The Swedish monitoring service Pingdom has published a couple of graphs of the Web’s growth from zero websites to 162 million. I’ve added my own commentary to the one below. This post is brilliantly, economically, unemotionally, frankly Swedish.

According to the latest numbers, there are more than 162 million websites on the internet today. We have come a long way since the first baby steps of the World Wide Web. Back in January of 1996 we had 100,000 websites, and if we go back to mid-1993 there were only a total of 130 websites. Not much need for Google in those days…

I was watching TV last night when the Berocca ad came onto the box.

It’s an ‘homage’ to the ‘Ok Go’ YouTube video (below) and involves some boring-looking generic ’suits’ going all oddball on some gym equipment that’s (inexplicably) been left in the street in response to someone nearby preparing a super-dose of the orange fizzy stuff. It’s a pale imitation of the original and caused me to reflect on how much ad creative is already effectively sourced (in terms of inspiration) from community and media sharing sites. Some traditional ad creatives you meet (by no means all of them) can be a little snooty about the wisdom of the crowds. However, just like the journalists who you sometimes hear slagging off social news and blogging sites only to find they routinely start a new assignment with a visit to Wikipedia, it seems that many are taking inspiration from folk-media.

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One (or two) of the things that characterise the Web 2.0’sphere is (a) an almost unnatural predisposition to omitting vowels and (b) delight in new stuff.It was only a matter of time before The Onion entered the fray with frrvrr.com, touting a social network service that introduces you to people you don’t know, based on shared purchase history and your browsing habits, medical records and CCJ’s.

As ever, The Onion is so close to the bone it hurts. I particularly like the description of how it works:

When you sign up, Frrvrr’s AvaTroll Accelerator™ will download itself onto your desktop and begin cataloguing your web history, or “webtory,” from the past eight months. Once it gathers all of your information, it creates a personalized avatar of you based on the snapshot of you gleaned from web usage and sites visited.

Hate to think what my avatar might look like. Could be worse than the one here…

How do you create a distinctive look and feel for a website that helps set it apart from the rest of the marketplace? Type, font, colour, image choice? Where does the inspiration come from for creating the best solution at the right time for the right client?

I recently found myself asking just that after finishing a project. Before I started designing I knew that one of my key tasks was to find a typographic style that would not only unify the site’s content but also make the site feel different from its well established competition.

Here’s an example of the typographic style we put together for the site: (I’ve used a background image and font colour a mile away from the content of the original site so as not to cloud the issue)

The idea for using type in this way — at an angle on a white background — seemingly came fully formed. However, when I step back, I’ve found it very intriguing to ask myself where the inspiration for this part of the design came from.
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The Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) is launching a new navigation scheme. Now I know they have decided to redevelop the site piece, and so there will always be a few rough edges, but at this stage it is hard to see where they are going with this.

Here is the old system.

The site has always presented a very flat structure, bringing sub-channels, such as Film up to the top, instead of placing it below a large category, such as Culture. The plus side was that there were fewer clicks for the user to get to the content. It was just more direct. The user also did not have solve the problem inherent in any classification system, ‘where did they put that thing?’ The downside was the sheer number of items in the primary navigation - 26. A user would not be able to automatically recognize the shapes of the words, due to the scale and sheer number, meaning they would have to read each of them in turn. This increased the amount of time they spent trying to find what they were interested in, but also meant it was difficult for a new user to grasp at a glance what the site contained. Such a system is neither scaleable nor flexible. What happens when you have more content and more channels? It would have been interesting to see how the traffic stacked up, or didn’t.So why change it? I would imagine for the very reasons I have mentioned, scaleability and flexibility.So here’s the new system.

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Lots of friends, colleagues and clients have expressed bafflement at the lead story on the front page of New Media Age last week. NMA suggested very explicitly (but inaccurately) that Hearst is retreating from its web strategy. We’ve been working with Hearst on strategy and design for over a year now and we knew this wasn’t the case. As planned, Hearst is simply going to be folding some old print title websites into the women’s 35+ digital brand Allaboutyou.com, soon to go onto a new platform with complete redesign.

(And, by the way, we’re currently helping Hearst Digital implement the UK’s second manifestation of social media software Pluck - and it might be the first if we can get in ahead of The Guardian).

Meanwhile, we’ll leave Natmags/Hearst CEO Duncan Edwards to put the record straight. This is his letter to NMA, published this week:

“Your front page story ‘Hearst to shut down four websites in digital u-turn’ (NMA 28.02.08) is inaccurate and confused…
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