Rihards Online

Wow, what can I say? I’m really impressed. Phil Hansen really needs more exposure, though it’s not like my blog will bring him much attention, but every single person who does learn about him from here is really an excellent thing. So who is Phil Hansen and what does he do? As the title already implies, he is an artist, but not just any artist.

This guy is really amazing, and each one of his works is different as well, and somehow it all makes wonderful sense. Really really amazing. There’s another video, which shows off more of his work and how he does it at Yahoo’s People of the Web feature.

So I’m having a break at work and browsing BBC for news when I come upon this article about the new logo/brand for the London 2012 Olympics and I can’t believe what I’m seeing there.

They spent £400,000 (almost $800,000) to create this brand. I don’t even know if it can be called a brand, it’s such an utter waste of money. I’d really love to know who made it, and that without having to wade through hundreds of paragraphs of bullshit on how it conveys the Olympic message on their homepage.

I still can’t believe that it’s not April’s Fools or that there isn’t other good enough excuse for this thing. Hell, most of the user submitted logos (they can be seen in that article as well) are much better than what the official designers have come up. This really better be some sort of twisted joke, because that logo really is horrible and should be replaced with something acceptable.

“We’ve had a huge reaction to the launch of the new logo – most of it negative,” I really wonder why that is so, maybe because it is indeed crap. Argh, someone please make the right phone calls and fix this mess!

We all know that advertising for most parts are crap, tedious, annoying or all three at the same time. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a select few gems out there that are well done, and deserve the praise for standing out from the jungle of advertisements that surround every one of us on a daily basis.

One such ad can be seen bellow, and while it may not be what everyone would consider a great ad(read: “You pervert! What were you thinking when you posted that image?!”) I think it’s great. For one it catches everyone’s eye, especially if you have to walk through there, and secondly it makes sense unlike a lot of the ads these days.

There are several sites which collect such ad design gems, and my favourite so far is Ads of the World. They have well over 5,000 ads that are noteworthy, divided up into several categories for ease of finding things that could interest you.

Just as a little side note, the new Durex XXL ads are hilarious. NotEvenOnce has some really great, and shocking ads as well, so those who like design and have some free time be sure to head over to Ads of the World and have a look around.

Welcome to part two of my sort of rant about the new style/look of Popomundo. For most parts it would seem that the developers cleaned up the major nuisances about which I posted a few days back. Mainly the navigation, which has now received a background so that it isn’t any more painful to look at. It could however use some better(read: more) spacing between the links.

The main annoyance still remains though. Even though I’m willing to bet that the artist who made these probably put in a lot of time in making these, and some of them are really great. The most of them are just horrible, not from design point of view, but from the idea behind it. Each city in Popomundo has its own banner, and the one above is for Amsterdam. These banners are supposed to represent each city. And sadly most of the city banners are just wrong, at best heavy handed on stereotyping. I wish that more thought had been put into these, because the effort that was put into the drawings themselves is great.

Having said that, the new style with the new fixes has been growing on me slowly. I really like the expanded areas for user images. But there’s still more that could be done to improve it. Quite a few large bits of wasted empty space in the middle of the design, and not enough separation of content so it clashes with each other.

And I’m not even going to say anything about the HTML/CSS(or lack thereof), because that’s one major mess up they made. I mean how can you spend so much time on making a design for the new decade and completely forget about bringing the code up to standards as well?