The Unnofficial Apple Weblog just launched a redesign today. They’re one of the longest running Mac blogs and have managed to turn themselves into more than just another mac fan site over the years. I like the new look, it finally mercy-kills their dated blue and green logo that I’ve always kind of wished didn’t exist. The new format is easy to use and read, but retains a lot of the flavor of the old site. Good stuff.

This has to be one of my all time favorite articles about design, branding and how that affects interaction with consumers and vice-versa…

Sandwiches can be Complicated at Times

While checking out (paying), I decide to go through with this thought, and look closely at the cheeseburger, and yes, indeed. The cheeseburger as has the easiest food interface one could think of. No forks, no knives, no spoons, no plates, no chopsticks. Like a sandwich, but softer and sweeter and above all: Standardized. No alarms and no surprises when eating a cheeseburger. Almost as simple as “the only intuitive interface” - the nipple. Sandwiches can be complicated at times.

The standardization makes the cheeseburger’s interface a branded one. Only a McDonald’s cheeseburger looks like a McDonald’s cheeseburger…

The Interface of a Cheeseburger by Information Architects in Japan.

Nintendo’s new game, Wario Land: Shake It, has a marketing campaign that takes the YouTube experience to a new (broken) level. Wario Land: Shake It – Amazing footage! You have to see it to believe it. In fact, you may have to see it twice…

Zipperless, water-proof, sand-proof, shock-proof, orange…

I want one. The Seattle Sling bag by Made is targeted at photogs heading into hardcore environments. It looks like something Gordon Freeman would carry, with beefy quilting, big fat plastic clips and a standard waterproof bag on the inside in contrasting orange. It’ll keep you’re stuff safe in all conditions and looks good to boot. (It had better for $150.)

Twitterkeys is a great little collection of symbols and shapes that are UTF8 compatible. This just means that these shapes can go lots of places a font-based (dingbats) or html dependent picture (.jpgs and .gifs) can’t go.

Originally made by TheNextWeb for enhancing Twitter posts, I’ve found this bookmarklet helpful for spicing up my communication in other places, like forums and email signatures. Just drag this link to your bookmarks toolbar: TwitterKeys and you’ve got a pallet of very portable symbols and glyphs at your copy & paste disposal.

“Bang” is a slang term printers use for an exclamation point. “Interrogatio” is Latin for “cross-examination.” The interrobang is the mash-up of the two used to define a gloriously unnecessary glyph that’s a marriage between a standard exclamation point and a question mark.

The interrobang was invented by a marketing man, Martin Speckter, who thought that his advertisements would look better with surprised, rhetorical questions using single punctuation marks. He was wrong. The interrobang is now considered a non-standard English language character that was in vogue for much of the 1960’s.

I love it anyway and I’m not sure why. It may be because it’s fun to say, or that it’s a typographical relic and I’m on a typography kick. Who knows‽

Are any of you guys geeky enough to have a favorite glyph? (< — not rhetorical and surprised = no interrobang.)

Independent dairies are finding a classic solution to a classic problem - how to differentiate their products. For inspiration, they hearken back to a time when ice cream was made on the farm, and milk was sold in glass bottles. For older people it’s a taste of nostalgia, for younger people it’s a novelty.

The appeal is simple - many aficionados swear milk tastes better from a glass bottle, and looks fresher too. Unlike plastic or cardboard, glass doesn’t alter the true taste of milk and it looks amazing on the shelf. “The glass, it just jumps out at you,” says Leroy Shatto, maker of Shatto Milk (shown above.) One thing is very clear. This old-time design approach is so retro, it’s trendy. To keep this trend alive, support your local dairy farmers by enjoying their yummy milk in glass bottles. But, most importantly - rinse, return and repeat the process.

Following up on this posting of clever signage that is effective…

Some stupid signage. (It’s probably just as effective after all is said and done; and is definitely just as eyebrow-raising.) Whoever made this sign was clearly not up to speed on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

1. English-to-Pirate Translator. Ye best be learnin’ t’ be talkin’ like a buccaneer.
2. A guide for picking up wenches in a manner not unlike Blackbeard himself. May the one you catch keep the wind in your sail.
3. Download some free Pirate Fonts. The pen is mightier than the sword.
4. Learn about the most successful pirate of all time. The scurvy dog controlled a fleet of 1,500 ships and upwards of 80,000 men. And she did it all without any color of beard…
5. Find out your pirate name. I’m Black Dagger Dan.
6. A treasure trove of recipes fer even the biggest sea dog appetites.
7. Know thine enemy. A beast to be feared.
8. Pick up some Pirate flags, authentic and otherwise, and show your true colors.
9. Peruse a listing of every single pirate movie ever made. With synopsis and star rating!
10. Learn about the tradition’s noble racquetball roots.

Remember that kid in the back of the class who would draw anything and usually get sent to detention? Well now he’s all grown up… kind of.

Comic Artist D.J. Coffman is gaining quite a following after offering to draw literally anything for $2. Why would he do such a thing, you ask?

Number one, it’s fun. Number two, it’s practice to make me faster and keep me sharp drawing various things I wouldn’t have thought to draw. Number three, it was originally meant to be a cheap way to give something quick back to donors of the Yirmumah comic. It’s not about making money, as you can tell by the cheap price tag, it’s mostly just for fun. I’ve unexpectedly gotten other bigger paying commission work out of people seeing these little drawings pop up, and some people actually pay me more than 2 bucks and I put a little more time into their drawings… so I guess it’s a happy accident for now. I’d probably do it even cheaper….. I upped the price to 2 dollars due to inflation and the price of gas and… well, 2 dollars sounds funnier.

So, what exactly is the ‘correct’ price for a piece of art anyway? Is it only art if it costs a lot of money? To find out, we commissioned a small work of art - a Voltage Creative logo killing the Comic Sans font. Check it out. Clearly it’s worth every penny - it did just create a conversation piece for us here, after all.

Lots of people in the industry have been crying foul since the announcement of the Google-Yahoo online  advertising partnership. This group includes SearchIgnite, which published a study citing that ad prices will rise as much as 22%, if the deal goes through. Google is meeting the uproar head on and calling shennanigans on the whiners…

First and most importantly, the report fails to acknowledge that ad prices are not set by Yahoo! or Google, but by advertisers themselves, through the auction process. Since advertisers set prices themselves via an auction, the prices must ultimately reflect advertiser values. That process will remain completely unchanged by our agreement.

Second, the report mistakenly claims that for any given keyword, Yahoo! will have the ability to see whose ads are priced higher — Yahoo’s or Google’s — and then decide which ads to serve. In fact, under our agreement Yahoo! won’t be able to see the current auction prices for Google ads, just as Google won’t be able to see Yahoo’s prices.

Third, the report mistakenly assumes that Yahoo! will serve Google ads for as many of its search queries as possible. This contradicts Yahoo’s own statements that their plan is to serve Google ads on search results pages where they have few relevant ads to serve. Yahoo! also has a strong economic incentive to keep serving as many of their own ads as possible, since they get to keep all of the revenue from those ads, while Yahoo! only receives a part of the revenue from ads served by Google.

Fourth, the report includes a misplaced focus on cost per click (CPCs) rather than the more important measure for advertisers — return on investment of their advertising dollar. One of the reasons Google’s ad system has performed so well for advertisers is that our ads tend to be highly relevant to user queries, which makes it more likely that a user will click on an ad and purchase the advertiser’s product. We have found that advertisers are generally willing to pay more per click so long as those clicks result in more sales. We anticipate that our agreement with Yahoo! will bring more relevant ads to Yahoo! users — which is better for both advertisers and users.

Finally, the report suffers from a number of methodology flaws. For one, the study fails to take into account that fact that Yahoo! shows significantly more ads per page than Google. Since both search engines tend to show higher cost-per-click ads in higher positions, showing more ads automatically tends to reduce the average cost-per-click. Also, the study’s terms are vaguely defined. Its authors discuss “head” and “tail” keywords, for example, but never clearly define what they mean. Are those terms that appear less often than once a day? Or once a week? There’s a big difference.

Ouch. Read the rest of the story: The SearchIgnite study on ad prices and the Yahoo-Google deal

These modern video-gaming classics re-imagined in Atari 2600 packaging is a weird walk down a memory lane that wasn’t. Very clever.

Before the over the top, logo heavy madness of today’s next-gen masterpieces became the visual norm for video game cover art, there was the basic beauty of the Atari 2600’s approach to package design. Clean composition and vague descriptive text came together to create something that was just so…intangibly fresh and mesmerizing. But what if the biggest games of now fell into the hands of a 2600-era artist? We’d have Atari Modern Classics, a vintage look at our new favorites through the pixelated beer goggles of an era where simplicity was king.

Check out the full gallery at The-MinusWorld.com.

Now this is great logo design. It has a distinctly Japanese vibe, and it should: Open Trace is one of three companies representing Japan at TechCrunch 50 this year. They want to be a Wikipedia of food production information, helping people find out where their food came from and what kind of impact that journey has on their environment.

The dragon speaks to their heritage and position as gatekeeper of information with the tree imagery nicely tying in the environmental aspect of their business. It’s a simple shape riffing on the “O” glyph, but the detail is very good up close, as well. Hooray for a modern startup without a shiny, bubble-licious web two-point-lame logo design!

Marketing ideas I can get behind: bright orange exotics in ridiculous situations. William Ashley China in Toronto has a Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera sitting on top of tea cups as the centerpiece of an advertising campaign.

Lamborghini makes out in the deal, too. The Superleggera (“super-lightweight” from Italian) is their latest and greatest performance coupe selling itself on one of the fundamental principles of making performance cars better: you can either add power or subtract weight.

[hat tip: Jalopnik]

Baking a personality into your product with design like this doesn’t cost anything. Why wouldn’t you ? Innocent Drinks, UK.