An ad campaign for LOUIS VUITTON by Mamoru Hosoda (of Digimon fame). an updated alice in wonderland, in which a girl, searching for her lost cell phone, floats in a dizzying world of the company’s logos. While waiting to meet her friends outside of a Louis Vuitton store, Aya’s cell phone is eaten by the LV Panda, who then promptly swallows Aya – but the inside of his stomach is gateway to a psychadelic wonderland. Based on characters created by famed superflat artist Takashi Murakami.
Louis Vuitton “Superflat Monogram” Japanese Cartoon
The song featured in this movie: Fantastic Plastic Machine – “Different Colors”. Takashi Murakami has featured his artwork along with Louis Vuitton’s collaborated products at MOCA, Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. The limited Murakami edition of Louis Vuitton’s Neverfull bag is one of the most sought after items for Fall 2007. The newest character added on the Louis Vuitton monogram pattern is the Chibi Kinoko on the Agenda PM.
This took me longer than expected and I was getting quite impatient already. I started working on this since Thursday night and I wanted to roll this out on Friday night but it’s just so hard. I think I got rusty somehow too.
This release, I mainly want to improve the readability of the blog. I want to try a darker background color too, almost all my previous layouts have been white. I want it really simple too. Nobody’s interested in my archives anyway, no one wants to know how many categories I have. So I rid them.
In order to make it look less boring, I try to change the colors of the posts to play around. You probably can guess how are the colors generated after a while.
Quite a bit of thought went into search engine optimization and advertisement placement too. No choice, I couldn’t throw them away as they pay for my bills you know.
However, this design is far from completed. After I applied the theme throughout the whole blog, I start seeing a couple of problems here and there that I overlook during my test.
In the next hour, I’ll be updating the blog design, so if you see something strange, it really is because I am doing something strange. I hope the layout would go well.
I did quite a rush job, especially in getting random categories and latest comments. I didn’t use a plugin and instead just code a couple of functions to grab random categories and stuff. It’s bad for maintenance and I’m kinda scared that things would break.
Also ridding most of the plugins. The new blog design would be a lot simpler and should load therefore load faster. I tested it on Firefox 2, Opera 9, Safari 3, and Internet Explorer 7. Internet Explorer seems to have a rendering bug that I couldn’t fix and I don’t really want to do CSS hacks. It’s rather minor anyway, so I’ll just wait till Internet Explorer 8 comes out.
And meanwhile, great news for spammers, you can happily spam me while I’m doing site testings.
Legendary designer Philippe Starck — with no pretty slides behind him — spends 18 minutes reaching for the very roots of the question “Why design?” Along the way he drops brilliant insights into the human condition; listen carefully for one perfectly crystallized mantra for all of us, genius or not. Yet all this deep thought, he cheerfully admits, is to aid in the design of a better toothbrush.
Philippe Starck: Why design?
He is pretty entertaining, calls us the most stupid bacteria. He speaks terrible English but who cares he’s funny at TED.
The ads are simply too big. I can imagine Windows Live Hotmail looking much prettier with the removal of the ad on the top. I’m okay with ads but when the designer is planning for the application, at least take in consideration how the website would look like with an advertisement.
One look at Hotmail tells me how much advertising revenue mean to Microsoft. They are probably trying to get people to upgrade to their paid plans. I like the whole Live service bar idea but let that be on top, not ads.
This explains why I spend so little time at Windows Live Hotmail even though that supposed to be my primary mail address that’s for work.
This method of conveying information to the user is just bad. If there really is nothing to put on the page, hide the bloody button to click on that page totally! Beats being greeted with some lousy placeholder that coudn’t even make me laugh.
Take a look at this year’s killer application – MS Paint.
MS Paint by freeloveforum
Well, let’s be a little fair to Microsoft alright. MS Paint is never intended to be a designer tool and is intended as a tool to kill your boredom and a psychotherapy aid. I mean, don’t you remember the time when you actually paint the whole screen in blue and try to paint a red color all over the blue till you don’t even see a bit of another color?
