Petit Bourgeois commentary on web building

My last day in the company, and Montreal web/ad/branding agency CloudRaker relaunches its web site, with an awesome new look and content. Congrats, guys!

William Davies on UK music glossies:

To simply accompany music with pictures (...) is not to bash two worlds together as Melody Maker used to do when attacking music with language, but to create an audio-visual soup that could ultimately serve equally well as a TV commercial.

In the email announcing his last Alert Box, Jakob Nielsen comments on the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo tie-up, from a point of view of web usability. He explains his surprise that Microsoft would spend money for what can be seen as an advertising company, in the context of rising banner blindness, but goes on to point out two benefits: the value of owning the search-the-web-from-here box on any page (that's where people search), and the compelling offer of a single interface for putting up ads on two distribution networks. He suggests plowing the money into improving search UI and results quality.

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From next week, I'll be working most of the time from CloudRaker's Amsterdam office, as an Account Director.

So it was worth the effort: the Soïa & Kyo web site was awarded a Boomerang prize.

None of my doing, but CloudRaker won a Grand Prix for work on Têtes à claques.

It's been a while I've posted in this category, but here are three sites we (Montréal+Amsterdam web agency CloudRaker) launched recently, with the help of Montréal's best Flash animator Sébastien Dupaul:

• Soïa & Kyo, a Québec brand of women's coats and accessories
• Mackage, its upper-market sister brand
• APP Group, their parent company

Warning: Flash alert, the sites are large.

I work in a 2.0-enabled outfit, and it's loads of fun. I nonetheless enjoy this tremendously:

MyWaste: A place for people to put all their shit, and talk shit about each other's shit.

@TheRegister (the rest is deadly too)

In an article on the boundless consumption of luxury goods and its effects on media in the Guardian, I came across this:

The October edition [of the UK edition of fashion magazine Vogue] out on Monday is the biggest for almost two decades. Weighing in at more than a bag of sugar - 1.2kg - the latest tome will have 462 pages, 306 of them adverts.

But, of course, everything is bigger in America, and the US September edition of Vogue is the thickest ever at 840 pages. Seven out of every eight pages are adverts and the magazine weighs more than 2kg.

I mean, gasp. To put it in perspective, Adbusters had a very interesting visual essay on fashion porn in its September/October issue.

As noted earlier, the fine folks at AQ have renewed their site recently. Chris posted about the project way back, and noted how intense it had been to play both roles of client and supplier. I wonder if he considered the possibility that he, as an experienced web designer, could be a terrifying client for a web agency? I found the "stepping under the net" image quite astute: but are we feeling equally comfortable on both sides?

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Yesterday was my last day at the office at Weathernews Inc. in Makuhari. I'm moving on to Canada, leaving my colleagues to deal with Australian weather forecast and other such activities. It's been cool, thank you all!