotation is a swiping motion, making for a much more visually pleasing experience.

In addition to this, Microsoft is going the route of Amazon and is removing the DRM from the Zune Marketplace, which is an ingenious move to one-up the largely successful iTMS - or it would be, if Amazon, a much wider-known name, hadn’t done it first. It won’t gain them much ground against Apple. Neither will it’s new social networking site, “Social.” That’s a different market altogether.

The Zune 80, 8, and 4 are set to debut in mid-November for $250, $200, and $150 respectively. Will I buy one? My love for the Zune tells me I will, even though I already have a perfectly fine Zune and iPod. However, whether or not this watered-down comeback can put a dent in Apple’s wallet is highly doubtful. Even though Zune has wireless sync, the iPod Touch and iPhone have the Wireless iTunes Music Store, something Microsoft easily could have, and should have, implemented in the first iteration of its MP3 hardware. Oh, did I mention that the iPod Classic maxes out at 160GB now and the iPod Touch has a slick multitouch interface and internet capabilities?

No matter what it tries, Microsoft will have to pull some very slick tricks out of its multi-billion dollar hat in order to catch up with Apple. Slick as in, using a certain Surface interface in its Zune. While this Zune has no fighting chance whatsoever, possibly less so than the first Zune, it is undeniably a step in the right direction; a step thats still always one step behind Apple.

I’m not personally a big iPod fan, but my recent conversion to OS X and my love for fluid design and style among products has made today a great day today. If you haven’t heard, Apple completely revamped the entire iPod line today at its “The Beat Goes On” event, and I must say, the goods look fantastic.

However, with the time I’ve had off I’ve recognized the potential of designdraft as a blog recording achievements and advancements in the world of design opposed to my personal site for my life. As a solution, I’ve created a new site where I will move all of my old personal entries and continue to write more about my life there, for all interested parties.

Also, another talented member of studio lag’s a hosted studio will soon have a website. For the time being, you can see her work below.

Everything will be up soon, and I’ll try my best to maintain everything. So look forward to it!

j.edmund @ http://www.jedmund.com
muki’s deviantArt @ http://mayuiki.deviantart.com

I’m still adapting my local version for use on the WWW, but sit tight, everything should be done soon. design en bleu will launch first, and if I’m comfortable with the idea, design en rouge should be ready by next month.

In the meantime, my personal works will start popping up on the site here and there, the first being my personal memoir-type creative writing piece, “Therapy through Word.” As soon as I configure Gallery2, more artworks will begin appearing as well. Also coming are some premiere sites introducing the final iteration of my design house and my manga concept. I’m planning on getting a lot done this year.

If you have any services or sites that you’d like to advertise in the metabox on the main-page (The gray box to the right), contact me at Justin [AT] ani-6.com. And be sure to drop me a line in the comments to let me know how you think things are faring out.