Andrew’s Photos – Blog

Found this today on YouTube. It appears as though companies are jumping on the themes of President Obama’s campaign and trying to use them to drive consumerism. As great as I think it is that a company like Starbucks is encouraging involvement in the community I find myself a little disgusted that they are using a moment like this as another reason to consume. I also am a little perplexed as to how Starbucks can legitimately claim to encourage consumers to be sustainable (which they try to do in the video). Drinking $3 coffee in a paper cup is about as unsustainable as it gets in my opinion.

On a slightly related sidenote the design in this video is just great. The colors, animation, and music is amazing.

Whitehouse.gov got a fitting update today for the newly inaugurated Obama administration. After poking through it for a bit I’ve written down my initial thoughts here.

• The Homepage: Very well done. I like the 4 featured articles/pages that are toward the top of the page. The navigation here (and throughout the site) is also quite good. Overall, it is made relatively easy for one to find information quickly and efficiently. Seems fitting with the larger claim that this administration will be the most transparent and accountable in history.
• The Blog: That’s right, whitehouse.gov now has a blog. When I initially read about this I was extremely excited, but after a first look it appears to be underwhelming. While so much of the site (as well as Obama’s campaign site and transition site) were amazingly well designed the blog page just seems crowded and poorly thought out. The text is done in a way that is just plain. While plain text can certainly work it needs to be made clear what parts of the page are article headers, article summaries, etc. For me the blog just fails as presenting information in a clear and thoughtful way.

That’s it for now, perhaps there will be more at a later date.

There’s an interesting article up on the NY Times website about the “buzzwords” of 2008. In addition to the fact that it’s interesting to read and what not there’s some cool design on the page too. The way in which the words are presented in really neat and worth checking out. Plus, some of the buzzwords are great; it’s fun to read through them and see how many of them you know/have heard of.

Here’s my favourite:

Greyjing – A nickname for Beijing, whose skies are some of the most polluted in the world.

Link – The Buzzwords of 2008 – NYTimes.com.

Just a heads up that I’m currently working on a complete redesign of my personal site so if there is any intermittent down-time over the next few days I do apologize. The redesign ought to be finished in a week or so (seeing as I’m now done with finals and can devote more time to it). Anyway, I’m pretty excited about it as it’ll be a huge improvement over what it is now.