John Niedermeyer is a Brooklyn-based design manager and internets enthusiast at <a href="http://buzzfeed.com">BuzzFeed</a>. Previously, he was a digital designer and editor at <a href="http://nytimes.com">The New York Times</a>.
Nedward is digging into the new MoMA.org… so far, very intriguing. Fixed nav bars are the new hottness.
I just sent the tweet above a few minutes ago, but wanted to post some more context about it here. MoMA launched a revamped web site today, with a lot of hook-ins to social networking sites like Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. But, one of the more compelling changes is the addition of a Facebook-style fixed nav bar, at the bottom:
As of noon today, we have a new president, as well as a new WhiteHouse.gov. The much-admired, Gotham-based typographical identity is gone, but as Jason Santa Maria points out, the designers went instead with two other typefaces from the same foundry: Whitney and Hoefler Text.
Another major redesign this week also involved the use of Whitney: kottke.org – though you’ll need to have the font installed on your machine in order to see it.
Which begs the question, Is Whitney the new Gotham? (Seems like just yesterday we were asking, Is Gotham the New Interstate?)
Hoefler+Frere-Jones is on a roll.
Well, that didnt’t take long – given the success of Barack Obama’s digital and design strategy in our recent presidential election, someone was bound to, ahem… completely rip him off, sooner or later.
Surprisingly, the most recent example is the campaign of Benjamin Netanyahu, the conservative Likud leader running for prime minister of Israel. The Times reports:
The colors, the fonts, the icons for donating and volunteering, the use of embedded video, and the social networking Facebook-type options — including Twitter, which hardly exists in Israel — all reflect a conscious effort by the Netanyahu campaign to learn from the Obama success.
I wonder if that type is the Hebrew Gotham?
Khoi Vinh recently realigned his blog, Subtraction.com, converting the back-end from Movable Type to Expression Engine. (Full disclosure: Khoi is my boss.)
There are a few new tweaks to the familiar design, the most noticeable being the link roll folded-in with longer form entries, creating a nice chronological flow. Also, he created templates for photo posts.
Twitter found another interesting thing to do since acquiring Summize this past summer: they launched an Election 2008 feed, which displays Twitter users thoughts on the election in real time. The scroll goes dizzyingly fast, but the pause on mouse-over is a nice touch.
It will be interesting to keep an eye on it during the first presidential debate tonight, as I’m sure there will be lots of insightful, thoughtful comments. ::wink, wink:: Though I wish that the list was curated down to a select bunch of journalists or commentators.
This is the personal weblog of John Niedermeyer, a Brooklyn-based design manager and internets enthusiast at BuzzFeed. Previously: digital designer and editor at The New York Times.