I love how the designers of this IBM micro-site interpreted their subjects (along the bottom) into stark and simple iconography while staying true to a consistent visual language. Very often we're tasked with taking cliches and making them fresh and invigorated. I think this team has done that well here across these 14 concepts.

No, that's not the name of the latest band featured to be featured on Spinner this week.

Just yesterday, I was sent a link to an amazing photograph of President Barack Obama's inaugural address. I've come to find out that the photo has practically gone viral, with over 2 million views in the first 5 days it was posted, so I'm potentially not the first person to share this with you.

I had a rather strong reaction to the image itself, the story if its creation, as well as the interactive element, and the combination inspired me to go out on a declarative limb: This is THE image that depicts everything historical about Barack Obama's election. A grand statement, I know, but read on and I'll attempt to explain.



New York photographer David Bergman blogged about covering Barack Obama's inauguration on January 20th, 2009. "I covered my first inauguration and what an inauguration it was," he writes. "Before Tuesday, I had photographed five presidents and covered big events including the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and concerts like Live 8 and Live Earth. But this one was the biggest. It deserved a big photo."

When he says big, he means big.

Our Men's Fitness Center launched recently. Check it out to learn about calming foods and tips for getting your abs in shape. Perfect timing for the summer. Kudos to the design team for developing a strong creative in short order, tackling both the visual design and all of the CSS.

When the LogoLounge authors reviewed 27,000 logos for the compilation of their fourth book, they noticed several trends. On the whole, designers are moving away from artificial highlights/Photoshop tricks and moving toward a more clean + vivid era.

The image about showcases four of the trends -- foldover letterforms, fine line drawings, flourishes (which have been around for quite some time, so I'm surprised to see them still in play), and jawbreakers. See all the 2008 trends on logolounge.com

This week, we launched a redesign of ParentDish.com, a site that offers great insights on parenting topics.

The project was one of the best-run and most efficiently-produced design efforts I've seen. This is attributed to the team's focus on:

> clearly defining roles and responsibilities between our varied teams at the onset,
> crafting a solid creative strategy + moodboards with buy-in from all key stakeholders before developing design solutions,
> conceptualizing a significant suite of identity options, and
> fostering ongoing communication amongst the design and development teams to bring about a fresh take on a compelling site that helps raise kids of all ages.

Kudos to the team on their great work.

Qualifier: I'm sure this discussion has been going on in AOL for years, but, being enmeshed in our Games world, I've never heard it. So pardon me if I tread old ground. I know there have been products (AimSpaces) and features (AIM's "Enter a status message here...") that have spoken to the issue, but I feel like they're steps in a direction instead of an enthusiastic sprint to the finish. So I'm using controlshift to throw in my 2 cents (1 cent adjusted for inflation).

I think Digsby is a little window into what is coming, and, ironically, what AOL has been well-positioned to do for a long time. The app's astounding out-of-the-gate popularity is a flare we should heed, especially with Bebo in our immediate future.

What is Digsby and why should we care?

Here goes another one... we launched a new blog today called Urlesque. Following up on the success of Asylum, we developed a new site that will focus on "what are people blogging about today."

Let us know what you think about the design.

Welcome to post one of Friday's Feast. I figured a sweet link or two each week to feast your eyes on may be a good way to segway into the weekend. This week's is ilovetypography.com!

This site is absolutely amazing for all your typophile needs. They have some great posts from professional typographers discussing great design, anatomy of letters, field news, and new typefaces. They have wallpapers for downloading and the latest fonts for perusing. It's a beautifully designed site, and is one I frequent to get the creative juices flowing especially when diving into new logo projects. Note the latest post about Erik Spiekermann being knighted! Who would have thought a typographer would get such an honor?!

As I have mentioned in these posts before, the intersection of graphic design and music has probably had the largest influence on me over the years. I was pleased to find this countdown on Spinner this weekend. I have to say they did a pretty good job! Check it out.

Ask any typographer and they will tell you: the font-family you choose can say as much as the actual words you print. When you are running to be the President of the United states of America, you can not afford to say the wrong thing. One of my favorite NPR shows, On the Media, just ran an interesting little piece on the typography of the 2008 presidential candidate's signs and stickers. They talked to Sam Berlow of The Font Bureau Inc. about his recent article in the Boston Globe about what the candidates' fonts say about them. My favorite comment is where he compares Clinton's logo to a poorly fitting Talbot's suit with the pants hiked up too high.

You can listen to the interview or read a transcript at the On The Media Web site.

I am not at all happy about the proposed design of the Union Jack, ok they left Wales off the flag when it was first created in 1801 but is slapping a huge dragon on the front effective? I understand that each of the 4 countries should have some kind of representation on the flag but this looks like it was designed using Microsoft Word, slapping a clip art dragon on the front and totally ruins the flag.

A few years ago I went to hear Peter Saville speak at one of the design conferences in New York, he felt that in the UK things were "over designed" with banks resembling amusement arcades with neon signs and bright colours, estate agents appearing like trendy lounges and constant visual bombardment of high street brands all fighting for attention. I am of the opinion that this in some part adds to the level of visual sophistication in the average UK consumer which in turn leads to agencies having to push the boundaries to create more challenging concepts and visual executions. Clearly this is not the case with this flag, which to me looks more like a guilty after thought than a well thought out and designed solution.

This post is from our own Wayman Luy, the visual design lead of Black Voices:

"BV is the leading website for the African-American community, a double-edged sword when starting a redesign. That #1 ranking comes from having 4 million unique visitors and up to 49 million page views a month (BlackPlanet is #2 with 2.6 Million UVs and BET is #3 with 1.7 Million UVs). Users and owners alike are comfortable with the site (flaws and all) and reluctant to change. To complete the redesign, the team needed to merge 4 distinct platforms into one seamless experience. And most importantly it had to fulfill its purpose as a destination for African-Americans to come together, discuss, and be heard.

Click "Read More" for additional info on the redesign...

I am very pleased to showcase the new Oscars package currently live today on Moviefone. This is just the first phase of an orchestrated program that leads to the big night (and beyond). The editorial, design and technical teams have done a great job in executing this from our recently completed CSS templates for Awards and Events. Click the "read more" button for additional commentary...

Within this post is a slide that I have been using in my last few presentations to represent the shift in consumer behavior and how it impacts online brand strategy. In the first section you can see the old school "death star" approach where the brand has built a big, impressive and scary website or portal that others will flock to due to its sheer gravitational pull.

The middle schematic shows where we are today: a still-there-but-reduced-in-strategic-importance branded portal surrounded by offshoot sub-brands designed to appeal to factions of the core audience. An example you can experience now is AOL.com > AOL Music > the alternative offshoot spinner.com. The clear benefit is that we can leverage technological platforms yet still have audience pitch-perfect content and voice. The final schematic shows 2-3 years from now, where the portal is an influencer in terms of platform innovation (and still "holds down the fort"), but is not where the majority of time is spent by the consumer. You'll also note that consumers have more self-chosen launch points into the slipstream. For portal design this means that more customization and total web "heat" must be exposed for the site to have value to ever more picky consumers. They have to be able to make it more their own. And, of course, those parts need to be distributable around the web like mini-traffic generators for your core sites.

As brands rush to get integrated into the next hot social networking portal (which, by the way, changes every year), they may be missing a bigger opportunity: the long-tail thousands of smaller micro-sites that permeate the web and are under the radar of larger brands. Custom targeting of distributed content and functionality from your site becomes more and more critical.

Part of the answer: create more open services and provide incentives to web developers and designers to leverage tools and access to your platforms. In other words AOL needs to help "power" the Web, not simply itself. Google and YouTube really nailed it here. So as we go gaga over Facebook (well deserved and relevant to integrate within), we have to remember there is not ONE PLACE you need to be. Brands will need to be in HUNDREDS or MILLIONS of places to succeed in the future!

The simplistic website colr.org offers a new way to create color schemes.

Use your own image on the web, or upload a random image from flickr, and colr.org will extract the photograph's colors to compose a personal scheme.

This is a great tool for interior design, painting a house, designing a website, or even making a more appealing birthday invitation....