When someone says Interactive Advertisements it usually invokes a queasy feeling. Flash ads suck... in a browser.
The Interactive Adobe billboard still wows me 1 year after first seeing it. Street level, interactive on a human scale, and in a passive way. A beautiful blend of programming, artistry and sheer creativity.
Check out some of the other work by Brand New School. You'll leave inspired.
Continuing in my "Then and Now" series, I take a cursory examination of the recent redesign of the University of Waterloo crest.
In a move which saddened me they dropped the use of Eidetic (the serif font) for the squished looking Solex (a Sans). The new logo is also taller - further away from the golden ratio. A taller logo means a smaller logo on all the web properties. The new web version looks a bit over-anti-aliased to me.
The new University of Waterloo crest; Sans, tall, and less saturated
It is difficult for me to write objectively about color (being color blind), but I find 0xAE002E on 0xFCE592 a little too washed out. A bonus is that it doesn't distract as much from the objects which it will inevitably adorn.
If your not bored yet, hop on over to the 2008 UW style guide for more officalness than you can handle.
Microsoft has chosen the correct route (finally) for IE8. They will make IE8 mode the default. No need to opt into their good mode. That's great news.
The day IE8 launches is the day corporations/schools which make and buy really crappy web products start looking really stupid (more than they do already). I know for a fact that one leading CS school and one leading tech company will have their web apps broken again. And I will laugh.
Here's hoping that IE8 looks more like a browser and less like someone ran random sort on its toolbar.
