Erin Snyder's Barbarian Blog

Hijacked Favicon

erin@barbariangroup.com(Erin Snyder) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:50:54 -0400

For the last few days, I’ve seen nothing but the Apple icon in place of Facebook’s standard favicon. I have no clue how this happened or how to fix it and its driving me crazy. In Firefox everything appears to be normal, but Safari still seems to think that that little apple is the right favicon to display on any and all Facebook pages. Weird.

Oh and here’s a handy little screengrab for reference (with a magnified state and everything)!

April Fool's, Gmail Style

erin@barbariangroup.com(Erin Snyder) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 09:13:00 -0400

Gmail never ceases to make me smile on the first day of April every year. This year Google is introducing “Gmail Autopilot™, which features CADIE, an auto-pilot technology that scans your emails and answers them for you (perfectly of course).

The learn more page displays some excellent examples of this new feature, and if you click around enough, you may just stumble on some other excellent sources, including CADIE’s personal homepage/blog and youtube channel.

Good fun.

Thanks Facebook!

erin@barbariangroup.com(Erin Snyder) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:53:39 -0400

So a few weeks ago something really amazing happened. I reconnected with a true and long-lost friend through Facebook! Crazy! This is not to say that I’m not friends with my current Facebook friends—overall, I would say I am, but I do have a rather large group of acquaintances.

Either way, I got a friend request from this old buddy and was super thrilled. I’m talking about a person I hadn’t seen or spoken with in years but was super close with back in the day (like middle-school days). We caught up via Facebook, literally, and it was amazingly refreshing to use that application for something useful. Truly, I don’t think we would have ever reconnected without it. So thank you Facebook, for somehow letting us reconnect after all this time! Seriously, thanks.

Coraline

erin@barbariangroup.com(Erin Snyder) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:16:46 -0500

I saw this gem this past weekend, and I just wanted to let every everyone know, that if you haven’t already, you need to see this movie.

There’s a few reason why. Sure, the story line was really nice, but I was truly blown away by the visuals in this film. Every little piece of this movie is full of handcrafted goodness. You see the stitching, the texture, the details. These characters are literally wearing hand-sewn miniature clothing. Sets were created with unique and unexpected objects, like thousands of hand-painted popcorn pieces that stood-in as blossoms in a forest of trees. The end result is a work of art that you literally want to reach out and touch. Not to mention Henry Selick and company really nailed the stop motion with this movie. The animation is smoother and more natural than ever, and that certainly didn’t hurt things.

Wired Magazine has a nice little photo gallery outlining some of the details that went into the various sets, puppets and props that make up Coraline. It’s definitely worth a look.

I Think I've Seen This Before...

erin@barbariangroup.com(Erin Snyder) — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 10:11:05 -0500

“Patently Obvious” is new line of cleaning products by KMI that offers natural ingredients with no compromise on performance. Apparently, the line has been in-the-making since 2005, where the new product development team aimed to create distinctive packaging that was both unique and eye-catching. The end result was a custom designed line of packaging inspired by classic chemistry bottles and made from 100% post consumer recycled plastics. [ original post ]

However, there seems to be one major flaw in this “unique” and “distinctive” packaging. It looks exactly like method—method with a rather heavy logo and crowded labels. Even the Patently Obvious website, while not nearly as well done, is somewhat method-like.

Either way, both brands have similar philosophies and values (eco-friendly, natural ingredients, sustainable packaging, etc). If side-by-side on a store shelf, this is a perfect situation where I feel like the cheaper one would win over the consumer. Turns out Patently Obvious is a European brand, so that issue won’t really come into play, but it’s still interesting to see the obvious similarities between these two packaging designs. Makes you wonder what each team thinks of the other’s design…