Been working a lot on trying to reduce the amount of information displayed on/around album art lately. Mostly around how to best display additional information about an album without forcing the user to go to the product page. Sometimes I am of the mind that its probably better just to force users to go to product pages to learn more. So I’ve been experimenting with only showing the album art and displaying additional information on interaction. Ultimately, I’m not convinced this is best for the user, but a friend sent me these two really cool jQuery plug-ins that I thought I would share.

Fullsize – its a plug-in but also a plea to the W3C to implement an additional feature in html to make it easier to display thumbnail and then show the full size without javascript. I’m not convinced this is a good idea at all, but the plug-in he’s got works pretty well.

Sliding Boxes and Captions – This one I can get behind. Slick animations while allowing the user access to additional information. I’m not for hiding everything because there’s no call to action, why would the user mouse over album art unless they know its going to do something? But there are several different ways to approach this issue, as shown in the demos.

Enjoy!

Okay, spent two hours setting this thing up tonight. Gotta really start using it now. I hope I can keep up to the expectations of the 2 people who have ever looked at this site.

Okay, so I have finally gotten to this post. I guess I took the whole week off. I gotta be more disciplined. Anyway…

One thing that angered me about Safari 3.1 was its @font-face support. This allows developers to load fonts that may not already be on someone’s computer and use them anywhere in the site. This could be a totally awesome tool, however, I thought, “Why the hell is Safari trying to become IE?” Read the rest of this entry »

I recently bought a new car, and because of this, I get a lot of mail. Lots of companies want my opinion on 30,000 different aspects of the car, as if my opinion was actually worth something. Sadly, I just don’t have enough time to give to these companies. One of them was nice enough to include a fresh dollar bill in the envelope, which was enough for me to actually look at all 40 pages of questions it had before I trashed it.

Anyway, one company sent me some information on how Volkswagon, I got a GTI, is supporting their movement to reduce carbon emissions. They are called Carbon Fund. Very interesting stuff. But what was more interesting was their logo, which looks a lot like the logo of a certain presidential candidate. I assume, since Carbon Fund as been around since ’03, that their logo came first. Here they are, in all their glory:

I am not a designer, but I do work with designers, and I know that they get inspiration from various places. Both of these are aiming at an awakening, to show that something is on the rise, but its not going to happen with just logos and good intentions.

Check out their websites to learn more, Barak Obama and Carbon Fund.