Spinning the Web

Wenlock & Mandeville

It’s probably taken most of us a couple of years to get used to the London 2012 Olympic logo, which was kind of the point, i guess. Yesterday, on the BBC’s godawful The One Show, we were introduced to not one, but two Olympic mascots Wenlock & Mandeville.

Look at them, all shiny and new. THAT, is the future.

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The great British election is a funny beast. Set in it’s battleship-grey suit and mismatched tie, it plods onwards with a familiar gait – boring everyone into submission through dire party election broadcasts utterly devoid of creativity (and usually, policy).

2010, however, was going to be different. 2010, it was said by many, ‘will be the first social media election’. ‘We’ll do an Obama’ was the battle-cry of the pallid campaign men.

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Saw this on Logo Lounge at the weekend and while it’s quite a nice, colourful new logo for Edmonton Public Libarary, I couldn’t help but think i’d seen the ad somewhere before….

Separated at birth? The new Edmonton Public Library ad and the old Guardian ad below.

The new look Creative Review (yoinked from CR's post - get their side of the story there...)

Last month, every designers favourite magazine and monthly news source, Creative Review celebrated its 30th year in print. To celebrate this milestone, the CR team decided to give the whole magazine a refresh. The new creative review is smaller in size, thicker in stock and for the first time in a long time, chock full of articles that aren’t just a summation of the past month’s blog posts. Read the full story

Will your website work on the new Apple tablet?

So, it’s just one week before we finally get to see the Apple iTablet/iBook/iPad/iPallette/iSlate/iDontcarewhatitscalled (probably) at their event on the 27th. Exciting stuff. But unless I’m missing something then there has been surprisingly little mentioned about how the rise of tablet computing (it isn’t just Apple developing a tablet computer) might affect the way we build web resources.

For instance, the iPhone doesn’t work with Flash and according to most people in the know about these things, nor will the tablet. Why? Primarily because it dissolves battery at an alarming rate (as highlighted to me by the Guardian’s tech editor Charles Arthur on Twitter today). It’s also quite buggy. I should say now that I’m not actually the Manifest London web nerd guru – that title goes to Mike Francis, but for me it seems the rise of tablet computing (and indeed the mobile internet) could therefore have a big impact for a lot of content-heavy websites.

We noted in our 2010 predictions that Javascript frameworks such as jQuery and Mootools will increasingly rival Flash (and software in general) in terms of creating dynamic page content – but as more and more people access the web via smartphones or tablets, surely we will also become less motivated to use Flash? How much of your website content uses Flash? Have you considered what your site looks like on an iPhone, or how it will look using a tablet computer? I don’t think Flash will disappear anytime soon, but there will certainly be an impact for sites that rely too heavily on Flash content.

Other growing considerations will include content dimensions – the iPhone has very specific dimensions (which will likely be shared by the forthcoming tablet) which could cause a headache for those using other proportions. Apple’s proprietary software will all use iFrame for video rendering and content that doesn’t use this will have compatibility issues (however slight). As an aside, very few video cameras render video in iFrame, meaning quick editing on iPhoto is more difficult and precious battery will be used converting the files in the editing process.

Anyway – all of this is pie-in-the-sky until the 27th so we’ll just have to sit tight and wait and see. But if what I think is true, then we’ll see a rush from brands to create websites that perform to their optimum on a tablet. For those that don’t have the budget to create a dedicated app or an alternate mobile site, it could prove a headache.