The ADC has a gallery on 29th Street that I pass by often. Emanating from this space is a usual crowd of highly creative people with incredible work, all worthy of some recognition and all worthy of their work being shown and presented there. What puzzles me about the new Art Directors Club logo is that this logo does not convey that same sense of creativity at all. In fact, it is probably the most boring logo redesign I’ve ever seen approved. The former ADC logo wasn’t the greatest looking I’ll admit, but it had a unique look to it that certainly made it stand out among other art galleries/clubs/organizations. The former logo had an old feel to it (despite actually being designed in 2005 by Paula Scher, according to Brand New) and that’s what I loved about it. It made me feel like I was going into a well-established organization and participating in great discussions with great artists. The new logo, composed of a tightly spaced Franklin Gothic, just cannot compete with the former logo in my opinion. It screams laziness, conformity, and a feeling of joining the David Barton Gym (as one commenter on Brand New says).
Barton took it upon himself to redesign the Facebook experience with a completely revamped interface and navigation system inspired by Skimmer. The new design he made looks much more fluid than the current Facebook site and mimics some of the side-scrolling functionality present in the current iPhone Facebook application.
One of my favorite parts of the redesign is the events/calendar page (see below) which I think would be a great addition to the current Facebook site. I wonder if anybody at Facebook is seeing Barton’s work.
Check out a demo video of the new Facebook facelift below.
Arguably one of the largest websites on the internet, CNN.com launched a brand-new look yesterday morning that they hope will bring a better multimedia experience to readers of the site.
The network debuted the rebranding effort on September 27th during the premiere of Ken Burns’ film series, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, a documentary that takes viewers on a journey through some of America’s most beautiful places. Eyeball created over 630 different on-air, online, and print elements to push the new design into the minds of viewers.
Shelby White over at WANKEN created this absolutely gorgeous annual report for a class he was taking at the Art Institute of Seattle. It wasn’t done for Helly Hansen, but if anybody at Helly Hansen is smart, they’d keep an eye out for Shelby’s work in the future.
Check out some more images from this annual report below.
In a letter entitled You’re Killing Me Zappos, Andrew Wilkinson asks Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh why the company’s website continues to live in 1999. Wilkinson has a point. The current Zappos website is not very user-friendly and buttons and objects seem to jump around all over the place depending on what page you’re on. Wilkinson does acknowledge that the Zappos Zeta page is a bit better than the default, but I still think Wilkinson does a much better job in the mockup shown above (click the image to see it larger).
