This is a blog for a weekend assignment where I am asking you to review the Best Design nominees for this years Crunchies, awards that are given out each year for new developments in technology.
The voting page for the Crunchies may disappear after the voting ends on January 7. So therefore I am providing you links here for the six nominees for the best design award.
Instructions: Please explore the links to the nominees as listed below as well as the support material about each of them on the Crunchbase. You are asked to compose two entries on this blog prior to class on January 12 which will consist of well thought evaluations of these sites. One approach to your entry could consist of an analysis of what you think is award-worthy about the site and/or the product it represents. Feel free to do additional research besides the information in the CrunchBase entry about the company and the design of the product or product websites.
We will review your entries on class on Jan 12 and revisit them towards the end of the quarter to see if your observations still stand after being in a ten week course that focuses on Interface and design issues.
I took a look at the Crunchbase entry for Infectious and was not terribly impressed. I can see that they are offering a unique product at a substantial savings to similar products (like car wraps) but I believe that they could really offer customers more.
ReplyDeleteSo, let me start off by saying I like the idea of skins for everyday objects: laptops, mp3 players, game systems, and at times - cars. Infectious offers a small portion of what most other skin manufacturers offer but - unlike most other skin manufactures they also make car decals. One of the first reasons I dislike Infectious is because they have very limited designs which don’t offer a wide variety of styles to consumers. After checking out the site my husband, a couple friends, and I concluded that there were no designs we would ever want to place on our cars. There were not even designs available that we would want to look at on other people’s cars.
Second their lack of skins for other products is a let down as well. Most websites offering skins have much more variety in designs and are available for more products. I will say that I do like their designs for home electronics more than I like their car decals.
While offering car decals is neat I would be more impressed if Infectious could put together something similar to Skinit.com which allows customers to upload their own artwork and make truly custom skins. Skinit.com also offers a plethora of designs as well – hopefully they don’t get into car decals or Infectious might go out of business just like their current competitor CarArt.com seems to have.