HappyCog.com the design studio of Jeffery Zeldman just re-launched there site with a brand new look, its an industrial news thou ! also i am in direct competition with them :P (yeh really ! i swear we are rivals :P) but still there work is gr8, simple, clean and great esthetics, its always great to see such nice layouts. For a hungry mind like me every day sites like these should be launched !

In the current erra, web2.0 look & feel have become the key requirement of many clients, and in some cases things get pushed to a level where it crosses the line, extremely heavy layouts, non usable for many users, disappearing navigation with ajax ! and literally every free ajax or Javascript effect found on the internet is used, this thing is quite common as in past you must have remember the javascript effects for the mouse movement “a revolving clock around the mouse”, pop ups, & lots of moving tags and stuff like that was common around many places ! and now its AJAX !

I feel design should be clean, with enough white space to breath, navigation kept as prominent as possible, proper spacing and line hight for text nice colors that are fresh, and classy ! Heading tags diffrentiating not only with boldness but also with spacing, a layout should be clean divided into grids / coloums, a good example is look at the newspaper why for the last 20 years it is placed in a grid of coloums ! is it because we are used to it or is it because it is more usable ! thou they do lack line hight cause they need to save space for advertisement grr…

The original candy-coloured iMac its roots are in gumdrops. The popular transparent Apple mouse came from thinking about how drops of water sit on a flat surface. An angle-poise desk lamp helped inspire the new iMac. The see-through outer casing of recent iBooks came from the look that food has when wrapped in clingfilm. The iPod is like a cigarette pack for those addicted to music instead of tobacco.

Jonathan the Vice-president of product design Apple Computers (the brains behind the iMac, iBook and iPod) is said to live modestly, while drawing a sallry of over a $1 Million a year he lives in a two-bedroom simple house near Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino and his only concession to this lifestyle is a top-of-the-range Aston Martin coupi.
- Jonathan ive Interview Link

One of the very inspirational interviews i read today ! and felt like posting a bit about it, no doubt a person who keeps his life simple can definately have an edge in comming up with innovation, rather then droping into media, giving tons of interviews, buying a house worth billion and then woring rest of the time in maintaining that life style ! Jonathan desided not to drop into this mess rather live simpley, no media intervies, a simple house a nice Aston Martin and be passionate about work! rather then the materialistic stuff in life !

Product design & Photography are the two things that interest me alot, may be more thou never got a chance to step into it and neither did make an effort for it, but these are two things that lack alot in many companies & there products. These are the key ingredient in every sale ! Why BMW / Mercedies / Apple / are on the top of the game because what the make is powerfull and what the present is passionate !