The Wall Street Journal Online has redesigned its homepage. Among other changes, the page is now fixed at around 1000 pixels wide. Here’s a quote from the letter introducing the redesign:

“We’ve taken advantage of the trend toward larger screen sizes and designed the page at a wider resolution to make the most of available space. The page will now be a fixed width and won’t change when the browser window does.”

Full Article »

Check out Woophy.

Pictures of places — almost anywhere. Makes the world feel smaller — in a good way. What I thought was interesting about Woophy is that it’s not much good for finding pictures of New York City, but it’s great if you’re wondering what the church graveyard in Atka (island off the Alaskan coast) looks like.

This week’s Advertising Age contains a special section on the role of design in brand development (and business development generally). Lots of interesting and inspirational tidbits therein, for example:

On the power of listening to end users…

“Consumers think they know what they want, but they often have trouble articulating it. But when we watch them, we can ask, ‘Why do you do that?’ We can change the product and solve their problems.”

— Henrik Otto, SVP Global Design, Electrolux Full Article »

I’ve decided to conduct an experiment. I’m unsubscribing from every email newsletter or update that I ever signed up for. I’ve raised the relevance bar to its highest position: if it’s not something that I read regularly, it goes. It’s been quite a liberating experience and I’m planning on applying the same strict standard to any future impulse I may have to hit the subscribe button again.

It’s also been interesting to note the differences between the various unsubscribe processes. The best of them offer a link in the email coded with the recipient email address so that no logging-in or other steps are required. Click the link, then a confirm button (”Are you suurrrre you want to unsubscribe…?”), and then you’re free! Some sites make it a little bit harder to figure out how to cast off the yoke of subscription. For example, UrbanBaby — a site which, although it’s a favorite site of many urban parents I know, has never invested much effort in improving user experience — provides that helpful unsubcribe link in the email, but clicking it gets you this tongue-twister: Full Article »

At the moment, several of us here at Catalyst are deeply immersed in a project that involves television advertising so maybe we were predisposed to take note of Dove’s “Calming Night” online campaign. The site presents “webisodes” directed by Penny Marshall and starring Felicity Huffman that place Huffman inside the TV world of old sitcoms (The Brady Bunch, The Munsters, and Leave it to Beaver). The angle — that Huffman travels into TVland seeking advice from TV moms — is a bit contrived, but the spots are amusing and worth a watch (an office favorite: Huffman explaining the concept of a Blackberry while the Beaver looks on, mystified).

“Webisodes” is a bit of an annoying term — especially in this case, since there only seem to be three of these spots and no indication of future installments. Still, the campaign is a good illustration of the use of video in online campaigns — beyond simply re-presenting commercials that were originally made for TV.