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

If you want to create functional mash-ups of web services to suit your own ideas, but don’t know anything about programming, check out Yahoo! Pipes. It is a free web tool that lets you play around in a fun graphical environment to create new and interactive web services. For instance, you could create your own search engine, or a way to browse Flickr photos using a map, or a way to collect Craiglist postings from different cities using specfic keywords.

You don’t have to know anything about programming: you’re literally hooking up “pipes” to one another to create your new tool. It’s like playing with Lego, only the final product is actually useful when you’re done.

It’s easier to understand when you see it in action. For our purposes, let’s say you want to keep an eye on the graphic design scene in Canada and in Calgary. You can automatically monitor blogs and websites that are talking about anything design-related in Canada. I just spend the past little while creating a system that does exactly that, and here is how it ended up:

Here is how I created the system. First, gather your sources. On many search sites, you can grab the RSS feed for the search string. So we’re going to want to go to sources like Twitter Search, Google Blogsearch and Technorati, type in searches like “design” or “Calgary graphic design” then find the RSS feeds for each search.

Next, assemble it in Pipes. The interface (shown below at a reduced size) takes a little getting used to, but makes sense once you dive into it. From the sidebar on the left, select the type of “pipe” you want to use. You can fetch RSS feeds, CSV files, search results and more. I used the “Fetch Feed” pipe, and into each field, I copy-and-pasted the RSS feeds that I had already collected. After hooking it up to a filter that prevents duplicate content, I connected it to the Pipe Output. Voila! A sweet new way to keep your eye on graphic design in Canada and Calgary.

There are tons of different tools you can create. A short browse through Yahoo’s gallery will turn up plenty of practical, interesting tools, like an Ebay Price Watch tool or a search engine that digs through every major video sharing site. Put your brain to it, and see what tricks you can accomplish with Pipes!

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.

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!