There’s not much I can add to this, as the video says it all, but the folks at Ikea came up with a brilliant use of Facebook technology to do something new, innovative and incredibly awesome. Check out the video for yourself and see how they leveraged a community’s willingness to participate with everyone’s love of free stuff to generate an enormous amount of buzz about their efforts.
The folks at Ikea score big by leveraging Facebook's existing functionality.
Jarvis Cocker is a British musician probably best known as the former frontman for the band, Pulp. He is currently (as in now through tomorrow) set up in the London Underground for a series of ongoing performances that are being streamed live on the Web. Interesting idea from a publicity standpoint, but from a design and web perspective, I’m more interested in the integration of the accompanying Twitter feed. I’m starting to see more examples of these across the Web and believe they’ll become even more ubiquitous as marketers strive to get more real-time conversations happening around their brands.
With the companion Twitter feed, it's not only the artist that gets to share the spotlight.
So we all turn to different places for inspiration from time to time, and over time I’ve come to realize that there are a number of blogs that I visit more frequently than others. Some of these, in fact, I visit daily. Enjoy:
http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/
Today this blog has a feature on the works of Banksy, my all-time favorite street artist. But there’s much more cool stuff and thought here than that.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
No surprises here to anyone actively involved in the Web design business.
http://ffffound.com/
Not a design site, per say, but rather “a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user’s tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!” Emphasis is theirs, and I’ll forgive the double exclamation points because I like their site that much!!
http://www.coolhunting.com/
Objects, videos and other cool stuff that you could buy (they’re not selling it) if you were rich and fabulous enough.
http://www.everyoneisanartdirector.com/
I might go so far as to call this site “edgy.” Artistic endeavors served fresh every day.
I recently came across the ground-breaking (my word, maybe not yours) website for digital agency Modernista, at modernista.com. It’s a pageless concept that utilizes the existing framework of the web to serve it’s information. Want to see their work? They take you to Flickr and YouTube. Want to know about their history? See their page on Wikipedia. Press releases, news? Served up on a Google news feed.
Modernista.com: page-less website awesome-ness
From an experiential and design perspective, there is room for improvement. The navigation device could be more elegant and I’d like to see it move more quickly and have a more persistent location as it moves from site to site, but I’m not here to hate. Frankly, I find this to be a brilliant example of work and an approach that anyone developing a site should explore.
Many of the clients I work with are rebuilding their 3-4 year old sites to better align with current technology. But why? As the modernista site so clearly articulates, there is no reason to invest in infrastructure when you can serve your entire site and experience on the existing backbone of the web. From a UX standpoint, your users are simply finding your content on sites they, probably, already have at least a passing familiarity with.
I like this approach for portal and aggregator sites as well. But in fairness, I think the challenges of maintaining the content might prove to be more challenging than your own content management system, but who knows? Maybe in the long run, at least from an economics perspective, it would pay off to have more effort in content posting and updating than in technology maintenance and infrastructure redevelopment?
I came across a fantastic hot sauce over the weekend at, of all places, my local IHOP. Cholula is fantastic stuff, and while I’m sure it’s no secret to anyone who loves hot sauces, it was new to me and I’m now crazy for the stuff. The flavors of the peppers are fantastic and this Frank’s Hot Sauce guy is now fully converted. They have some interesting recipes on their Web site, and I think I may try out the one for chicken wings.
Since I also have an interest in Web design and related things, let me say that while I’m not generally a huge fan of Flash-based sites, the Cholula site is pretty nice and has some interesting and fun features. I particularly like the loader graphics and, of course, the recipes. Check it out at cholula.com.
