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.

So effortless, you don't even have to look at what you're doing.

PS: i don’t understand why most “premium” mice are still not designed to the shape of a human hand. If it’s made to be “stylish” or ambidextrous, then it’s 100% compromise. If you’re gonna spend that much on a mouse, go for a Performance MX and call it a day. If you want touch input, Apple are the masters, and the Magic Trackpad is the real deal.

Marketing copywriter Jeremy Reeves explains on Visual Website Optimizer what the long sales letter is. I have seen these before, but didn’t know it had its own category.

I always thought they looked so tacky and poorly designed, but it seems there is some strategy to them. It turns out i’m mostly right. Long sales letters almost always have miserable design (the kind of design that instantly turns me off — no matter what the product). But, as 37signals has shown, they don’t always have to.

Via Ramit Sethi on Twitter.

The November 1, 2010 Xbox Dashboard update has finally fixed one of my biggest annoyances with the interface: the lack of visible indication for preceding items in lists of tiles. Now, you can see the “tail” of the previous item on the left side of the screen before the selected tile, where previously there was nothing. The picture above shows the last item in the My Xbox menu. In the old design all you would see is the System Settings tile, and that’s it. So you never knew where you were in the list. Was it the the end of the list, or was there only one item? The only way to find out was to scroll back. It was a horrible design, and i’m amazed they let it ride for so long.

The “stacked” perspective effect has also been trashed, and it now sports a squared, flat look that simply scrolls side to side. It’s a much cleaner and concise use of screen space now without all the rounded corners and perspective effects. I think there was a subtle tweak to the menu sound effects as well. The “theme” now ties into the recent redesign on Xbox.com — green curves sweeping through white.

Other notable changes are a new “slideshow” first-boot orientation that introduces the controller buttons and on-screen menus in a more illustrated style, hosted by Vanna White — viewable step-by-step or skip it altogether. No more all-or-nothing corny live-action video to sit through. I saw a few new options under Video and HDMI in the System menu, but didn’t poke around everywhere yet.

I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for other UI-related tweaks in this update.

Outstanding. Beautiful unity of information and graphic design.

If i start now, i might have something almost as stunning by 2010 the time my flying car comes in.

[via Veerle's blog: Approved]

[Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo]

I’m also a big fan of kinetic typography, so i dug the video’s intro.