Written by G · July 7, 2008
· Filed under Adverts, Design
We've been looking a lot at magazine design lately, and we thought it was about time to share a few of our thoughts on the subject with a few posts.
Here's one of the sneakiest forms of advertising I have seen in a while. Advertisers commonly pay a high price to get on the second page, and even more for the back cover... But there's one place that's always been the haven of no advertising - the front cover. Until now.
We found this ad in (on) Vice Magazine the other day while browsing around, and as it's not a UK magazine, we weren't too fast on the uptake. However, the ingenious creativity behind the idea can't be ignored - the ad for BMW overlays the standard front cover with glow in the dark paint. To anyone buying the magazine, and for 90% of reading time, the cover looks like a standard cover, yet when the lights go down, your eyes are drawn to the subtle glow in the dark image of an iconic BMW 1 Series.
Even more subtle is the placement of typography. The "1" of "1 Series" is positioned exactly where the "I" in "Vice" is. That's planning for you. Ensuring both the creative teams, copywriters, advertising agency, and printers are on the same page is not an easy feat of team management.
Despite the gradual decline in the print industry, everyone still likes to own a magazine or two, and the continued emergence of unique and smart ideas for the medium is reassuring.
We think this is the best icon set we've ever made. In ourpreviousiconsetswe kept things simple, to one or 2 colours. This time we've gone all out on the colour, and the detail.
If you need any icons for anything vaguely image related, we think you'll find them here.
We've got something for everyone's needs - some smiling lips, a camera lens, some vortex colour, a crop tool, a TV icon, and plenty more.
This one's a big file - all that juicy detail in vector form is bandwidth hungry.
We hope you enjoy them, and as always, they're free to download and use as you wish!
Thanks,
GoSquared
P.S. We always love a mention or a link back if you use our precious, hand made icons. We put our blood sweat and tears into producing them. Cheers!
Being in London, this year we haven't been lucky enough to attend the Apple World Wide Developer Conference at Moscone West in San Francisco. We'll be following Twitter along with the rest of the world's Apple fans, but just in case Twitter goes down (not that that's ever happened before... oh wait) we'll be keeping you posted on developments throughout the day.
Good work Gernot Poetsch on snapping the first shots of the Moscone West building in San Francisco where the WWDC keynote will take place on Monday.
Every year, these banners leave a few hints as to what will be revealed on the big day, and this year is no exception.
As mentioned in our earlier article "Thoughts on WWDC", the focus on OS X as much as iPhone here seems to suggest we will be seeing something about the next version of Apple's desktop operating system.
Interestingly, this is the first time we have seen Apple marketing their operating system without the term "Mac". Some people have noted this down as possibly meaning OS X could become available on PCs, but I sincerely doubt that. Instead, I see it as Apple strengthening the definition of each of their brands, so that they fall into the following categories:
Mac: The computer hardware (Desktop and Notebook)
iPhone: The mobile hardware (Perhaps a range of iPhones, gradually replacing the iPod)
OS X: The firmware (One operating system that developers can build for using the same tools and services, while making it even easier for consumers to move from iPod > iPhone > Mac)
It is also interesting to see Apple reviving the idea of OS X on the iPhone, as until now it had seemed Apple had been making the firmware update seem more like the "iPhone OS" as opposed to a mobile version of the desktop operating system.
So the new iPhone is only days away, and there are tons of rumours flying around all over the place. Let's have a look at what's being said, and what could be said at WWDC...
I've been thinking about how the keynote could go, and here's a little idea of how the show could pan out:
< -- Begin thinking like Steve -- >
Intro
Hi folks, thanks for coming. We've got some great stuff for you this morning.
This is the most popular WWDC EVER. We've got 100s of Apple Developers on hand to help you out and chat over the week. First time we have sold out in the history of WWDC.
Today, I'd like to talk to you about our two core platforms: OS X and the iPhone.
iPhone
* A few slides about how iPhone market share has been growing (conveniently ignoring the last few months where it's been falling).
Yes, it's true. Today, we're introducing the new iPhone. And yes, it's 3G.
New iPhone, runs iPhone 2.0 firmware from the box.
I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of this guy until today, but I thought it would be important to share just how (for want of a better word) STUPID he appears in this video.
When asked on what Apple needs to do to really improve its chances in the corporate sector, Mr Krakow suggested that Apple should "Bite the bullet, and either get Blackberry or Windows Mobile on the iPhone"
His reasons for Apple doing so were very vague, and mainly focused on people "being happy" with what they currently have. How can an industry ever evolve if they're always happy with what they have?
Gary's comments on "moving to the Apple system" made him sound as if he really didn't have a clue about what he was talking about. Also, on a side note, you don't tend to hear people in the industry calling anything a system these days - it's more "platforms" and "devices". His comments were as if Apple hadn't got ANY plans to bring out a whole host of enterprise features in the coming weeks.
All I can say is, it's hard to believe this isn't a joke.
Relating back to our posts on the DreamBrowser, we found a great demo of a much improved technique for scrolling windows at Thorwil's Blog.
The concept of scrolling using scroll bars in a GUI has not altered for over a decade, and an improvement like this makes a lot of sense. It may not aesthetically be the most attractive solution right now, but as time goes by it's highly likely this could end up in desktop software and operating systems.
It's going to be interesting seeing how this concept develops and whether it will make it into the wider world of mainstream software.
Fellow readers of liquidicity, we are surprised. Genuinely surprised.
People print our posts.
We never realised that many of our readers actually like to have a real, physical copy of some of our posts to (I guess) stick on their wall, put in their scrapbook, hand out in the street, or do anything else with.
In all honesty, we never designed liquidicity for printing, and only rarely print posts off ourselves. So today, we decided to see just how bad liquidicity looked on paper - horrendous! The navigation bar showed up as an unordered, un-styled, empty list. The sidebar showed below the content, running over several pages. The default font was, gasp, Times New Roman, and the rest was just bad.
Worst of all, for even short posts at least 3 sheets of A4 paper needed to be printed due to the unordered layout spiralling off down the page. What a waste of ink and paper.
We immediately got to work on a new printable style sheet. Now whenever you print a post on liquidicity, your discerning eyes will be met with a centred, red, bold title, a well sized font, a focus on content, organised comments, and nothing else. No sidebar, no category links, no "digg this" - nothing that isn't needed on a piece of paper. All in a lovely paper friendly font: Helvetica.
So, all we can say is... find your favourite post and hit "Print"! But not too many times, because we really do like trees.
Many thanks to Stass for pointing out that people actually print stuff off once in a while.
Only a small post, but I just signed in to Google Mail and received a loading bar progress indicator.
No need to stop the press, but it's a whole lot more useful than the old "Loading..." message.
I hope they do the same with file attachment uploads as well. Progress indicators are a much more user friendly display of loading times than just a spinning icon, or as previously on Google Mail, writing "Loading...".
Hint: Always aim to explain to your users the progress of whatever operation they are waiting for. Progress bars are a simple and efficient way of doing so.
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