Groan.
The Literary Death Match Is Coming to Toronto
On Tuesday, November 2 Literary Death Match is happening in the t-dot.
Claudia Dey (representing Harper Collins), Ibi Kaslik (representing Penguin Canada), Susan Holbrook (representing Coach House Books), and Andrew Kaufman (representing Random House) will do battle for the Literary Death Match crown.
Julie Wilson and Lisa Gabriele are the judges.
It is at the The Drake Hotel Underground (1150 Queen Street West), doors open at 7pm.
Tickets are $5 at www.literarydeathmatch.com, $8 at the door, and $5 with student ID.
Follow the shenanigans on Twitter @LitDeathMatch or Facebook.
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LitQuake Sounds Cool
LitQuake: a Nuit Blanche style event but with authors, not artists.
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Indigo’s Fall Site Release: Kind of Major
New Site
The first thing you notice, less emphasis on books… but the biggest change is blog.indigo.ca. Community is still there (and still broken) but they are now attempting to engage directly with customers via the regular-old-internet, senior people too and noticeably the staff are named — and Heather’s editorializing is no where in site sight.
Other things I noticed…
- A smaller home page (their SEO/ page rank is going to take a big hit next week)
- More personalization (a big blank space on the main page for your cookie’d recos)
- Expanded inventory selection
- Presumably a new CMS
- Tiled photos for browsing
- Page side-scrolling (annoying)
- Item-page facebook like button
- No mobile redirect on iPhone (and no flash page elements hooray!)
- Everything is softer — from the palette to the scripted NYT Bestseller headband to the stitches in %-off badge. (It is going to be a big challenge to keep this fresh after a season or two.)
Old Homepage
Overall I like it, but it reminds me of the GlobeandMail redesign. A new person in charge inevitably leads to a change in the look and feel but it is not aggressive enough. No video editorial, no the61-style spectacle, no change to the shopping paradigm, less personality, and still no update to the availability status of out-of-stock items.
But good for them for spending the money. I was getting worried they were going to throw the whole operation under the bus.
My eyes are on the blog platform — I hope they add an events blog, and video, and pithy voices, and customer service… in other words I hope they come out from behind the corporate facade to really love and champion books.
Congratulations to all involved. It must have been hard work pulling this off. To the pub!
Did I mention video? http://tv.indigo.ca? Bueller?
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App Idea
This is an app I want for the iPhone: when I hear about a book on a podcast or a friend recommends something, I want to be able to open my phone, capture the title (with autocomplete) and have the details sync back to my desktop for later consideration. That’s it.
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End of An Era
I noticed yesterday that the chapters.ca banner has disappeared from the frontage of 82 Peter street. The building (and the one behind it, now owned by GAP adventures) used to house the offices of Chapters Online. When Heather Reisman bought Chapters in 2001 the chapters.ca URL went away but the banner stayed.
Together with the webfeat.com banner on the building across the street, the two signs were the last vestiges of the internet stock bubble visible in Toronto. Circa 99-00 Peter street and surrounding area was teeming with internet start-ups — now mostly gone and forgotten.
Chapter’s distant descendant Kobo still rented space in the building until recently. With their departure, I suppose the landlord had little sentimentality for the ghost sign. Indigo’s return to word-on-the-street (if only by proxy) and the removal of the sign on Peter Street mark the end of an era.
Posted in exhaling
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Originally From Ule.com
Reblogged from D. Gray
For practicing User Experience Designers, one of the most important laws isn’t Fitts’s Law, which helps us understand how to design interactive elements. Nor is it Hick’s Law, which describes how long people take to make decisions.
It’s Sturgeon’s Law, which tells us that 99% of everything is crap. It’s easy to produce a poor quality result—anyone without the critical skills is capable of it and there are a ton of those people floating around.
Yet if we want to be really excellent at what we do, what are those essential skills? What should we be practicing to become a master?
This is exactly the question we set out to answer as we studied the work of the master UX professional. These masters were folks from all different disciplines within the UX world—interaction design, information architecture, user research, copywriting, and visual design. While they produced different deliverables and end products, it was clear that each of the masters we talked to had built their mastery upon some common skills — skills that turn out to be indispensable when they’re trying to produce excellent results.
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