Cartoon by Patrick LaMontagne

You already knew that Apple’s marketing was probably the best, it’s quite obvious if you judge by the lines of fanboys waiting for hours for new products in front of Apple stores.

Fanboys have already been called Apple worshipers for a long time, but a scientific study from the UK suggests that these words couldn’t have been chosen better. Neuroscientists have been studying the effects of the brand on the brain of Apple fanatics, and the result shows that the brain zone activated by Apple imagery is the same as the one activated by religious imagery for believers.

Of course more studies would be needed to prove that finding further, but if it proves true it makes it a strong demonstration of the power of branding. Via Partial Objects.

Picture via ronnestam.com

Cartoon via joyoftech.com

Image source: Andrew Warner

You may love or hate Apple, but it is hard to argue that their products are beautifully designed. Actually, they are more than beautifully designed, they are innovative and influence the way other products in the same industry are designed.

Apple’s influence is really blatant with two of their products: the iPhone and the iPad. The images illustrating this post show some phones and tablets before and after the launches of the iPhone and iPad. Do I really need to add anything?

Image source: OSX daily

Earlier this week Adobe announced Adobe Muse, a new product that promises its future users they will be able to create drag-and-drop web design. The users targetted by this software are mostly graphic designers who use other programs of the Creative Suite, but don’t know how to code websites (and don’t want to learn). Think of it as InDesign for the web.

At first, I thought it was a good idea. When you look at the features or the demo video, it also looks great and you want to try it. The problems start when you take a look at the code outputted by Muse, it’s just aweful!

The Adobe Muse controversy

This is where web designers and web developers decided to give their opinion. Oaddit on Reddit posted about Adobe Muse’s source code, then a discussion followed, with a lot of ironic comments about the sever divitis case Adobe Muse is suffering.

Some bloggers have also been criticizing Adobe’s latest product, not only about the code output, but also about the global direction Adobe is taking with this tool. The best review of Muse is probably the one written by Elliot Jay Stocks.

The only positive review I have read so far is the one on Mashable, but I have to say that I disagree with a lot of their comments.

A clean version of the Muse website

In the webdev subreddit, user IAmaRobotBeep, who seems to also be a web design teacher, took the time to create a clean HTML-CSS version of the site. The difference between the two versions speaks for itself, the 1500+ lines of HTML of the Adobe Muse website turn into 105 lines. Enough said. If you want to take a look for yourself: the original site – the reworked version.

Would you use a tool like Adobe Muse?

Does this new tool look like something you could use? I’m especially interested by graphic designers’ opinions, after all they are the ones Adobe wants to use Adobe Muse.

If you are an industrial or web designer, you know how important it is to give feedback to the users. This article perfectly illustrates some tricks that designers use to give hints to their products’ users and to reassure them. Five examples are given of useless sounds artificially created to make you feel more secure.

Dominique de Villepin is a famous french politician, now also a candidate to become president of the country. He is the one who took a stand at the UN against the war in Irak, but it looks that he also should take a stand against his web design agency.

What did they do wrong? Just copy-pasting an old template they used for a funeral counceling website and use it to create de Villepin’s candidacy’s website. Even worst, they thought it would be clever to add some Google Ads to a campaigning politician’s website.

Nearly everything is pretty much the same on both sites, even the labels on the contact form. What astonishes me is that the agency who worked on both websites proudly displays it on its portfolio.

The Gawker network recently launched a redesign throughout its entire network: Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku,… All those websites suddenly became unusable and guess what? They pretty much lost more than half of their readership overnight. This also applied for me, I was an avid reader of Lifehacker and didn’t go back to the site after the redesign.

It is quite easy to see the difference for the before/after comparison, as the Canadian version of Gizmodo still uses the old design. Before / After. The new version includes, among other things, some totally weird scrolling behavior, unusable commenting system, strange listing of articles,…

In Digg’s case, the problem was more about functionalities than really about the design itself (but I’d argue that functionalities are part of the design). Right after the launch, the power users lost all influence and left the Digg boat, then everyone else left too.

So next time a client tells you he doesn’t believe his design is so important, talk to him about Gizmodo and Digg…

The moment you upload your meticulously constructed web pages onto the internet, you’re global. Internet users from Nebraska and New York, to Norway and the Netherlands all have equal access to the very same information you upload.

If all you’re looking to do with your website or blog is to develop a strong global following, then you might just be fine with your English language website: after all, over half of the European Union (EU) alone speak English to some degree.

However, if your plan is to build a successful, profitable international online enterprise, then you’ll need to plan how you are going to adapt your website for the international arena: after all, three quarters of the world’s population speak no English whatsoever, and those that do speak English, at least as a second language, still prefer to do business in their native tongue.

With that in mind, here are three considerations you must make when designing your website – aspects that will make your site far easier to adapt for other languages in the future.

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard that enables computers to consistently display     text in most of the alphabets and writings systems of the world. It has been adopted by leaders from the IT industry such as Apple, IBM, Microsoft…and countless others. It is supported in most of the standard operating systems and internet browsers and most popular design applications (Dreamweaver, Front Page etc) facilitate the development of Unicode web pages.

Unicode is compatible with over 90 scripts, and has a repertoire of over 100,000 separate characters. UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode that is familiar to most programmers. It is the best option when creating websites for international markets, as it allows you to use characters from many different alphabets and languages.

In the simplest terms, use Unicode if you plan to adapt your website for non-English speaking countries.

Colors

When you design your website, color will play a pivotal part in much of your decision making. Moreover, your choice of colors will probably reflect whatever your main product-offering is. If you’re an environmental organization, you might opt for a lot of green on your site…if you sell water sports equipment, you may use a lot of aqua blue.

But your color-choice should also be representative of your target country and culture. For example, in western cultures, red can denote ‘danger’ or ‘love’; whilst red can signify ‘purity’ in India and ‘good luck’ in China.

Similarly, green represents the natural world in many cultures, but if you’re ever thinking of having an illustration of a green hat on your site, it’s worth knowing that this signifies that a man’s wife is cheating on him in China.

Purple can signify ‘royalty’ in the west, or ‘mourning’ in some eastern countries (Thailand). Furthermore, black denotes ‘death’ in Western cultures, but in many Eastern countries, white is used for this.

In short, to avoid overhauling your website when launching into new markets, you should carefully consider your website’s color scheme from the very beginning.

Navigation

Navigation is a crucial aspect of any website’s design. Good navigation is what keeps visitors on track to reach their goal – whether that goal is to discover information, or complete a transaction; bad navigation is likely to lose you visitors.

If you have a vertical menu on the left of your English-language website, it’s worth considering switching this to the opposite side for languages that read ‘right to left’, such as Arabic. This isn’t essential, as you can have menus on the opposite side of the page, but it all depends how you want your website to appear to your visitors. However, if you want consistency across your websites, then perhaps use a horizontal menu to remove the need to make any alterations.

Some websites use IP2Country services which detect the location of the visitor based on their IP address, which automatically alters the display to suit the layout and language of the visitor. This method isn’t 100% dependable, so it’s best allowing the user to select their language manually, by having clearly labeled options at the top of the page.

These are just some of the fundamentals of building a website that easily adaptable for international markets…and if you follow these steps, you’ll be well positioned to build your global in-bound traffic from any country you wish.

About the author
: Christian Arno is the founder of global translations company and website localization specialists Lingo24. In the past twelve months, Lingo24 translated over thirty million words for companies in sixty countries and their turnover in 2009 was $6.1m USD.

Hadopi is both a law that aims to protect intellectual rights of artists and an institute that has been created consequently to the law, its main objective being to find internet “pirates”. This law was very controversial as it was not realistic, not proportionate and basically stepping over basic freedom of internet users.

The institute just released its logo and stirred up quite a bit of controversy in France. In fact, the logo they released uses a corporate font, Bienvenue by Jean-François Porchez that was especially created for France Telecom, so it is a quite obvious copyright infrigement by the creative agency behind the logo. Anyone else finds this quite ironic?

Sources (in french): Etienne Mineur – ReadWriteWeb France

Mmmmm… I think I will try some of that gorgeous meat… wait, WHAT?!! To give you an idea of the difference between the package’s picture and the real content of it, check out this page on Funtastic.

Thanks to 99designs, the US Open logo was created for $49.-

Too complicated and meaningless, looks like a bad car logo…

Traditional, but it makes sense for Wimbledon I guess…

Looks like some beach party is going on in Melbourne!