30 Jul 2005
It appears Virgin Blue think they’re Nike. No-one else seems to have been able to get away with running advertisements consisting only of a company logo and no “message”.
The advertisement above displays the Virgin Blue logo centered on a plain red background. And that’s all.
They don’t have a brand strong enough to can get away with that! Nike’s ubiquitous tick is one thing — ranked with McDonalds and Coca-cola as the most recognisable brands in the world — but Virgin appear to have forgotten that, at least in the region they’re running these ads, they are only a domestic airline, still with a minority share, and without even having released a frequent flyer plan yet — though that’s apparently coming later this year (the story that announced that was written/funded courtesy of Virgin Blue and Boeing flying a journalist to the conference in Seattle, by the way, so take it with a grain of salt).
Even if we look at Qantas, and their “image” campaigns, there has been nothing so presumptuous as this. They’ve done some fairly ‘abstract’ campaign work, with their (excellent) “Spirit of Australia” commercials, but that’s always achieved a purpose, or conveyed some sort of message about their offering… whereas Virgin’s purpose here seems utterly futile.
In fact, the only thing this ad has going for it is that it makes people like me generate noise, and it costs them less to run it during Adshel’s offpeak season (January–September) than at other times.
28 Jul 2005
The ATO‘s e-tax application is a pretty horrible beast, and a perfect example of something that really should be a web application — but it works on Wine near-perfectly. Sort of.
I just filled out my 2005 tax return on Linux, before getting to the final step and discovering it wouldn’t print nor submit electronically (because, apparently, they can’t code and are dependent on Internet Explorer as a connectivity layer — and yet they test for security before allowing you to download the program! Hah!)… but it would save just fine, so I copied my tax file across the network to a Windows computer (resenting all the while having to leave my chair, because I really shouldn’t have had to even leave my browser — In this instance Firefox — if they’d done this properly) and imported, printed, and submitted it electronically without any significant problems.
Note that you can’t import a file from anywhere — you need to actually copy the file into the e-tax folder itself (probably C:\etax2005) before e-tax will let you startup without creating a new file. You’ve also got to enter your TFN again (presumably as a meagre form of security) to get it to open the file.
It annoys me that they don’t even support Mac users natively, instead saying that it will function, if “suitable Windows Emulator software” is installed. That’s so presumptuous I was tempted to fill in the section asking for costs incurred in filing the tax invoice, listing three licences for Windows XP purchased earlier this year (not really, but it’d be a nice revenge :)).
Okay, rant over.
27 Jul 2005
Update: There are still some notable flaws in this package. Various components do not function, most importantly the Preferences (Edit -> Preferences) but also various XUL package installation elements. Proceed with caution.
It appears they’ve fixed the segfault problem I wrote about a few days ago, because they’ve changed the version number (heh, and presumably a few other things) and now it works fine. Standard Synaptic upgrade should do the trick nicely. This, incidentally, will take you to the latest Firefox version (1.0.6 at time of writing) as opposed to (I think) 1.0.4 in the last (segfaulting) release. For the first time in a while, the repository is actually up to date with Firefox’s frenetic release cycle!
Not that it matters, really… none of the bugs reported have been rated critical, or the IT press would have had a field day with it. Besides, the only reason we’re not seeing the same cycle with IE is that they appear to have temporarily given up, and now only seem to roll out updates with operating system patches (probably not much less regular, but, with Windows now strongly encouraging users to allow auto updating, far less noticable). I’m still browsing happy on Firefox.
27 Jul 2005
Note to self.
Live CSS editing is all fun and games until someone loses half an hour of rather intense work because they forgot that live CSS editing doesn’t include a “save” feature, and resets if you accidentally click a link to open in a new tab.
I’d recommend Firefox Web Developer Extension should bear warnings to this effect when using live CSS editing, but it’s entirely possible no-one else has such moments of monumental stupidity. I’m beginning to think that this tool has become a little too integrated into my development process… (but that’s only because it’s so completely indisposably awesome)
27 Jul 2005
Or, an article denouncing the “web is smaller” graphic design mantra. Apparently, it’s all about size…
Today I received an email from a graphic designer we’re [base10solutions, that is] collaborating with in building a website, and this comment about source images and computer screens came up:
I know we said to make the flash ones a really hi res picture… but you cant view more than 72dpi over the net anyway.
It’s not as though people who say this are just stupid: the whole “72DPI” myth has been propagated for… a bloody long time. It’s one of those things stuck in the collective unconsciousness of the world’s graphic designers, especially those who have flirted with design for the screen only occasionally.
The designer we’re working with is great… this isn’t in any way against her, but her email provided an opportunity to jump up and down, and there are two reasons for that.
Firstly, monitors don’t all display the same number of DPI, or, more accurately, PPI. I think the emergence of a plethora of display technologies, as well as falling costs in recent years of all kinds of displays, has meant that we’ve seen a huge move away from 15″ screens being standard (I’m hardpressed to find any 15″ CRT monitors new, and even the LCD market is shifting towards 17″ screens) — and “sensible” resolutions on these (1024×768, max) have similarly been abandoned. This means, of course, that the common wisdom regarding display resolution has become irrelevent, and ultimately false.
Let’s do some maths for a second. I hate this as much as the next person, but… well, it’s required.
I’ve got a 1280×1024 screen. It’s roughly 13.3×10.6 inches in size (17″ diagonally), which equates to about 96dpi. Try this:
1280÷13.3=96.2dpi
1024÷10.6=96.6dpi
It’s not horribly complicated maths, but apparently much of the graphic design world hasn’t even bothered to do that much for some time, instead accepting what Photoshop or ImageReady says in all its wisdom when it advises that “72dpi” is for the web. Yeah, okay.
Having said that, an image 600 pixels wide will (in 90% of cases) always be 600 pixels wide when published to the web. This means that it’ll always take up about 58% of an 1024 pixel wide screen… it also means that it’ll take up only 46% of a 1280 pixel wide screen. An image’s embedded resolution has absolutely no impact unless it’s being printed and the software spooling it to the printer understands this.
So, I suppose you could say I’m getting hung up over words (again) — but I’m not really. There’s a perfectly valid reason to provide higher resolution creatives to your web people (if you’re a graphic designer) — they want source resolution just as much as you print junkies do. For the website we’re building, we were going to construct a Flash animation that had a spinning image in it. If we’ve got higher resolution source, it’s possible to do more funky stuff with that (because, in this case, it really is purely about eye candy), just like it is in print (though without the static nature).
It’s worth remembering (especially when a web team are developing end-to-end creative deliverables) that the client is ultimately responsible to some extent for the quality of the finished product. An eye for design isn’t necessarily their sphere of influence, but providing resources to facilitate good design is. And good design is best achieved with good resources.
There’s a common misconception, it seems, that web designers only want creatives supplied in PNG or GIF format. Most print designers realise JPEG images are fairly lossy, so that hasn’t ever been too much of a problem (for me)… but certainly the PNG/GIF thing is. At any rate, just so the world knows, us web people don’t mind more than single layer rasterised images or mockups when building sites.
And we certainly don’t need you to splice the website up for us… that’s been another concern in the past. I’ve spent two hours piecing a supplied website design back together before I even start pulling it apart (again) for CSS treatment!
In fact, in my experience (such that it is), it seems that the less graphic designers think about the fact that the creatives they supply are ultimately ending up on the web, the happier everyone is. So here’s my recommendation: don’t think of it as web anymore. Any web development agency worth their salt should know what to do with whatever source material you throw at them, and if they can’t use it then it’s their job to say, not the designer’s to guess.