Mas pelo bem e pelo mal, sendo verdadeira ou não deixa a ver algumas pistas:

- O tom de verde mais escuro;

- Camisa mais sóbria, provavelmente no template que a Espanha usou na Euro 2008;

- Camisa de goleiro na cor grená.

Até sou a favor do grená para camisa de goleiro. É sempre legal uma inovação, mas sem perder o estilo. Também sou fã do azul tradicional nos goleiros, quem sabe pode ser a segunda  camisa de goleiro.

Preparei dois mockups no template da Espanha com  o kit home e away.

A terceira camisa continuará sendo a a verde lima-limão mesmo com a provavel troca de material esportivo para o ano que vem, mas no momento ainda é cedo pra especular sobre isso. Pena pois gosto da combinação de Palmeiras-Adidas.

I really like this bootup concept, It is pretty unique.

I really liked the Clear Intrepid mockup, it is smooth, and creamy.  I love the texture of the brown, its just perfect, the distro-logo is new, looks a bit 3D-ish.

Welcome to Part 3 in this series of posts that takes an inside look into the development of my WordPress flash games arcade. If you're new to this blog and you want to catch up on the series, read part 1 here and part 2 here. In this entry I will outline some of the initial design ideas for my new arcade, including elements of layout, textures and color schemes.

I should add that as of last night I have a working version up and running and I've purchased the domain name for the arcade. I'm planning on launching a closed beta next Monday. It won't have all the user-side functionality but the core of the site will be working and will allow anonymous users to play all the games. Now on to design matters...

Working Process

So in simple practical terms how did I go about starting a design? Well it all came down to some basic research. I began by brainstorming the key elements I'd like to see in an arcade - an arcade that I would enjoy using myself. I then went and tried out around 10 other existing games arcades, ranging from 'A-listers' to small scale sites, and I compiled a quick pros and cons list based on my experience. The last thing I did was to look at my two existing arcades and specifically to look at statistics. Using Google Analytics I was able to get an in-depth sense of which games were popular, which parts of the site were most used, and most crucial of all: which parts were unnecessary. I then looked back over this data and reduced it to a set of 10 fundamental features that I'd like to use in my arcade.

I should also point out that the background to this research was oriented towards eliminating excess and redundancy from the arcade structure (something I wasn't able to do in this post!), optimising categorisation and maximsing the presentation of game content.

Once I had my 10 point feature set, I then began a quick layout sketch using basic shapes, squares, rectangles, circles etc to come up with a content layout. Given the fact that any design I came up with would have to be layed over an existing WordPress theme, I had to limit myself to some fundamental layout factors: 2 column, 3 column, header, footer, sidebar etc. As much as I'd like to try something more radical, I simply don't have the developer skills to implement wild ideas at this point, so it was important to be as realistic and economic as possible - and that's not necessarily a bad thing!

After I reached a satisfactory layout in sketch form, I then went onto search for an appropriate WordPress theme that could act as a solid skeleton for my modifications. The 'wireframe' diagram I made below was really only something I made for readers of this blog, my work on the design was based on the sketches.

Front Page Mockup

The wireframe illustration below shows you how I'd like the front page to look in an ideal sense. It looks fairly 'busy' right now, but that's mostly because I'm a novice at making wireframe diagrams. What the site will actually look like on launch day is quite a bit different. Nevertheless, you can get an overall sense of the key elements and it also provides a good goal to work towards.

Logo & Branding

I'll now talk you through some of the main features of this design. Starting at the top the first thing that will hit the visitor is the logo, or in other words the 'brand'. Without even getting into spam arcades, I've seen so many arcade sites that pay little to no attention to branding. There' an obsession in the industry to search for domain names that contain the word 'arcade' as if somehow this keyword alone would make your site an instant success. So you have things like arcadefun, fungamesarcade, retroarcade, funretroarcade, funretrogamesarcade, etc etc. This strategy is completely counter productive, because it ends up rendering your arcade characterless, anonymous and one of a million other similar sites.

Get a brand name, go for something unsual but evocative and make sure you spend time developing a logo. Even if it's just refining a nice font you got from dafont for example, it will help print the brand on your visitor's minds, and that sad as it may seem, is the fundamental principle of advertising. Branding is not jsut about having a memorable logo, it can be instilled in all aspects of the design, from color to texture and font type (more on that below).

Bookmarking

The next feature you will notice on the top right is a search box, some content and game review RSS feeds and some key social bookmarks (delicio.us, magnolia, blinklist, technorati etc). Bookmarking is important for the following reasons: loyalty and hearsay. These services provide a means of one-shot visitors finding your site again, but they also have a secondary purpose of sharing content with other users. Get a popular delicio.us user to bookmark your site and you will suddenly have 2000 other users visiting as a direct result.

Navigation

At the time of writing, I'm still working on some extra navigation elements, but what I wanted to aim towards was one main navigation bar that serves the entire site. I found that the majority of the sites I visited during the research phase overwhelmed me with navigational options, sent me in the wrong direction and overall made me loose interest very quickly. Having a simple and functional navigation structure will enable visitors to have an immediate response to the way they access content on your site. It is important for a visitor to feel in 'control' on a website, to master the structure in a matter of seconds.

In my previous post I talked about ways of challenging categorisation. The ideas that came from that have been implemented into the site and you'll be able to test the new approach to categories on launch day.

Featured Content

The next main feature in the design is the featured content strip that forms the second visual layer after the logo. This area will hopefully use a dynamic script (ajax??) to power a sliding gallery of featured/most recent games on the site. It will be regularly updated and it will help give the site a sense of continual freshness. Providing a sense of the 'new' is another key element in keeping loyal visitors.

Main page left column

The left hand column has 4 basic components: a large thumbnail image, a brief introductory outline of each game, a voting system and a review section (authenticated users only). The main emphasis is on the image. Another one of my observations of the many arcades I visited was how tiny and meaningless the thumbnail images were. I want to provide users with a real 'feel' for a game just by looking at an image. Clicking on the large thumbnails enables users to play the game straight away. Clicking on the test or title of the entry allows them to see the game details in more length and to play the 'embedded' version.

The voting and review elements are part of the interactive side of the site reserved for authenticated users. There are many more interactive features that I don't have time to cover here but that will emerge in later posts.

Main page right column

The right column contains first of all the user login panel. This is placed in a prominent position since the site will attempt to nurture a community. Next is space for some 125x125 banner ads. I decided not to go the google ads or flashing banner ad route with this aracade, partly because its annoying and overused but partly because a monthly banner ad on a PR4 site earns more anyway.

Below the ad section will be 2-3 panels displaying various site stats such as 'editor' picked games and most rated games and possibly also user uploaded games and blog posts etc. The order and nature of this has yet to be fully decided.

But that's a very brief overview of the front page layout. I've missed out a lot of detail, but there's no time for that now and this post is already way too long :) I'll finish things off now with a brief look at textures and colors.

Textures

Partly inspired by Bryan Veloso's relaunch of Avalonstar and partly out of personal preference. I wanted the site to be 'space age grunge'. I know it sounds ludicrous and it probably is but that's the way I saw it. The space age element is a reference to some of my personal influences such as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkosvsky's film version of Solaris. The grunge element is a nod to my youth and growing up with 'grunge' culture.

Below are two texture sketches showing contrasting colors, light grey and black. These elements will form part of the site background. The black element may feature elsewhere too.

Texture 1: 'Light Grunge'

Texture 2: 'Dark Grunge'

Color Scheme & Fonts

The link color scheme will be bright and strongly contrasted with the grayscale base layers of the design with strong blue and orange colors. To balance this out there will be a sufficient amount of grayscale tones and some good old white space too. The font type will be mostly modern, probably Arial which is a spin off of Helvetica.

That's it for now. The next step in this process it the beta launch. Again that will be happening (knock on wood) next Monday. After the launch I'll write part 4 in this series which will be a debrief and will address some of the user feedback that I hope to receive. I may well write a 5th part if there's more to say. See you on the other side!

I'm specifically developing a "Flag Book" design, an intricate diecut piece (it will be printed and produced by hand), that will showcase some of the various designs I came up with this past year. I've gotten good feedback about the prototype, and also had some additional ideas thrown out:

• Produce an e-book, to distribute information and let the consumer decide if they should print it;
• Produce a floor sized book, that could be an interactive piece;
• Produce a grassroots, mainstream book, to be distributed;
• Produce a mockup of a grocery store flier, detailing the issues with bottled water;
• Produce a performance piece, with people entering the grocery store to buy things, and returning bottled water.

Standard
Dual 2.6ghz Intel Quad-Core processors
2gb Ram
512mb Nvidia video card
350gb HD
16X dual layer SuperDrive

Options
Dual 3.0ghz Intel Quad-core processors
4gb Ram
1gb Nvidia video card
500gb HD
16X dual layer SuperDrive

Maybe one day when we have some free time will make our own mockup...
Tell us what you think!!!

This is a mod that was recently made for the nintendo wii. It looks really nice and would be a fun little thing to have for traveling. There is a downside though. The wii is intended to have you up on your feet jumping around having a good time. With this if you take on a plane or pretty much most vehicles you wont have that much free room to play most games for my wii. Although I do like the look it would kinda ruin the point of the Wii.

see it here http://www.flickr.com/photos/threethirty_rlug/2401994623/

While I love this service, the experience of using it could be better. Take a look at the final screen. How quickly can you figure out what it's trying to say? It's essentially a timetable of all trains coming into Montgomery station, bound for Castro station. I think there are a few barriers to figuring this out:

• The times pop out, which is good. You know they're for the M line, but at what stop? If you bother to read the decidely less important text above, you'll see that these times are for the Montgomery station.
• These times are stop-specific, but there's unnecessary emphasis on a specific line (the M). In this case, the M, K, and L are all acceptable routes, but are made to appear less important. They're shown in smaller type under "For other routes serving same stop."
• The top of the page seems to have a lot of fluff. We're already at nextmuni.com; we don't need to know what "agency" we're subscribing too. The direction (inbound/outbound) doesn't seem to be necessary either, since we're more interested in a specific destination.

Considering how often I use this service, especially when I'm out, I thought it'd be fun to redesign it as an application for the iPhone. Here we go... (btw, I'm not affiliated with SFMTA/Muni or NextBus. This is just an exercise.)

Audience. I can't say I know exactly who NextBus designed their system for, but for the sake of moving this exercise along, I'm going to make some assumptions. (Normally, I'd get specifics from product management and user research.) In this case, the audience consists of San Francisco commuters taking routes from regular stops. They want to know when their train/bus is arriving at their stop.

Visual Goals. Clearly answer the main question: when's the next relevant train coming to my stop? Combine this information with the Muni brand in a route-focused (not line-focused) design. Emphasize the answer to the main question. Deemphasize setup details and other minutiae; junk that gets in the way of the message.

Here's my initial mockup:

• Uses the iPhone Weather application as a model. Users can browse multiple stops by dragging left or right.
• No emphasis on a specific line. Gives times for any lines going to Castro from Montgomery station.
• Header emphasizes that the information is for the Montgomery stop.
• Brand goes beyond logo. Colors are supposed to suggest recent SFMTA rebrand. (Though I didn't go so far as to tilt the black header... it really bothers me in Muni's new station signage.)

Have another look at NextBus' version of this screen for comparison.

Next step: design the interaction, particularly for setting up one of the "stop monitors" I mocked up. Stay tuned...

It's that something extremely similar is can be found in iTunes.

Bere+smîntînă

If you've ever wanted to put your own photo on a magazine cover for a gift, prank, etc., but didn't have the image editing chops (or time) to do it yourself in Photoshop, check out MagMyPic.

Upload your own photo and add it to the cover of any of these 18 magazines:

• Cosmopolitan
• Fortune
• GQ
• Life
• Maxim
• Modeling International
• Motor Trend
• National Geographics
• PC Gamer
• People
• Pet Fancy
• Rolling Stone
• Seventeen
• Sexy
• Sports Illustrated
• Time
• TruLove
• Vogue

The site also sells the magazines (the real ones, not the ones you mock-up) but you'll be able to skip that part and still get your magazine cover.

[Via Download Squad]

Sul profilo Flickr dell'utente BluezPS sono apparse queste foto di una PSP. Ovviamente non è un prodotto dalla Sony. Il dubbio rimane: si tratta di un mockup (una modifica reale fatta da un ultrasmanettone) o un prodotto di photoshop? Una cosa è certa un design del genere permetterebbe alla PSP di insidiare molto più da vicino il dominio di vendite del Nintendo DS. Io personalmente la comprerei a scatola chiusa.

bionda? mora? niente di tutto cio'....

http://www.downloadblog.it/galleria/big/cairo/4

...quanto mi piacerebbe se venisse creato un menu di questo tipo su kde4...
per quanto sia immaturo mi piace da impazzire, ma ogni volta che apro quel maledetto kickoff mi viene voglia di strangolarmi con il mouse....

Vero che si puo' sostituire con il menu classico, ma qualcosa del genere:

mi farebbe ESTREMAMENTE piacere... ovviamente il menu sarebbe espandibile, tipo che cliccando il menu K si estende il "pannello applicazioni" in basso invece di mostrare il "solito" menu a tendina...
magari sottopongo l'idea al team kde ;P

ps. per la cronaca, il desktop linkato da downloadblog e' in fase di sviluppo per piattaforma windows.

Nummer eins: etwas dunkel aber sehr individuelles Ordner Fenster:

Nummer zwei ist dagegen sehr hell, habe ich hier bei Wordpress gefunden, besonders gefällt mir hier der Menübereich:

Nummer drei ist ein bisschen eine Kombination aus beidem, geht mir zwar zu sehr ins Orange, aber trotzdem sehr stylisch:

Auch wenn einer der Vorteile von Gnome ist, dass  man sich alles sehr individuell gestalten kann, sollte man auf ein ansprechendes Standard Design viel Wert legen. Immerhin zählt oft auch der visuelle erste Eindruck. Dieser war z.B. der Hauptgrund warum ich mich damals für Gnome und nicht KDE entschieden habe.

Well, Have you ever Had one of those times where you've put something ALL CAPS by accident? You've had to delete it all and type it again. Also one of those times where you've wanted to count the words? Well, I composed a little mockup what I think it should look like in Firefox.

If I ever find out how to make add-ons, I will make one for you and post about it later. I think it's a great idea, and would add even more usefulness to an already great browser. I made the mock-up in The Gimp.

Enjoy,
nikoPSK

I caught this article a few days ago on ‘5 things you’ll love about Firefox 3’ right after reading a few others about new stuff being built on the Mozilla platform Instantbird, Spicebird and the ‘elder’ of the group, Songbird.

So okay, first impression, what’s up with the bird names? Sure, Mozilla... the bird theme Firebird (before having to change to fire-something-else), Thunderbird, Sunbird - I get it, there was a bird theme. But really, does everything have to be x-bird, how about an iBird or and eBird? Really, Mozilla had to scrap the Firebird name and opted for Firefox. It also has the SeaMonkey browser suite. Songbird I like, since it’s music and songbird actually means something. But really, Instantbird? and Spicebird? Since these are alpha stage products, I think it’s a perfect time to re-brand, well rename. How about a different organism? Skip fox and monkey... think multifunctional messenger/communications center... maybe Websquid or anything else that doesn’t end in bird.

Besides the name though, it looks like a good product, although I’m not really sure what the business model is. Mozilla itself seems to have hit the jackpot by striking a deal to incorporate Google search as the default search engine in their browsers and set the default home page as a Mozilla skinned Google search page. That’s easy and relatively innocuous. So what are these guys going to do, strike a deal to steer users towards Gmail through integration. I guess I got ahead of myself... Spicebird is a Mozilla answer to Outlook (watch out, I had to surf as the GoogleBot to bypass the MS cookie nazis though). besides the demo on the main page, there’s a bit but not much) more on the Mozilla Labs blog. Spicebird is kind of like Mozilla Turducken (Holy epiphany - that’s what they should call it!!!), Thunderbird email stuffed with Sunbird calendar and scheduling, stuffed with Pidgin (okay, stick strictly to the theme even... Instantbird) instant messaging. So, wait... Mozilla essentially already has all these products and it couldn’t come up with a unified product on it’s own? How puzzling. To be fair, they kind of have tried a little with Lightning, which adds a Sunbird calendaring feature to Thunderbird as an extension.

I don’t mean to ~dis~ Mozilla at all, but I worry for Thunderbird a little bit as Sunbird never really seemed to fly and while I like and use Thunderbird on my non-mac machines... it’s ripe for the picking.

Oh, and Instantbird? It’s Pidgin (formerly Gaim) re-branded as far as I can tell... Pidgin accepts plug-ins so extensions aren’t going to be revolutionary as far as I can tell. They’re talking about enabling audio and video, but the libpurple people in general are working on this, both for Pidgin and Adium, both of which I prefer to use. Supposedly, Instantbird is pretty much the same as the others but with an XUL based User Interface.

Songbird is going to be a huge product though, assuming it becomes as reliable as Firefox some day and isn’t crippled by management. And by that, I mean that as long as it accepts extensions that allow whatever the mind and code can create it will move. I’ll get into that more specifically in another post about the music industry and digital audio products (both of the software and hardware varieties) in another post soon (hopefully), but that’s really the power of Mozilla, a focus on the framework and not on control of the product in the users’ hands.

It’s all about extensibility - It’s all about extensions! Just check out theMozilla Labs to see what new stuff they are adding to Firefox and Mozilla in general, largely through extension development. i don’t see Microsoft building that much flexibility into IE (or whatever they name it next) and I don’t think they have a culture surrounding their products that could even if they had the inclination.

But really, getting back to Firefox 3 and those 5 things I’ll ‘love’... in reverse order, according to computer world, they are better memory usage, easier bookmarking, a better bookmark organizer, an enhanced address bar, and easier downloads, which really means a more feature-rich download manager window. You can’t go wrong with better memory usage. The easy bookmarking they seem to have put in place looks a lot like what Flock has been using since day one, right down to the star-designed button. I can only dream of the day when I’m given more power over my bookmarks, so I dream of a Firefox 3 final release I guess. I’m not so sure about the enhanced address bar... I always am skeptical of those auto-complete functions for the address bar, popping up the URL of every place you’ve ever been - in front of someone else as they borrow your computer, surfing h... o... t... (’honey, what are all these sites? I was going to hotmail and I found...) but if that’s not a problem then it looks pretty nice, from my trial of the Firefox 3 beta, it was somewhat useful. the easier downloads seems to include a download manager that has more info and options as well as tracking/download resumption features. I looked at the screenshot and immediately went off to mock-up the feature I think they should add to it...

Tabs! so you can sort/show just a certain file type. Reduce clutter - organize - improve productivity equals/really means not so annoying.