CMD+Shift Design
Liz Andrade
Designer of print and web. Podcaster, Blogger, internet nerd and crazy cat lady.
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Categories
Google Thinks I’m A Dude
Saw this article on themarysue.com today and immediately checked my Google Ad Preferences… what do you know? Google thinks I AM A DUDE! Hmmph.
via Does Google Not Understand Women Or Just Geek Women? | The Mary Sue.
Social Art
A Seattle local who is doing it right. Chase Charvis, awesome photographer. This is a video of his keynote at the PhotoPlus Expo last month, don’t matter if you’re not a photographer — if you’re passionate about what you do, watch this and be inspired.
Website's Making Me Think
After a very busy work week last week, this one has been a little slow. I have a few project quotes I’m working on that I am excited about (just need at least one of them to come through and I will have made my gross earnings goal for the year!)
Much of this week I have been extremely aware of the usability (or lack of it) for all the websites I visit. As you may know, I am reading Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think for this months Pagebreak Podcast and I am really enjoying it. Anyone interested in web design or improving the site they own should pick this up.
Lastly, I’ve been working on a project I have wanted to work on for a long time now… and I may have even mentioned it before on the blog. I have some great content in this sites archives, so I have gathered it all up and I am not in the process of editing it, piecing it together and adding all new content to create an Ebook. I’m still in the starting stages of this, but It’s going to turn out to be about 2 parts freelancers advice guide and 1 part personal memoirs. It’s a big project to take on, but I’ve gotten excited about it!
If you weren’t online this last week, you missed it. Last Monday, Gap revealed it’s new logo — and… it was BAD. The internet was booming with hate speech about this branding monstrostity.
On Thursday, Gap tried to defend it’s decision — and then announced it’s plan to crowd-source a solution that might save them from the huge blunder they made. As if that eyesore of a logo wasn’t offensive enough, now the design community was being asked to bail them out?
Exactly one week after the logo was unveiled, it’s gone. Yesterday’s press release announced that they would be returning to the classic blue box logo and that they had no plans to crowd-source a new one.
This whole fiasco has been incredible! Last Monday it was all anyone was talking about! This weekend, friends of mine who have absolutely zero interest in design were talking about how dreadful the new mark was! You thought the backlash to the Tropicana rebrand was bad? This was unlike anything I have seen… some of the comments on the Gap Facebook page were almost violent with RAGE about the design.
I’m not going to bother asking what you thought of the new mark… you hated it! But man… what do you think of how people basically used the power of the internet to shame away a logo in only one weeks time? Also, does anyone know who designed this logo?
(Hey, that’s me!)
So the wait is finally over, Niki and I have been scheming about this for a long time now and then over the last couple weeks pulled it all off…
PageBreak is a design, business and marketing-themed book club and podcast, started by Liz Andrade and Niki Brown. The main goal of the club is to build a strong online community of designers, developers, freelancer (like ourselves) and to discuss and enjoy books about the stuff we love to do!
We’re starting out with the plan to pick a new book and record a show at the end of each month, so if you have a suggestion we’d love to hear them! You can subscribe to the show via iTunes or stream the show at pagebreakpodcast.com (we’re working on a site with commenting and all that jazz, so stay tuned…)
Book #1? Rework by 37Signals Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson. Make it through the show (or download it and skip to the end) to find out what we’ll be reading for September, maybe you’d like to read along? If you’ve read Rework and you want to discuss it with me and Niki or other listeners of the show – head over to the GoodReads PageBreak group!