I like the branding done by the company Art&Logic at their web site. It is a company of software engineers who telecommute on projects.
Basically, what I like is that they are very straightforward about differentiating themselves. They say:
We Do the Hard Stuff
We specialize in difficult projects. Our clients typically have complex requirements and high performance expectations. Our project teams can solve the most unusual and tricky problems
What an exciting time to be in the Web industry. I just read an essay by Janice Fraser of Adaptive Path that really got me thinking.
Major change, like questions of what happens to our bookmarks when we lose our current definition of a web page? In 2002, Luke Wroblewski of the NCSA published a book (SITE-SEEING: A Visual Approach to Web Usability) that referred to the unified model of the Web, a model that we have internalized and includes concepts like clicking a link “takes” us somewhere, like we can go back and visit a page using a bookmark, our browser keeps a history of our session, which we can navigate, etc. This model frames (ahem) some hostility to new windows, especially pop-ups, as well as framesets, because a user may not always realize that they’re ability to bookmark a page has been undermined (in the case of frames) and that they’re browsing history has started anew when the new browser window appeared, whether or not they know it
Sorry, it would seem this post has been cut short, likely during a transition from one blogging platform to another. -drg
In case you hadn’t heard already, Macromedia is being bought by Adobe. This is a huge deal, especially for the web industry. (Read about it at CNET.com)
Me, I’m not pleased to hear it. I sort of like having them compete for market share. Keeps prices down. Increases innovation.
What I hear is that Adobe is poised to be a more head-on competitor to Microsoft. That sounds crazy, as an industry insider, at least as far as off-the-shelf software goes. I’d buy web development software from Adobe or Macromedia before I’d touch any web development software from Microsoft–at least for front-end work.
I’ve viewed Microsoft FrontPage as a breaker of the Garbage In-Garbage Out rule of computing. With FrontPage, you can put awesome code in, and then it gets transformed by M$ FrontPage’s mandatory eatShit&&Die filter, and then you get Garbage Out. Incidentally, I’m pretty sure they use the same filter when saving Word documents as web pages.
Ooookay, didn’t mean to rant.