Author Archive

But first the People demand cute dogs, or a woman looking straight at them, or distracting animation, or a fake Windows dialog box, or fake page content and no border, or the word ‘WIN’. (See Nielsen on banner blindness.) The People also prefer elegant use of the banner space and will be displeased if you squeeze a landscape scene into a tall skinny ad.This lowbrow thinking is not always easy to reconcile with the “Big Idea” approach to web advertising*. But web ads are so ignorable that I suspect execution hooks are more important than given credit for, if they complement your message. (Of course one oughtn’t become completely unclassy about it – enough monkeys have been punched methinks.)

Anyway I tried to keep in mind the principle for some banners I made recently:
Read more »

Q: Dear Julian,

Why do people from the future often wear tight-fitting unigarments?

Linda

A: Good question Linda. When Google releases its clouds of flying video nanobots we will be able to view realtime video of anywhere on Earth from any angle. The user will be able to ‘fly’ through the world in any direction as their viewpoint jumps seamlessly from nanocamera to nanocamera within the all encompassing bot cloud. No longer will there be a distinction between Google Earth and Streetview and any video camera anywhere. Wow!

But Linda – I’m sorry to say that the main use of this amazing technology will be peeking at ladies’ undies, hence the tight jumpsuits.

If you want to know what the weather will be in 10 days, is the 10-day forecast really any use? It often changes several times before the actual day arrives. (Oh yes, it hopes you don’t remember the “Sunny, 25˚” from a week ago, now that it’s hailing.) Should you bother reading it – or is it just a scientific-looking horoscope? Here’s an idea for a site to illustrate the uncertainty:

Weatherwiggle.com (yes, the domain is available) will graph how much the 10 day forecast is at variance with the actual weather, over time.

The dotted line in the graph represents the actual weather for a given day. The dots represent the predicted weather for that day, from 1 to 10 days ahead. Each frame of the animation is a different day.

As expected the 1-day forecast is mostly accurate and so it’s close to the dotted line. The 2 and 3 day forecasts are likewise fairly accurate. Beyond there however the predictions vary considerably from the real weather, and the animated graph ends up looking like a dog’s tail wagging. (Hence the site name.) In the fake example, you may as well ignore any forecast more than 3 days from the present.

Features to put on the site:

• choose your location
• today’s weather wiggle. A record of the predicted weather for today, from 10 days till the present, showing how accurately today’s weather was forecast.
• the next 10-day weather forecast – but with the diminishing accuracy of each future day shown. The accuracy should be computed based on historical data and would no doubt change based on local climate and time of year. An ‘ignore-beyond-here’ line would be good.
• animation of the daily weather wiggles in your locality for the last x amount of time
• cool data visualisations because people love that stuff

If you make the site let me know ok? (Or does something like this already exist?)

was A Book of Songs for Anne Marie by Baby Dee. The songs are like fairy tales; magical and romantic and formal. And she sings them like a crazy giant tenderly cradling a baby bird.

Two songs you may like are Lilacs and Black but Comely.