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I’m usually the last to say this about anything Microsoft but, from an information architecture perspective, it isn’t quite bad at all. It’s easy to visually parse and it strips our a lot of information bloat without sacrificing key content.

I do wonder what MSN’s very mainstream audience will think about the very stark and minimal aesthetic though.

Now

Soon

For the upcoming Wired issue, Khoi Vinh and a couple of his crew from NYTimes.com put their spin on Craigslist. Just don’t call it a redesign:

Any truly serious redesign of Craigslist would inherently look very different from what we produced, and we kept that in mind from the very beginning. And, yes we took some artistic license, too, which is why it’s probably more accurate to call this a re-imagining than a redesign.

Craigslist has been awesome for me over the years – I’ve used it to sell my car, look for a job, buy vintage furniture and everything in between (except the adult listings). It’s clear that the new design takes into account how to make user flows like that even easier.

Hopefully, Khoi’s ideas can seed a refresh of this great tool.

Kieth Lang at UI & Us tells a story of how rounded rectangles, a shape very common in Apple’s software and hardware design, took off. The primary players in this story are graphics developer Bill Atkinson, a parking sign and Steve Jobs.

Steve took Bill on a walk, pointing out the ubiquity of rounded rectangles in the world around them. Eventually a rounded rectangular No Parking sign convinced Bill.

The very next day, Bill proudly returned triumphant. Overnight he’d written code to draw rounded rectangles at turbo speeds. And once rounded rectangles were as computationally cheap to draw as square-edges rectangles, they became ubiquitous on the Mac.

Kieth does his own digging and comes up with more fascinating information about how the mind actually requires less cognitive effort to process rounded vs sharp-edged shapes.

Read the entire article at UI & Us

Here’s an hommage to newspapers in a way. Really Interesting Group’s “Things Our Friends Have Written On the Internet”.

Via thishappened.org

Oh, and a word about Vancouver: Go.

Follow my posts on the Teehan+Lax blog or via Twitter @derekvaz. I’ll try to keep the posts less technical and more about how IxD is shaping the world we all live in, designers and non-designers alike.

ImageSpark officially goes live today.

This is one of the most creative and fun projects I’ve had the chance to work on. What started as a simple idea – to store, share and discover inspirational imagery – evolved over some long weeks (and weekends) into the site you see now.

Though the ImageSpark team was officially six-deep (IA, Designer, Developer A and B, Project Manager and a Partner overseeing it all) this project has touched many hands to get it to this state.

The best part is that this is really just the beginning (read:Beta); As we monitor feedback via Twitter (@imgspark) and use the site ourselves, we’ll be constantly considering how we can improve this great little tool.

Cheers to my colleagues at Teehan+Lax on a cool idea, now live.

Keynesian economic policies seem to be a hot topic now as analysts discuss the Obama administration’s plan to reboot the US economy through deficit spending and a delay on proposed tax hikes.