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An interesting project that is soon coming out of Adobe Labs is Flash Catalyst. This will allow designers to bring their web designs directly from Photoshop or Illustrator and add in interactive elements, such as how forms should work, or scroll-bars operate. Often there is a gap in communication and understanding as the developer tries to interpret from a static design how things should work. An additional benefit to these tools is that the client can see immediately at design stage how things will work once live. This would be of most benefit on larger, more complex websites with a lot of functionality.

This is not the first tool to do this kind of thing however, and it is worth looking at other software out there, most notably Protoshare, and Axure, both of which have some good features.

On watching the Gadget Show (Ch5) last night I became quite interested in the idea of Augmented Reality. The idea being you can do some very clever image recognition techniques to bring the virtual world into the real world. Already this concept is very promising for the video games industry, but it has also been used successfully in other ways, including the new smart phone G1, powered by Google Android.

The new accessibility guidelines were released this month. A few things caught my eye:

It is not recommended that Level AAA conformance be required as a
general policy for entire sites because it is not possible to satisfy
all Level AAA Success Criteria for some content.

Clearly sense has prevailed and they realise that AAA is often unobtainable without putting severe restrictions on the design and requirements of a website

1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum): The visual presentation of text and images of text has a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1, except for the following: (Level AA)

• Large Text: Large-scale text and images of large-scale text have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1;
• Incidental: Text or images of text that are part of an inactive user interface component, that are pure decoration, that are not visible to anyone, or that are part of a picture that contains significant other visual content, have no contrast requirement.
• Logotypes: Text that is part of a logo or brand name has no minimum contrast requirement.

This is sufficiently different, and has been more clearly defined than in version 1 of the guidelines. All designs must therefore be checked for ratios if we are to conform with AA standards.

2.4.5 Multiple Ways: More than one way is available to locate a Web page within a set of Web pages except where the Web Page is the result of, or a step in, a process. (Level AA)

This is very interesting. Certainly I have always stressed the need for good navigation in a website, but this really forces the point home.

There is still no automatic process to determine if a site is accessible as so much depends on human judgment, but it would have been nice to have gone more into the correct testing procedure. Still seems rather vague to me.

What is done well though is the guidelines on how to conform to each point, and the sheer amount of information available.

What I think these guidelines show is that in order to meet them you really need to bring in accessibility from the first design/prototyping stages to ensure that you dont hit major problems further down the line.

Here’s to an accessible 2009!

This website makes great use of Google Maps to associate places by feelings. I think it’s a nice idea and will be interesting to see how it develops, once more social features are added to it.

Innocent are launching ready meals and calling them Veg Pots, the idea is you get 3 portions of veg in each pot, so combining with a smoothie, there’s your 5 a day right there.

To promote this, they are using Flickr, so users can submit their own veggie work of art.

I think it’s simple, but very effective and works great with the innocent brand.

Great promotion by Slim Jim

Not original as it has been done before by Red Interactive, and Cravendale, but absolutely brilliant, and more interactive than those before it. Great use of sound too. Could be used for things like Pot Noodle.

A great ad/peer-to-peer effort from Levis.

This is brilliant. Although, not for a brand as far as I can see, the idea could definitely be used.

Using the video responses feature of YouTube, videos have been linked together to allow the user to go on a video adventure.

A very bizarre series of mini-sites from Converse. Start here. I don’t know whether to love it or hate it. Beware of the Kissing with Ross site. You have been told.

I like the interactivity in this online ad. Would be interested in the interaction statistics for campaigns like this where it isn’t a simple mouse click action.