How to Make Blog Readers Cross-eyed?

I know there are now so many ways for you to generate your fancy fonts into your website. But end of the day, isn’t it about readability than aesthetics?

Stare at this chunk of text for a good 5 minutes.

Caution: If your vision starts blurring, please close your eyes. I indemnify myself for any damage done to your eyes if you do become cross-eyed.

I was looking at it trying to read for a few minutes. Next thing I know, my vision started to lose focus.

So all I can say from this example is, please don’t use a drop shadow for all your text because you can. Because as a reader, I also can not come back to your website – ever.

Use awesome-ness sparingly and it’ll remain awesome.

Apple Redesigns Movie Trailer Landing Pages

It’s been awhile since I visited the movie trailers on the Apple website. And I was met with awe, noticing how each movie now may have a customized landing page based on the similar template.

The new original

With some fine-tuning. Apple has removed their own logo and menu bar in movie landing pages from the top. Their now putting more emphasis into iTunes by branding the pages; iTunes Movie Trailers.

In the main navigation, you’ll  also find Trailers in iTunes and Download iTunes. Looks like it’s all coming back to iTunes.

Dynamic slideshow backgrounds

I love this. Large images leave a huge impact. And because it’s a movie website, it delivers the experience with this approach.

Semi-transparent playlist panel

Instead of the boring boxed up grey panel, now movie trailers can have a customized color scheme for these panels containing trailers. The panel is collapsible. Though I found some panels actually disrupting the background images a bit.

Customized background

If you notice here, this movie trailer landing page doesn’t have a slideshow but a single large background image. It stands nearly as tall as the page itself. But as I said, large images leaves a huge impact.

Customized color theme

Instead of a white or soft grey background, some movie trailer landing pages are in black. This may be Apple working up some packages with movie distributors on how their landing pages can be customized.

In addition of the above, they’ve added social media tools into the movie trailer landing pages too. You can now share movie trailers by using email to a friend, facebook and twitter below the movie synopsis.

Other mentionable additions are:

• Movie image gallery
• Related apps for download (again, tied to iTunes)
• Related movies by actor/actress

Seriously, leave it to Apple to come up with a simplistic yet very effective redesign of their movie trailer landing pages. The only thing bugging me is the delayed launch of Quicktime after I click on a trailer.

But I guess, it could be a Windows thing.