Apple.com to be redesigned...
http://www.macminute.com/2003/08/27/apple
GASP!
Quote:
Apple.com to be redesigned by Zeldman, Bowman
Apple has contracted Jeffrey Zeldman of Happy Cog Studios and Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign to collaborate on a redesign of the company's site...
Apple.com to be redesigned by Zeldman, Bowman
Apple has contracted Jeffrey Zeldman of Happy Cog Studios and Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign to collaborate on a redesign of the company's site...
GASP!
Comments
Now, about that whole marketing thing...
Perhaps they can revisit THAT as well and give someone else a shot at creating a campaign(s) that does the company justice.
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Cause this current crap just ain't gettin' it, fellas.
by the way, it really was a great design, and based predominantly on the previous design submitted by chiat/day. i mean, do you remember the hideous red sidebar mess that was pre-'97 apple.com?
but it is time to start giving the site some new life.
Originally posted by rok
i think the current design has been in use since the first public display of the aqua interface, which would put it during public beta. i guess fall/winter '99?
Looks like it. Apple.com went from this to this around the turn of the century.
by the way, it really was a great design, and based predominantly on the previous design submitted by chiat/day. i mean, do you remember the hideous red sidebar mess that was pre-'97 apple.com?
Ugh. I know zip-point-squat about web design, but looking back at this "capture" from archive.org, the site looks down-right clunky at best.
Originally posted by CubeDude
Maybe they are redoing the tabs to make them look more like the new Panther tabs.
It's all about teh tabs. Once Panther is out, and depending on what they're doing with Safari, they're going to be an anachronism as-is. The organization can remain the same, but the looks might change.
But it's always kind of bugged me that Apple feels compelled to keep the same number of tabs, squeezing out Switch when the Music tab appeared, and before that, they had the more useless iTools with their own tabs in some cases.
I still think the user's support page, especially the "personalized" one, plus all that signing in crap could be handled better too. It might be nice to leverage emerging more flexible web standards to make a more personalized user experience of the home page.
Originally posted by LoCash
That red sidebar design was actually partly implement by Studio Archetype, a design house I held a lot of respect for.
The sidebar isn't the problem so much as the mess on the right. Tabs and sidebars are roughly equivalent functionally, just a question of what seems more space efficient and what you put in them.
My feelings on this are very similar to how I felt with El capitan saying good-bye.
I saw el-capitan(and all it's later g4 derivatives) to be the. perfect. case.
it had everything. easy on the eyes, handles, easy-open hatch, clean interior...etc.
then when the g5 case was introduced my first reaction was "well...it's no El Capitan, but it's not bad"
upon seeing the interior I fell in love, the interior of the g5 is a work of engineering art, it is absolutely stunning.
so... I feel similarly to an apple web-page change as I did to the case change.
I'm sure whatever apple comes out with will be just as intuitive, easy on the eyes, attractive, user-friendly..etc. as the current page(which should have been ranked #1 in all high-tech webpage shoot-offs )
I'm sure that Apple's new webpage will be more "sharp" and "powerful" looking, as that seems to be the latest trend seeping into apple's design.(alubooks, g5, brushed metal...etc.)
it will likely have the same general layout though, with one big headline picture, subsequent smaller headline pictures, tabs, and hot news.
so I'm sure whatever it ends up being it will still be very easy to use, and adapt to.
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Originally posted by segovius
A redesign doesn't necessarily mean a change of aesthetic. If it's Zeldman in control, it probably means a switch to Web Standards/tableless CSS.
They could just recreate the site as is without the tables and tweak it a bit. But this is seismic if they do - it basically means a giant leap for the Standards lobby and also a huge move towards browser compliance. Actually, btrowsers mostly are all compliant anyway with exception of one company's product and this will be bad news for them because where Apple leads everyone else follows when the ground has been safely broken and the risks minimised.
It's great to see Apple seem committed to innovation at all levels of the company not just in product design.
Well, I think in the context of what I've read so far, we can expect a change in aesthetics that will employ more modern development methods. The problem you mention that Microsoft will have because IE is a far cry from W3C compliant... I wouldn't be surprised if they started to take some initiative to change that a bit. The problem is that, and will be for a few years, we still have a large install base of older browsers that are most definitely not standards compliant. The problem is that we usually design for the lowest common denominator. I think we're on the verge of being able to get away with losing tables in favor of CSS. I wouldn't do it for 60% of my clients, but I could see Apple doing it.
It's building the rendering engine into the OS (like Apple has just done), and having explorer.exe (the Windows Finder.app) use that engine to display web pages.
It is one legitimate way to do it, except for the fact that 90% of users stick with the defaults. And that's bad in a monopoly.
Barto
Originally posted by Placebo
Maybe Apple will finally use (Gasp!) Flash on their site! Imagine that happening!
why? especially when they have QT with Flash support built in already
Originally posted by applenut
why? especially when they have QT with Flash support built in already
But Flash sites have such nice feels, small file sizes, and offer an overall better experience than an HTML site. QT is not the same thing.