Category: Design

And I don’t want women’s tennis shoes, or a gold box, or …

So there I am, doing some “research” trying to remember some tabbed navigation I saw wayback when…

Amazon used to be such the paradigm of good interface. Their tabbed navigation has been ripped off more than Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” Jacket.

I suppose with the integration of everything and the kitchen sink, complexity would be de-facto.

I beg to differ. It’s not the sheer volume and variety of products that makes the site fail now, it’s the plethora of marketing that I can’t defend. I don’t want to know what’s in my Gold Box and I don’t want a fucking Segway cluttering up my mind on EVERY FRICKIN PAGE as I try and find out what band sounds like Grandaddy. And if I feel good about myself, maybe I’ll buy something.

I don’t need a search form for Google, even though I’m sure “they” want to know what I’m searching for. I don’t want a nickel in my Amazon account. I don’t want to make money with paid placements. And most of all, I don’t want the navigation I use at the bottom of every page to be displaced by the Bottom of the Page™ Deals. Oh, I’m sure there’s a patent on that atrocity.

At the very least Amazon, gimme some preferences to turn all this crap off.

I don’t even know if my rant can balance out the screenshot to the right, it’s so frickin long. And look at that deadspace.

Sheesh.

The one saving grace: The Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine was a joy to stumble upon. In doing research online, I lamented not having “grabs” of websites long since gone. I actually have a half gig on my drive of screenshots I’ve taken, but this is better. It’s not bug free, and it’s slower than molasses.

Sharpies smell good.

This is work: We get various field agents, technical propellor-heads and sharply dressed marketing folks together in a room and spout off a bunch of ideas. I stand there at the wall and play Pictionary and write everything down, discounting nothing but inserting things like “big can of worms” from time to time.

I take those scribbles, snap some photos and throw them away so I can sit down and transcribe them into maps and visual concepts for testing. It’s always due yesterday, but it’s almost rote how we’ll go through a half dozen iterations before all raised flags are removed and we can begin evaluating how it can be described for production/coding.

The beauty of functional specifications is often lost in this fast pace of web development, but its value can’t be undermined. I get passionate about this stuff and I suppose the fretful look on my face makes the deadline-centric types agreeable. Carefully integrating soft and fuzzy ad-space seems to satiate.

It’s a process – and on days when I get to do it, I dig it.

Then I go home, or to a hotel.

If I’m lucky, I won’t hear Devo’s “Whip it” being bastardized for a Swiffer® commercial.

White Castle fries only come in one size.

Another icon from my youth has been corrupted by the tweaked out stylings of whatever this design era will be named. Extruded, snappy colored, wonky shaped visual noise to clutter up the landscape.

Getting on the road at 6 am to drive up to Columbus for work was hard enough. Add this insult to the injury of the sausage biscuits that made my stomach squeal in pain as I rolled through the gray plains fraught with heavy clouds.

Damn the White Castle branding initiative.

Why can’t advertising be good?

So it’s a beautiful early summer day, I drive into the city, round the bend and see this eyesore mounted on the side of the building I act like I work in.

Don’t get me wrong, I admire messages slapping me around like an unpaid pimp, but this just gets me irked with its narrow demographic. It’s so wrong on so many levels, I can’t begin to describe it.

How bout a big blue sign with a big ol bud light bottle glistening with cool condensation in the middle; Simple, non-offensive to any group, and clean.