The iPad, Part I: A post about Renais­sance typography

With everyone sharing their thoughts on Apple’s new iPad, I thought I’d share mine, both of them.

1. Is Steve Jobs the new Gutenberg? (See also here and here.) No, but he is possibly the new Aldus Manutius.
2. The iPad introduces two screen formats: portrait at 1024×768 pixels and landscape at 768×1024 pixels. What are the implications for designing layouts?

Two posts, Part I today.

USA Today’s tax infographic

The excellent infographics blog Visualizing Economics featured this interactive infographic from the USA Today last weekend. It’s an overview of U.S. incomes and income-tax rates since 1940. You enter an income and year; it shows you the corresponding (inflation-adjusted) income and tax burden for each year in the series, as well as what the taxes were spent on (Medicare, national defence, etc.). It’s a good example of the work established media like USA Today have doing on the web over last few years.

I like several things about it:

UX critique: Aeroplan sign-up

I signed up with Aeroplan (Air Canada’s loyalty-marketing card) this week, because I was tired of gas-station clerks offering me Aeroplan brochures. To ensure that I get some benefit for surrendering my gas-purchase data to the marketers, I thought I’d write a series of posts on Aeroplan’s sign-up UX.

I realize that UX teams work under constraints, as in the case of Mr X (here and here), so I don’t mean any criticisms as attacks on the designers’ competence. They achieved their objective: I found the process basically OK and relatively painless.

They begin well

I like the way they start. Click the Become a member button on the main page and you’re placed into an entry page that gives you an overview of the process:

 

 

I could gripe…

I could gripe about the usability of this site, but it’s charming in its way. It makes every possible design mistake but gives off a light, naive, fun vibe.

(Warning: Loud intro music.)

Hat tip to Swiss Miss minimalissimo via Twitter.

Update (8 Feb 2010)

New Zealand twitterer infodesignr points to this site as another example of undesign (my term). IMO, it projects straightforward honesty lacks the joyfulness of Yvette’s Bridal Formal. I’m not being ironic. Still, given the content, you’d expect something mid-20-century-style Swiss School modernist, wouldn’t you?

Feel free to hunt me down and kill me for saying this, but isn’t there a slight, second-cousinly resemblance between Yvette’s and this site by the Swedish type designer Andreas Pihström?

Christopher Burd is a business analyst, writer, and information designer based in Victoria, British Columbia. His website is www.catchword.ca. You can follow him on Twitter.