Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The new Twitter.com

Earlier tonight Twitter announced a major update to their Web interface once again making Twitter.com a destination, rather than a site to check every once and a while.

By beefing up the Twitter homepage, @ev, @biz, and the gang are making a compelling argument for people to not use third party Twitter apps and to stick with, what used to be, the only place to tweet.

What's new?
While not rolled out yet, screenshots of the new site have surfaced and Twitter has posted an introductory video (commercial) to get folks pumped up for the new release.

The one-pane approach that Twitter has employed for some time is now a two-pane split The thinner, two column layout is now much wider and uses some very nice visual effects taking place when you act on certain links. If you've seen or used the recently-released Twitter for iPad (iTunes link), you'll see many similarities between that app and the new site.

Photos and video are now embedded within tweets and will show up underneath the message in the "reading pane". Another cool tidbit that's been discovered is the ability to include whole Flickr sets in a tweet.

The background scoop.
With the wider interface, you'll quickly notice that background images aren't as easy to see as they once were. This change will be a challenge to online marketers, designers, and anyone else that want to display a custom background on their page that has detailed information or branding included.

Change = Good.
These are some exciting changes for Twitter and I'm looking forward to see it rolled out in the coming weeks. To see more of the changes for yourself, check out their preview page.

Monday, February 23, 2009

Tropicana Thunder

On a trip to the grocery store this past weekend, I needed to pick up a few breakfast items for my family.  One of the items on my list was orange juice.  Being the design geek that I am, I first looked at the packaging, then the price.  If you haven’t already heard, Pepsi recently refreshed the branding on almost, if not all of their product families, including their Tropicana brand.  There’s no doubt that a large sum of money was invested in this rebrand As I surveyed the landscape of juice before me, the Tropicana cartons stood out.  All of the other brands had imagery plastered over every square inch of real estate and the gratuitous use of whitespace made the PepsiCo product stand out, to me.

(Not from) concentrate

That’s when the individuality got lost.  As I examined each Tropicana carton it became clear that the option I was looking for (No Pulp) was as hard to see as the tiny bits of orange themselves.  It was only after I took a closer look at each carton that I was able to locate the type of juice I wanted to purchase.  Slight usability issue, but I got what I was looking for (not to mention the price was too good to pass up, regardless of the brief hassle I encountered).

The squeeze

Now just a few days later, I’ve read that due to an enoumous amount of loyal customer backlash, Tropicana will be reverting back to it’s previous look (from the logo to the carton graphics).  When this happens, I hold out hopethat some of the new look design considerations will live on, aside from the proposed cap design.