Folded Shirt Cuff Shows Off Watch

Noticed that Stephen Colbert had a simply clever trick to flash his watch from under his shirt cuff on The Colbert Report last night. He (or his stylist) just folded in the “corner” of the cuff down to where it hits the button, which makes a nice little window allowing the watch to be seen.
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This just in: Amazon has killed off orange and teal. Doubtful that Hollywood will follow suit.*

The New Header Design Above the Old

Amazon.com (or is it just Amazon now?) just redesigned the header across their site, along with a few other elements on the home page. Product pages seem untouched, aside from the new header. They’ve stripped almost all the color from the previously teal-blue header bar with orange buttons. It is now in shades of gray, with just a few select touches of color, some orange notification type and a few blue links. It looks bigger and less cluttered, yet is actually just a few pixels shorter.

No More .com, Uncolored Departments Menu

The .com has been dropped from logo at top left, and the type weight slightly adjusted so the name appears larger and clearer. The Shop by Department menu is now hidden until you pop it open, and submenus expand more uniformly with more rich content. The search bar now appears nearly twice as tall, with all elements (department selector and go buttton) integrated into a single visual element, much like Firefox’s recent Address Bar revisions. The cart button is a larger and much cleaner line graphic now without a text label.

Cart and Lists are separated from the integrated Search Bar

Front page “headline” banner type is now in gray, with highlights in only one color per piece, instead of gray with orange and blue, and the typeface is slightly lighter-weight and less narrow.

Lighter, less-compressed typeface, fewer colors.

This feels very much like what Google has been doing to their products. I’m a fan of these clean, tailored designs. Stripping the old-web glitter, decluttering, combining elements, and making things larger and clearer and grayer, with more breathing room all around. Color is becoming a much more conscious choice, used for emphasis, instead of ambiance. Amazon must be doing a phased roll-out or A/B testing, because in Firefox i get the new version, and in Chrome i still get the old.

Red with big elements and plenty of white space.

Coincidentally, i just saw the other day that Target did a major redesign of their entire site. It’s very on-brand for them. Very designy and clean, yet fun (no capital letters) and easy. It looks more like one of their print ads or TV commercials now, instead of just a web store. I don’t shop Target.com often, so i’m less familiar with the changes, though i definitely did notice that it was new when i visited last week. They even made a little video to show it off.

Update: Apparently, Target’s redesign is a complete relaunch of their entire web store presence in order to be independent of Amazon.com who previously ran their e-commerce services. That explains the “reset your password” links on their new homepage. I had no idea that Target’s redesign was related to Amazon when i started writing this. It was just an ironic coincidence that i noticed both their redesigns this week.

*That’s a reference to the trend in films to color grade everything severely orange and teal.

[Normally i just write these down or email them to myself, but figured i should start publishing them.]

A feature idea for Plex or Xbox or any media center. Physical media are becoming more and more obsolete. Yet many of us still have them sitting on shelves next to the TV, and may keep them forever for whatever reason. While they take up space, there’s something about being able to pick up and hold and look at something tangible when trying to pick a movie to watch (or browsing music). However, many of us have or would like to have all our media stored digitally on the local system or a NAS or the “cloud”. There’s no doubt that it’s more convenient to be able to play movies and music from a purely abstract/digital interface, without having to find and load a disc and switch all the gear to the proper playback settings.

So, as a shortcut, using a camera device like the Kinect, or perhaps a smartphone camera or a remote with a camera/scanner, you could simply snap a shot of the DVD case (or barcode), and the media center app (Plex, or Logitech Harmony-ish system) would identify the movie, put the system into the proper playback mode, and start playing it from the storage device. Imagine holding a DVD box up to your TV screen (with a Kinect-type device) as if to say “I want to watch this”, and it just happened.

I guess it sounds a bit like a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s kind of a round-about way to do it, especially if you already have your DVD collection ripped and stored on your computer. But flipping through pages of thumbnails on a screen à la iTunes or Netflix can be overwhelming. Sometimes it’s easier to just grab something off a shelf.

For that matter, this idea could easily be extended to playback things you *don’t* have in your collection. Tying in to streaming/rental services, on your smartphone you could click a “watch now” button on Amazon.com or IMDB or Get Glue, and start watching right away on your TV. You could “scan” a TV commercial for a movie or TV show and start watching it right away. Or scan a poster and have it ready to watch when you get home.

In fact, thinking about it now, i’m sure someone must already have done something like this.