elbowruminations | Graphic Design Trends, Tips and Reviews Graphic Design Trends, Tips and Reviews

Apple has made white boxes the only way to package a technology product. Anything unwhite is uncool. Nintendo Wiis, Xboxes, and even that pseudo-cool new hard-drive, the SeaGate Free Agent – if it ain’t white, it ain’t right.

Rather than following Apple’s lead, HP has decided to think green instead of white. Instead of bothering with boxes, HP is now packaging one of their laptop models in messenger bags. Now, the consumer gets an accessory they can reuse, which not only helps the environment (the bags are made out of 100% recycled material), but sets the product apart. Best of all, it gets blogs like us talking, which helps their product’s profile even more.

Great packaging is nowhere near as important as having an innovative product, and nobody except short-sighted design blogs like us would even bother talking about the box instead of the product. But you can draw some meaningful conclusions from staring at the box.

If you want to be a leader in your industry, it’s important to know where to innovate, and where to merely follow trends. Blaze trails where they matter, and if they don’t matter, just pick the right trail to follow.

Apple was trying to introduce sexiness to the personal computing industry, and needed distinctive, visually appealing packaging to help complete the image. White worked, white caught on, and successfully set the trend. They chose to “innovate”, and it was the right move.

Nintendo, on the other hand, knew it was the Wii product itself that was pushing boundaries. Packaging was merely a stepping stone. They realized that thanks to Apple, a white box for their product would indicate what’s inside was sexy and sophisticated. No need to innovate where following a trend accomplishes the right goal. Distinctive packaging wasn’t the goal: letting people embrace and understand a motion-detecting, hand-held, revolutionary console game was the goal.

HP needed to blaze a new trail, because nothing about their run-of-the-mill personal computers sets them apart as leaders in their industry. By leveraging a bonus feature like a messenger bag, they’ve suddenly been heralded as innovative, consumer-focused, champions of the environment.

At the end of the day, the message sounds like a sermon on diversity: it doesn’t matter if your box is red or yellow, black or white. Just make sure you know when to follow trends, and when to challenge yourself to innovate.

Popularity: 11% [?]

If you’ve been on the hunt for a simple, easy-to-customize music player for your website, call off the dogs, because we just found the answer. It’s Yahoo!’s EasyListener, and it just saved you about 30 hours of web research, trial and error and Flash development.

Let’s say you’ve got audio files on your website, but you want your users to be able to click, play and download your files. All you need to do is tell EasyListener what page to check out, and bammo! After some colour-choosing and size-selecting, the player is all yours to copy-and-paste into your website.

EasyListener comes courtesy of the cutting-edge collaborative developers at Yahoo!’s top-secret team called Next. Besides cooking up some fancy code to make this widget, the team did a fabulous job with the design. It’s a tasteful, clean look with subtle shading and nice colour options, making it flexible enough to fit almost any website’s existing layout and colour palette.

Any other free, practical, well-designed and simple-to-use widgets you know about? Tell us about them here!

Popularity: 7% [?]

While RSS (Really Simple Syndication) remains a shadowy figure lurking in the alleys behind traditional websites, the majority of web users are quite happy clicking about without the faintest understanding of what RSS means or does. For those that do know how to use it, perhaps less than 10% of the online general public, most are super geeks with intimate working knowledge of the past five space flights. In support of this point, Bloglines lists ten of the most read blogs through RSS subscriptions. Included on this list are Wired Magazine, Dilbert, and Slashdot among other geeky haunts. RSS, in addition to being unpopular, has never really been used in a retail setting at all.

Until Now that is! Home Depot in Canada is an exception and perhaps the only retailer we could find presently willing to experiment with RSS. The Hammer Drop is a daily web exclusive sales item that is offered to customers via their RSS reader. This product is different each day, is available for that day only and is “dropped” at 8 am. As an example, today, the item being offered is 25 Ft. Powered Tape Measure for the Hammer Drop price of only $14.95.

It may be obvious to state that sales through retail RSS feeds, despite being a dream come true for commission sales people, it’s not going to become a viable method of making money until everyone understands what it does. You might be wondering along with us, what it will take for RSS to become understandable to consumers. We have a couple of suggestions to share.

Firstly retailers like Home Depot doing what they are doing by embracing new technology is a great way to make advancements like RSS common place. It should also be noted the Hammer Drop is part of a series of Home Depot web 2.0ish experiments such as an online auction, a customer product review option, and a Yahoo Answers-like forum.

Secondly, if RSS is to become a valid and relevant distribution method for online news sources, retailers and really anyone outside of the blogosphere, it needs to be made consumer friendly. Integral to this process is the challenge of re-naming RSS appropriately to be comparable in nature to a similar product in the real world rather than attempting to promote the baffling process of burning feeds and syndicating posts. Perhaps by naming it after a reality based procedure that mirrors the way it works, the general public will be quicker to catch on. Using e-mail as an example, the concept of an electronic inbox and a way to send mail electronically rather than “postally” makes electronic mail easy to understand.

RSS needs a similar analogy and when you put it into the perspective of news delivery, this approach to RSS could very well be the online answer to today’s hard-copy publishing woes. Imagine your trusted neighborhood news syndicate stepping in, buying your trusted RSS reader, re-naming it Paperboy and adopting the tagline: Your Virtual News Delivery Service. How far away at this point is an RSS subscription fee? Maybe these are the kind of corporate alliances we can expect to see in the near future.

Whatever the future holds, perhaps a better name for an RSS feed reader is an e-box. Part e-mail, part newspaper box, a source for all your online information, and a loyal companion to your inbox. This of course, is simply a helpful suggestion from your friends at Elbowruminations while we wait for someone at Wired magazine (or the Home Depot) to devise a trendy term that really catches on.

Popularity: 5% [?]