Opinion BY Armin

Connect the Ads

Established in 2006, interclick is a publicly-traded company that focuses on deploying online advertising campaigns based on data to connect advertisers with very specific and targeted audiences. Earlier this month, interclick introduced a new logo created by New York-based CA Square revolving around the theme of “pinpointing digital audiences amid the chaos of data.”

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Opinion BY Armin

Internet Explorer Version Who Cares?.0

A long time ago, like, totally, in the 1990s the de facto browsers were Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Netscape, the equivalent of today’s Safari and Firefox. The latter in both cases had more geek cred, while the former had better looks. Back in those days I always chose IE, mostly because the broken image icon of Netscape was far more scary. At the turn of the century as browser competition increased, IE’s stronghold on the market dipped deeper than the Titanic and has become not just a source of frustration for programmers who need to concoct hacks to make things work specifically for IE, but it’s also a sad punchline. They even managed to completely alienate the growing Mac population by discontinuing development for that platform in 2003. Microsoft is hoping that IE9 and its commitment to CSS3, Web Open Font Format and HTML5 will bring back some glory when it is released sometime in 2011; it is currently in beta testing. As an aside: According to our stats, 10% of our readers are on IE, and 1% of that 10% is beta testing IE9. All the images in this post have been pulled from a comprehensive blog post at IE Blog.

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Opinion BY Clinton Duncan

Loony Tunes

On the 13th of July 1998, Jeff Robbin, Bill Kincaid, and Dave Heller released the first version of SoundJam MP. Two years later, the developers of SoundJam sold their software to Apple, and continued development (in secrecy, as is typical of Apple) of the software for the Cupertino based company. In 2001, iTunes was released and, to this day, Jeff Robbin continues to guide the direction of iTunes under the ever watchful eye of Steve “boom boom” Jobs. All was going great. That is until the latest update, when they decided to substantially redesign the application icon.

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Opinion BY Armin

Virb is the New Virb

In the Mesozoic era of social networking — that distant year of 2007 — a new community was poised to take over the web, replacing the aging and visually painful MySpace species. Virb allowed users, who joined by invitation only, to craft and customize extremely elegant and sophisticated personal profiles with all the accoutrements of online social behavior. Photos, videos, messages, etc. MySpace died a natural death. Virb, however, was crushed by the imminent rise of Facebook with a nail in the coffin courtesy of Twitter. Acknowledging that they couldn’t compete with Facebook, Virb is re-emerging not as a social tool but as a website-building tool, harnessing the effectiveness of its personalization tools so that photographers can put up a decent portfolio or bands a decent promotional site. The new service also benefits from hosting company Media Temple being the parent company of Virb since 2008. While most companies who didn’t succeed at first would be compelled to change names and launch under a different personality, Virb is betting that its name, in good-standing condition with the web world, can handle the complete switch of service and business model.

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Opinion BY Armin

Technically, This is Very Colorful

If you like your movies and television shows in color, you owe such modern-day pleasures to Technicolor, the company that created the eponymous color film processes in the early 1920s and gave movies like The Wizard of Oz the ability to show a yellow brick road, where before there would have only been a gray one. Long associated with Hollywood, the name/term/idea of Technicolor went from having the kind of service-specific equity that Google now has in search engines or Kleenex in facial tissues; this past decade however, Technicolor seemed to have gone astray. It was bought by French tech company Thomson in 2001 and the Technicolor name became a simple subsidiary. In a 180-degree-turn-of-events, this past January, Thomson announced that it would change its corporate name to Technicolor and give it back the consumer-facing reign. Today, Technicolor is a machine of technological proportions, providing services in animation, digital effects, production, post-production, and more. Both Thomson and Technicolor have adopted a new logo, designed by Technicolor’s Marketing Branding team with advertising agency Gyro:HSR.

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Opinion BY Armin

MapQuest comes Alive

Back in September of 2008 we reported on the evolution of the MapQuest logo and the feeling of the majority was that it was too little too late to make up ground against Google Maps — two years later, MapQuest is betting that it’s not too late with a complete overhaul of their identity and their mapping experience. As a subsidiary of AOL, MapQuest will be integrating the local brainpower provided by its sibling service, Patch; you can read the full details of what MapQuest is setting out to do in their blog. The new identity has been designed by Wolff Olins.

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Opinion BY Armin

Survey Says… Monkey!

Launched in the distant dot-com era of 1999, SurveyMonkey has grown to be the self-proclaimed “world’s leading provider of web-based survey solutions.” Considering that there isn’t much competition — Zoomerang and the lovely bare-bones Google Docs come to mind — I imagine the claim is true, but we’re not here to debate the merits of facts stated in About Us pages. Last month SurveyMonkey introduced a new logo.

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Opinion BY Armin

Mission eMpossible

If you enjoy the freedom of reading books on the road without the hassle of carrying said actual books, you are the beneficiary of files with the up-and-coming extension .epub. EPUB (also commonly written as ePub) stands for Electronic Publication and it is “an XML format for reflowable digital books and publications” that “allows publishers to produce and send a single digital publication file through distribution and offers consumers interoperability between software/hardware for unencrypted reflowable digital books and other publications.” In more popular terms, and to use a recent example, Apple’s iBooks which fuels the iPad’s iBookstore supports the EPUB format through which all books are re-rendered for your reading pleasure. EPUB is quickly becoming the industry standard for eBooks — despite Amazon’s Kindle not supporting it natively — and it’s the job of The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) to maintain its standards and promote its adoption. Earlier this year IDPF conducted a contest to design the official logo of EPUB.

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Opinion BY Armin

An Inconvenient Drop Shadow

For a company infamous for their optimization obsessiveness where every nano-second and shade of blue is a matter of life and death, a change as radical as the one seen above must not have come easily. E-mails to Brand New spotting the new logo in the wild started coming in as early as March February and while I was hesitant to post based on a few intermittent reports, it seems now the change is official and, like all things Google, a big deal. The change to the logo comes as part of a bigger redesign of the Google search experience that started to be rolled out yesterday for users in 37 languages — although I’m sure English is one of them, my own Google remains stuck in 2009.

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Opinion BY Armin

Ubuntu’s Circle of Friends Gets Smaller

According to our Google Analytics, 58% of your are using a Macintosh Operating System, 39% are on Windows, 1.5% are logged as using the iPhone OS, and, finally, as the subject of today’s post, 0.65% of you are reading this from a Linux Operating System. (Wow, 0.01% use Playstation 3!). The Linux platform, in contrast to that of Apple’s and Microsoft’s, is free and open source and has major street cred among hardcore developers and people that simply want a tinkerable alternative to the Mac vs. PC battle. Also, unlike its commercial brethren, various operating systems can operate in a Linux environment, and one of the most popular is Ubuntu — launched in 2004 by Canonical Ltd. and embraced by a growing community of users that contribute to its growth and evolution. Under a new brand vision of “Light” Ubuntu is preparing to change its identity this coming April.

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