And then it sucked.

There’s nothing worse than a movie that shows great promise, then fails to deliver. If it’s just bad, you regret the money and time wasted. If it’s terrible, you wish you could erase the memory from your brain and punish those responsible.

Sadly, a lot of movies fit that description. Here, I modestly suggest, are the nine most disappointing movies of all time:

9. Showgirls. I know you’re thinking, but wait… let’s take a trip back in time.  It’s 1995: Elisabeth Berkley and Gina Gershon are smoking hot young actresses, featured in a movie about strippers, Vegas, and girl-on-girl action.  It had trailers like this. It looked like it would be two hours of Phoebe Cates coming out of the swimming pool. Any straight guy under the age of 40 was at least be curious and intrigued about the film, if not counting the days until its release. What we didn’t know was that it would be a dreary, humorless 128 minutes of boredom.  Worse, it turned out that Berkley, naked or not, seemed awkward, unsexy, and ridiculous in every scene she was in.  Her dance moves sparked unintentional laughter in theaters.  Oh, and just for good measure, the producers of this film threw in a shocking, violent rape scene to somehow turn the would-be 2am Cinemax movie into a grim revenge drama.  Not quite the cheap thrills people were expecting…

8. The Return of the Jedi. In 1983, George Lucas had yet to tarnish his franchise with the “prequel” disasters. The first two films were beloved blockbusters. The Empire Strikes Back, arguably the best and most memorable movie in the original Star Wars trilogy, set up this film to deliver a fantastic close to a three-part epic. Han Solo was frozen. The rebellion was in trouble. Luke was wounded, humbled, and ready to settle the score once and for all with Darth Vader. There was no reason to imagine that Lucas could screw this up. And what did he do? Re-do the “blow up the Death Star” finish from the first movie, put a jabbering fish-creature in charge of the rebel forces, and drop a bunch of animatronic teddy bears in the middle of the film. Somehow, the movie was still vaguely satisfying, but filmgoers would be forever haunted by the silliness of an ewok army and the closing “dance around the campfire” scene.

7. Godzilla (1998). In the summer of 1997, I was at an opening weekend screening of Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World, and before the film, they showed this teaser trailer for a remake of Godzilla by the producers of the smash 1996 hit Independence Day. The crowd went wild. A few people literally jumped out of their seats. It seemed likely that Godzilla was bound to be the biggest hit of the following summer, if not the decade. If only the movie lived up to the teaser! Instead the next summer brought a movie starring — I’m not making this up — Matthew Broderick (Ferris Bueller) and Hank Azaria (Moe from The Simpsons). The movie itself was dull and unoriginal, seemingly constructed out of old scenes from the Alien and Jurassic Park films. Worse, the special effects were unimpressive and murky, with almost the entire film set in the middle of a rainy night, which seemed to suggest the filmmakers hoped we wouldn’t look too closely at the screen. Worst of all, the movie reduced one of the most beloved, classic monster movie icons, Godzilla, to nothing more than a giant crazy dinosaur with no personality. Not only did the producers of Godzilla deliver a dud of a movie, they tarnished the franchise upon which it was based.

6. Godfather: Part III. With the first two Godfather films each winning an Oscar for best picture, and widely viewed as among the ten greatest films of all time, the third chapter in the Godfather series had two tough acts to follow. This 1990 dud has a few memorable moments, but it will mostly be remembered for a) Al Pacino’s wild over-acting, b) the glaring absence of Robert Duvall, and c) the scene-wrecking presence of Sofia Coppola. Pacino spends the whole movie screaming at the top of his lungs (in the sixteen years since Godfather II, he lost any sense of restraint). Sofia Coppola looks awkward and confused every time she is on screen. George Hamilton (?) has a big role in the movie. In short, the film is a mess. I wish it had never been made. Almost as much as the remaining movies on this list…

5. Alien 3. Why must third films in a trilogy be so terrible? Is there some strange, unseen law in the universe that corrupts and infects the third acts in filmmaking? Anyway, Alien and Aliens are both science fiction classics. The first is a quiet, creepy, suspenseful haunted house story set in space. The second is a thrilling, action-oriented adventure that mixes humor and terror brilliantly. The third film wasn’t as thoughtful as the first, or as much fun as the second. It was just noisy, dark, and repetitive. Worse, it’s just utterly forgettable. Newt, that adorable girl from Ripley saved in Aliens? Ooops, she died while they slept. Oh, and there’s an alien loose in a steamy space station… just like the first movie, only with more techno music and loud noises! Director David Fincher would go on to make some great films, but this one was a truly awful and needless piece of filmmaking.

4. Rocky V. Many of us refuse to even acknowledge that this film exists. The original Rocky won Best Picture (deservedly so, I’d argue). The next three were increasingly campy and silly movies, but still entertaining. My best friend and I still quote from Rocky III all the time (”Prediction? Pain!”). At the end of Rocky IV (1985), our hero defeated the towering, murderous, steroids-inflated Ivan Drago, in Moscow, on Christmas Day, for free. So where could they possibly take the series after this? Moviegoers got the answer five years later with Rocky V: Balboa discovers he has brain damage, goes bankrupt, moves back into a rough Philly neighborhood, and starts managing some meathead boxer named “Tommy Gunn,” who eventually betrays him. Rocky ends up beating up Gunn in a street fight outside a bar. The End. If you never saw this fiasco, you might think I just made that up. But I didn’t: they spent months working on scripts for a fifth Rocky movie, and this was the best they could come up with. In a 2008, Sylvester Stallone told BBC interviewer Jonathan Ross that if asked to rate the Rocky V himself, he would give it a zero. Sounds about right to me.

3. Spider-Man 3. Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 were both fantastic adaptations of a classic comic book, setting new marks for how smart and entertaining superhero movies could be. And then this happened:

2. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Many would put this movie at number one, and deservedly so. It’s hard to describe the intensity of the anticipation for this movie before its release in 1999, and to overstate the crushing disappointment with this film once it hit the screen. It was the prequel to the most iconic and beloved film trilogy of a generation. People camped out for months in front of theaters to have good seats for the premiere. So what went wrong? Let’s see:

• George Lucas was so enamored with new special effects technologies, he insisted on creating a fully digital character for the film: Jar Jar Binks. Goofy, incoherent, and cartoonish, Jar Jar added nothing to the story. Six year olds might have enjoyed the stuttering, stumbling lizard man, but not the rest of us. Each time he shows up on screen, a tiny piece of me dies.
• In the first three Star Wars movies, the idea of “the force” served as a compelling mystical, philosophical element to the story. Luke became powerful because he believed and learned to trust the force. In this movie, we learn that it’s actually just some chemicals (midi-chlorians) in your blood that make you a good Jedi. So the Force is like having anemia or something? Lame.
• Jake Lloyd, the boy chosen to play Anakin Skywalker might have been the worst child actor in the history of film. He almost single-handedly destroyed the movie.
• Natalie Portman was inexplicably coached to speak her lines in a strange accent that seemed to be a mix of 80-year-old Kate Hepburn and an automated customer service telephone robot.
• The script sucked. Lines that Lucas wrote for this film include: “Yippeeeee!” and “‘Now THIS is pod racing!”

Depite all this, if you were to skip every scene in this movie that included Anakin or Jar Jar, there was still some cool action sequences and a thrilling light-saber duel between Obi-Wan and spooky, sinister Darth Maul. Those fleeting moments of coolness spare this film from taking the overall #1 most disappointing movie spot. Which goes to…

1. Matrix: Revolutions. In 1999, The Matrix premiered in the same summer as Episode One, and provided a stark contrast. The Matrix was everything the plodding, tired Star Wars prequel wasn’t: fresh, stylish, innovative, and original. It blended an unlikely mix of science fiction, mind-bending philosophical puzzles, and kung fu fighting into an entertaining surprise hit. Its original style, with 360-degree freeze-frame sequences, comic-book physics, pulsing techno music, and the trench-coat-and-sunglasses look spawned countless imitators. The movie’s impact on pop culture was viral. People quoted the film in classrooms, offices, and bars (and still do): “Take the red pill”… “Free your mind”… “There is no spoon”… “Stop trying to hit me and hit me”…

Underlying all this was an intriguing story: the human race had become enslaved by machines, crammed into pods, where they became little more than bio-electrical “batteries.” The “matrix” provided humans with a simulated reality that replaced their ability to see the real world. Neo (Keanu Reeves) discovers the truth, realizes he has special abilities inside the matrix, and that he may be “The One,” who can free the human race. The sequel, Matrix: Reloaded, while not quite as well-received,still delivered an exciting film that left viewers with an astonishing cliffhanger to ponder until the final act of the trilogy arrived. Web sites like this, this, and this popped with essays, articles, and discussions of the symbolism and philosophical questions raised by the films.

So when Matrix: Revolutions lit up screens in 2003, fans expected answers and a fitting sense of closure to the story. Most than that, the hoped for the same originality that fueled the first two films. Instead the films’ creators, the Wachowski brothers, cranked out a dud that lacked everything that made the first two films memorable. Most of Matrix: Revolutions takes place “outside” the Matrix, in the real world, and machines try to attack the remaining free humans living in in an underground colony called Zion. As a result, it was like countless other movies that pitted robots or aliens against humans: lots of guns, lasers, explosions, and chase scenes. It looked like a bad imitation of a Terminator or Aliens Starship Troopers, or (ouch) Star Wars: Episode One. What a difference four years made… But worst of all, it failed to deliver a satisfying close to the trilogy. The ending is too convoluted and complicated to summarize here, but they key problem: Neo doesn’t free humanity from the Matrix! Most people will continue to live their lives in the “dream world” that Morpheus railed against. Almost as an aside, we learn that humans who “want to be freed” will be allowed to leave. But how the hell will that work, since they don’t know they’re in a fake reality?

The ending is all noise, special effects and flashing lights, but as a work of storytelling, it fails completely. Imagine if the empire remained in power at the end of Star Wars, or if the Kobra Kai bullies beat Daniel at the end of Karate Kid, or if Chief Brody failed to kill the shark at the end of Jaws… Fans of the film who bought into the premise of the original film were robbed. In the end, the audience was supposed to happily accept that most people would remain blindly lost inside the Matrix. Truth and freedom? Just optional. You call that a “revolution”?

The blue pill, it turns out, was just fine after all.

1. Life is better with a dog next to you.
2. Don’t be afraid to try new things.  But it’s okay to try some things only once.
3. Wonderful things can emerge from broken plans.
4. 95% of the time, you should be honest and tell the truth.  The rest of the time, it’s better to say something agreeable or keep your mouth shut.
5. You don’t really appreciate your parents until you are an adult.  And you appreciate them even more once you have children of your own.
6. The best pizza in the world is served in Chicago, at Giordano’s or Gino East.  No other place comes close.
7. It is not a good idea to split a bottle of Tequila with someone before heading out for the night.
8. Star Wars is not as good as I though it was when I was a kid.  It’s actually goofy.  That said, when Han shows up in the last second to save Luke and help him destroy the Death Star, I still get chills.
9. Everyone should read Catcher in the Rye twice.  Once as a teenager, once as an adult.
10. There are few places more beautiful than the hills in Tuscany, the beaches of Bermuda, the humbling glory of Grand Canyon, or the view from Highway One as it winds around the northern California coast. 
11. If you want to really get to know someone, drive across the country with them 
12. You will hurt people — sometimes by accident, sometimes out of thoughtlessness, sometimes on purpose.  The important thing is to own up to what you’ve done and try to atone for your actions.  Some people will forgive you, some won’t.  But you should try either way.
13. Poker taught me that you’ll rarely have all the information you need to make a 100% perfect decision, in cards or in life.  The best you can do is slow down and think, consider the likelihood of possible outcomes, then make a decision.  Major life decisions are often more of a gamble than anyone tells you.
14. The challenge of being a parent isn’t making the big decisions. It’s the thousands of tiny, micro decisions that are hard. 
15. Petty, cruel, and evil people are everywhere, but they are vastly outnumbered by individuals who are kind, generous, and compassionate.  It may not always seem that way, but only because bad people get more press.  
16. Most friends will eventually drift out of your life. That includes most of your “best friends.”  It’s sad, but natural: people change, start families, or  move to different places.  If you’re lucky enough have friendships that remain close after decades, hang onto them.  The older and busier you get, the harder it is find true friends.
17. When playing Texas Hold’em, it’s almost always a good idea to fold Ace-Jack preflop.
18. You’ll win most of your games in Madden if you learn to play defense, run the ball, and hit your tight ends on crossing patterns.
19. If you see a restaurant that makes sub sandwiches, Chinese food, fried chicken, pizza,  and seafood, stay as far away from it as you can.
20.  If you follow sports, even a little bit, you can make small talk with almost any stranger.
21. Naps are good.  Take them whenever you can without apology.
22. Raisins have no business in oatmeal cookies.  Macadamia nuts need not be paired with white chocolate, either. Raw cookie dough added to ice cream, however, was a stroke of genius.
23. When you’re stuck in the wrong job, you dread the morning alarm, the clock creeps, and lunch becomes the most important event in your day.  We aren’t made to live like that.  If that’s your day, it’s time to quit and do something else.  
24. Sometimes, people deserve second chances.  Third chances, on the other hand, are almost always a bad idea.  If life gives you a second chance, don’t miss it.
25. You can believe something your whole life, only to realize that you’ve been wrong all along.  Don’t be stubborn and ignore reality.
26. Winning always feels good, whether it’s pool, air-hockey, or skee-ball.  But when you worked hard to get better at something — practicing, studying, training — and then you win, it’s ten times more satisfying.
27. If you want to feel alive, climb into a roller coaster.
28. Coney Island, Las Vegas, and South of the Border are cheesy, tasteless, and creepy places, but if you don’t spend some time in all three, you’re missing out.
29. Dating is tricky.  People generally want a partner to be four things: attractive, smart, fun, and sane.  98% of the time, you’ll find someone with three or fewer of those qualities, though it may take a while to know for sure.
30. It’s okay to go to the movies alone.  Vacations, too.  Sometimes it’s actually better.  Just don’t make it your lifestyle.
31. Everyone should climb up and leap from a high dive at least once.  The moment between leaving the platform and crashing into the water will be one of the longest and most thrilling seconds of your life.
32. You’re  much better off giving a college kid a beer than a credit card.
33. There are few better ways to spend a sunny afternoon than snorkeling on top of a warm ocean, watching colors shimmer, wriggle, and dance beneath you.
34. When you’re stumped creatively, get up and take a walk.  Somehow moving your legs and breathing in fresh air helps jar loose new ideas.
35. Most people, even your friends and family, don’t really know you.  They have a perception of you based on how you were as a child, a roommate, a classmate, or a co-worker.  Their notion of you, and what you are capable of, is based on memory.  But who you were isn’t who you are, or what you can be.  You decide that.
36. You can help people, give them encouragement and love, but you can’t change them.  People have to change themselves.
37. It’s hard to top the sound of your own child’s laughter.
38. You aren’t trapped.  You may feel stuck or trapped in a bad place, but things are rarely as hopeless as they seem.  Decide that you will change your situation — whatever it takes — and as Joseph Campbell said, "doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be."  Sounds like mystical hocus focus, but I’ve seen it happen.
39. Some things you’ll only see or do once.  Slow down and take it all in.
40. The voice in your head that tells you that you can’t do something can be loud and persuasive. It is also, quite often, wrong.

With a baby daughter, a demanding job, freelance clients, graduate school, and a determination to play poker with a competitive edge, I drink at least one of these bubbly canisters of caffeine, taurine, guarana, and various other mysterious chemicals a day. I don’t drink coffee, so my daily energy boost comes from one of the following drinks. I’ll take all the help I can get.

Since 2006, I’ve tried almost every sugar-free energy drink I’ve discovered. Unless otherwise noted, I’ve stuck to the low-carb variety of these, but occasionally, I sample full-sugar energy drinks as well. Some are forgettable, some made me cringe, some made me feel like I could jump over a house. Below are all 63, rated, with notes:

Top Shelf

1. Jolt Ultra: Sugar Free. This is a tough drink to find, but if you see one, grab it. Light. Refreshing. Smooth. Tastes a bit like a carbonated version of the original Gatorade, spiked with a major payload of caffeine. Comes in a big, re-sealable 24-oz canister that looks like something that might be used to refuel a space ship. If I could find this one in more stores, it would be my first choice.
2. Monster Java Lo-Ball.  I don’t like coffee, but I DO like this.  Kind of like a mocha drink, but cheaper, tastier, and loaded with bubbly caffeinated goodness.  Can’t get this yet in DC, but it will be a favorite when it does.
   
3. Monster Lo Carb (the Blue one).  A smooth, sweet flavor that goes down easy. No bitterness, or harsh citrus flavors. I’d drink this even if it wasn’t supercharged with caffeine. You can find this at almost any supermarket or mini-mart. Hard to beat this as an excellent go-to energy drink.
4. Rush Energy Lite. Damn, this is a good drink! Sweet, tasty, and powerful…  like strawberry soda on steroids! Arguably the best overall drink in this list. Sadly, I have only seen this drink one time while in Miami… and I fear it may be extinct.
5. Ace Energy Drink: Lo Carb. Tastes a bit like Sweet Tarts, pulverized and and liquefied into energy drink form. Nice refreshing flavor. Not sure how potent this drink is, as I didn’t feel much of a kick. Bonus points for the funky, retro, poker- and pin-up girl themed packaging. A damn good drink, if you can find it.
6. Spike Shooter: Orange Gold. Wow. Tiny can, but packed with 300mg of Caffeine. That’s like six Diet Cokes or two Blue Monsters… Anyway, tastes great, like Orange Crush. Beware, though: it packs a serious wallop. Even for a hardcore energy drink fiend like me, this gave me the jitters.
7. Spike Shooter: Original Flavor. See above, only it tastes more like fruit punch. Again, beware: this thing packs a major punch. Might make some people jump off bridges or something…
8. Spike Shooter: ‘Quila Lime. See above. Quite tasty, with a bit of citrus bite. And the drink packs a punch. Again, beware: Not an energy drink for lightweights.
9. Full Throttle Lo-Carb. Nice and smooth, but does it taste like bubble gum? Good, but nothing I’d crave. It’s Coca-Cola’s stab at the energy drink market. Solid, but not overwhelming.
10. Full Throttle Fury. Throttle’s spunky little brother, a nice change-of-pace energy drink. More fruity. Very, very hard to find these days.
11. Full Throttle Unleaded I think this has replaced the Full Throttle Lo-Carb… Good, crisp, and taste. A first-tier energy drink.
12. All-In Energy Drink: Grape. I had pretty low expectations for this over-marketed, poker-themed energy drink, but I have to give it credit: tastes like grape Crush and delivers a nice punch of caffeine. Very tasty. Two downsides: First, the small, Red Bull-sized can is so 2003. Second, the language on the back of the can is very silly. An energy drink is a beverage, not a life philosophy.

Surprisingly Solid

13. FRS Health Energy: Low Cal Peach Mango. A different kind of energy drink: it’s not carbonated and actually includes real mango puree in it. Boasts an alleged antioxidant called quercetin. Not bad at all. Tastes like a smooth, rich fruit juice. The only downsides: comes in a skinny, tall 11.5 oz can, and didn’t seem to pack much of a punch. Not as loaded with caffeine as other drinks.
14. Guru Lite. Small can. Tastes a little like Hawaiian punch. Not bad at all. Not a great value, though. Still, a pretty solid little energy drink if you can find it for cheap.
15. RockStar Roasted Light Vanilla. Smooth and not too sweet. Nice mix of vanilla with a hint of coffee flavor. Big punch of caffeine. An excellent drink, though hard to find.
16. RockStar Lo-Carb.  Tastes better than other RockStar drinks, and has more caffeine. Win win! A little too fruity, perhaps, but other than that, a nice go-to drink. This was #1 for a while, but I’m starting to think this is just too sweet and berry-flavored, so I’m dropping it down the rankings a bit.
17. Xenergy Mango Guava. Stop laughing, it’s hella tasty and smooth! fruity, but not overly sweet… very balanced flavor
18. Xenergy Blu Pom See above; another excellent drink… tastes like berries and fruit, but not in a syrupy, overpowering way… crisp and delicious
    
19. Freek Sugar-Free Maniac. Ignore the horror-movie packaging — nothing scary about this tasty, refreshing energy drink! A very exciting new discovery, if you can find it.
20. Venom Energy Mojave Rattler. Made by the company that makes Seven Up and Dr. Pepper, this lo-carb drink doesn’t exactly taste as dangerous as it sounds. A nice, crisp berry flavor with a hint of citrus. Comes in a funky, re-closable bottle that looks vaguely like something in which you might store nuclear isotopes. A solid drink, but nothing particularly special.
21. Amp Energy (Sugar Free). Nice nice… Kind of Mountain Dew-y, but lighter-tasting and fresher. A solid new drink.
22. Highball Energy Drink. Found this at Whole Foods the other day and tried the lemon lime version. Very subtle flavor, kind of like tonic water. Not bad at all. Not the most powerful energy drink, but smooth.
    
23. Sexy Italia Energy Drink Plus. Not sugar-free, but I got it as a gift so I tried it. Excellent flavor: maybe a blend of cherry or raspberry, and very smooth. Would go great with vodka. If you’re in Italy any time soon, this might be a good call.

Lower Your Expectations

24. Redline: Triple Berry. Tasted like berry-flavored Kool Aid. A bit too sweet. Aftertaste was a tad harsh. Not bad, but not great.
25. Java Monster: Chai Hai. It’s a Monster drink. No wait, it’s a coffee drink. No wait, it’s a chai drink. And it’s not sugar-free. At first sip, it seemed very rich and tasty, like a good Chai. But after a third and fourth sip, it just seemed a little too milky and a little too sweet. Not a bad drink, but hard to drink a whole can.
26. NOS Sugar-Free/ Nice flavor, kinda citrusy, but in a good way; not a bad drink if you found it on sale someplace
27. Cocaine Energy Drink. Not sugar-free, but someone found this for me, and with a name like “Cocaine,” clearly this is drink crying out for attention. The packaging describes it as “a carbonated atomic fireball,” which sounds about right. It burns your throat and nose as if you chewed up up a bunch of fireball candies. And it’s got a ton of caffeine in it. But after all that, it’s not a particularly enjoyable beverage. I struggled to finish the can.I ‘ll say this — it tastes far different than any other energy drink, but that’s not necessarily a good thing.
    
28. Shark (regular).  Tried this one in Thailand.  Like a Red Bull, but not so cough syrupy… Not bad.  Didn’t find a lo-carb version.  Solid.
    
29. Low-Carb Kronik Protein Energy. According to the can, it contains “power too sick for science.” If by “too sick” they mean Watery, berry-flavored fuzzy water, with a slightly bitter aftertaste, suppose they might be right… Next!
30. Unbound Energy Lo-Carb.  Discovered this new one on a gas stop near Pittsburgh, PA.  Not bad, but very sweet, without any real flavor to distinguish itself.  Not bad, but nothing special.
    
31. Enviga Sparkling Green Tea (Berry Flavor).  Something new from Coca-Cola and Nestle.  A little fruity, but fresh-tasting and loaded with caffeine and green tea extracts. A little timid.
    
32. Vault Zero. More of a soda than an energy drink, but tasty, cheap, and loaded with caffeine; close your eyes and you might mistake it for Mountain Dew
33. MdX Sugar Free. Some kind of “extreme” Mountain Dew drink (Mountain Dew X!) Like Vault Zero… only a little weaker
34. Starbucks Mocha Doubleshot Energy + Coffee. My brother reviewed the Vanilla version of this thing, so I was curious. They didn’t have a sugar-free version, but I tried it anyway. Verdict? Tastes like Yoohoo chocolate milk. Meh. Go for the Monster Java Lo-Ball if you want coffee/energy drink fusion.
35. 99 degrees (sugar free).  200MG of caffeine?!? Wow. Not bad, but the flavor is a bit medicinal.  Not too fruit, not too citrusy.  Just kind of like weak fruit punch with some hidden drug in it.  Not terrible, but nothing to grab off a shelf if other options were available.
36. Diet Red (Hansen):  Small can, sweet.  Very Red Bullish, with more of a berry flavor. Not bad, but nothing special
    
37. Mad-Croc. I honestly can’t tell how this isn’t the same drink as Red Bull Sugar Free… Maybe 2% more “bite”…  Solid, and I think cheaper than Red Bull.
38. Sugar-Free Red Bull The small can is awful as a matter of value… $2 for 8oz? And despite being one of the first energy drinks, its flavor is pretty unremarkable.
39. Brava Italia. Almost indistinguishable from Red Bull… maybe a little harsher. Odd European soccer players on the can. Not sugar-free.
40. Rhino’s. See Diet Red and Mad-Croc… maybe a little more tart, which isn’t better
41. Archer Farms: Sugar Free Raspberry. Target makes this drink, and it’s not bad. Gentle flavor, almost like a flavored seltzer water. The can is ridiculously girly. No man would want to be seen walking around with this, but his girlfriend might love it. Not much caffeine that I could detect. Meh…
42. Archer Farms: Sugar Free Tangerine. See above. Same deal, with a little more of a citrus taste. Yawn.
43. Jolt Endurance Shot: Wild Grape. One of the new trend of micro energy drinks in shot form, this 2.5 oz energy bump is like grape fruit punch that didn’t get mixed with enough water. Reminded me of children’s medicine. And where’s the enjoyment of drinking something like this? Lots of caffeine, no doubt, but not much enjoyment and a pretty forgettable flavor.
44. Rockstar Energy Shot: Tropical Fruit Punch Flavor. Here’s the good news: it delivers 200mg of caffeine in a 2.5oz bottle. The bad news: it tastes like Robitussin.

Junk in a Can

45. Bawls Exxtra. Bawls made one of the earliest hyper-caffienated drinks on the market, and it came in a funky blue bottle (see below). Recently, they released a sugar-free edition of the drink. Not awful, but it tastes like sugar water… without the sugar. And I’m paying $2.49 for this why?
46. Ripped Rage: Sugar Free. The packaging on this thing is very macho: chains, jagged typefaces, and a huge “R” that looks like it was carved into the side of a tree. It also boasts of using a “themogenic matrix(TM) that will make you break a sweat, or break something!” Um… okay, tough guy! Meanwhile, it tastes likes raspberries that were left in the fridge a week too long.
47. Exotic Spanish Fly. Very strange drink. This not-sugar-free “Spanish Fly” drink is made in Germany featuring something called “shizandra,” a Chinese herb “cherished among women as a sexual enhancer and youth invigorator.” Hmmmm… Well, this Spanish-German-Chinese energy drink tastes vaguely like berries. Slightly bitter aftertaste. Meh…
48. Blade Energy. Meh. I can’t tell if this is a CVS-owned product, but it’s like a Blue Montster, only a bit more harsh tasting. A very forgettable drink.
    
49. RockStar. An utterly forgettable drink. The best thing I can say is that it has bubbles.
50. Diet Pepsi Max.  Diet Pepsi + extra caffeine.  Not not THAT much caffeine.  Meh….
    
51. Bawls. I tried this—the non sugar-free version—before they came out with a lo-carb edition. Meh. Tastes like syrup. Oh wait, it IS syrup, with some caffeine added in for good measure. No thanks. Sexy bottle, nasty drink.
52. Arizona Green Tea Energy Drink. Sweet, weak, and kinda apple-juicy… Barely drinkable
53. Crunk. I really hoped to like Crunk, being Lil Jon’s official energy drink and all… The can boasts about the unique ingredient: Ashwaganda Horny Goat Weed. Imagine what you’d expect Horny Goat Weed to taste like — that’s what this tasted like.
54. 24:7 Lo-Carb Energy Drink.  If you squint your eyes, it looks like a Blue Monster. But it tastes like a Red Bull mixed with Antifreeze. Yuck.
55. Energade. Like Gatorade, only weaker and flatter-tasting. Pretty terrible stuff, which is why I’, pretty sure it no longer exists.
56. Sparks. An energy drink mixed with beer. And yes, it tastes about as bad as that sounds.
57. Lost Lo-Carb. Sour. Bitter. Horrible. Please STAY lost.
58. Lost Five-O. Even worse… I could only take two sips of this before surrendering.

Beverage Crimes Against Humanity

59. Sobe Adrenaline Rush. Bitter. Possibly rancid. The only adrenaline I need for this is for throwing the can as far from me as I can.
60. BooKoo. Is BooKoo a foreign word for “water pollution?”
61. VonDutch. Just foul-tasting, bitter, and weak. Almost undrinkable. Von Sucks.
62. Sobe NoFear. Easily the worst energy drink in the world… Seriously. Someone needs to be charged with a felony for marketing this sour, bitter can of nastiness. It might be made from rancid grapefruits. Humans should not ingest this liquid.
63. Fuel Extra Strength 7 Hour Energy Shot: Fruit Flavor. I’m not a fan of “energy shots” over actual drinks to begin with, but this is simply horrible. If cough medicine could go bad, it might taste like this. Inside this little bottle is a dark, terrible place where happiness and joy die.

I found the explanations in the WordPress codex confusing and unhelpful. I searched around for some other solutions and didn’t find much to help me sort this out. Most articles or posts on the matter were knee-deep in code and long scripts. Finally, I found this post by Lorelle on "Creating Multiple Single Posts for Different Categories" which was tremendously useful. However, I still found the explanation a bit fuzzy. I sorted it out, but think a clearer take on this might help other similarly baffled WordPress users:

Step 1: Design two (or more) custom templates. A good way to start is to copy the "single.php" file from the default templete and modify it to suit your needs. In my case, I set up one template called "blogpost.php" and another called "article.php." I prefer to have descriptive template file names. Need more help? I’ve found Ben Gillbanks’ short tutorial on creating custom templates useful. Ok, so once you’ve got your custom templates worked up, copy them into your theme directory.

Step 2: Back-up your single.php file. Since the next step will destroy your single.php file as it currently exists, take a few seconds and make a copy of your working file, just in case something goes wrong. You can always replace your modified single.php file with the original to change everything back to the way it was before you started tinkering. Better safe than sorry, right?

Step 2: Turn the "single.php" into doorway to your custom templates. In a normal WordPress theme, the "single.php" file, also known as the "Single Post" template, takes a post and styles it with this basic template. But if you want to use multiple post templates, you can use this file to help WordPress understand which one to use. The WordPress engine looks at the single.php file to style your post’s content, but since it is a PHP file, you can use it to redirect it to your custom templates.

So what we’re going to do is replace the single.php file with some very short code that tells WordPress to check the category of a post and then load the appropriate template. You use the categoryID number from the Manage | Categories tab to identify the correct category. Here’s how the code would look:

<?php
$post = $wp_query->post;
if ( in_category(’5′) ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/article.php’);

} else {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/blogpost.php’);
}
?>

So let’s break this down. the first two lines set up a query. The second line tells WordPress that if a post matches category 5 (which happens to be the ID for my "article" category… your number would vary, obviously), load the template "article.php". The next lines say, basically, "ok, so if this isn’t an article, it’s a blog post, so go ahead and load "blogpost.php".

But what if you have more than two category-based templates? No problem. Your new best friend is a little conditional tag called “elseif.” Here’s how that would work:

<?php
$post = $wp_query->post;
if ( in_category(’5′) ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/article.php’);

} elseif ( in_category(’6′) ) {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/column.php’);

} else {
include(TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/blogpost.php’);
}
?>

So this three-way query tells WordPress, "if a post is category 5 (an article), load the article.php template, if it’s not category 5, then check to see if it is category 6 (a column) and load the column.php template if it matches that, otherwise, it must be a post, so load the blogpost.php template." You can set up as many “elseif” statesments as you need to match the number of custom post templates you want to use.

Go ahead and save your single.php file. That short snippet of code is all you need. You’re almost done.

4. Give it a test. If you did everything right, the single.php should act like a traffic cop and direct posts to the correct template, depending on their category. Test posts by category and see how they display. If the templates seem broken or no post shows up, you may be missing a bracket or semicolon someplace in your single.php file. Go back and double check it. Conditional statements (if, else, and elseif) can be a bit confusing, so it can help to check the syntax here. You might also need to make sure your custom templates don’t have any odd code that might mess up the display.

Hope this helps. Drop me a line if you have questions or comments…

I was curious what the guy was talking about, so I ran the page through Babelfish and learned that they were mostly talking about his socks, buying more at H&M (they have H&M in Italy?), and his upcoming class reunion. Somewhere in the middle of this, he linked to some mashups, including mine. He got lots of comments on his socks, not so much on my bootleg.

Still, nice to know my mashups have now been listened to in North America, Europe, Asian, and Australia, maybe elsewhere. I need to work on building my African and Antarctic audience…

The following, in my humble assessment, are the 11 most overrated films in history. If you love these films, good for you. You probably hate some of the movies I love. Let’s call it even, despite the fact that you’re so wrong not to recognize how weak many of these movies really are.

First, a disclaimer: For the purposes of this article, I’m focusing on films that either won major awards, rank highly in the IMDB Top 250 or AFI’s 100, or have a significant cult or fan following. Godfather 3 or Rocky V, for example, can’t be overrated, but most people already think they sucked. A second disclaimer: this article contains spoilers, so if you haven’t seen any of these movies, stop reading if you don’t want to read how some of them end. Finally, just because I call a movie “overrated” doesn’t mean it’s not a good, even a great, film. It just means that some of these films have gotten more of their share of acclaim than they deserve.

That said, some of these movies also flat out suck. Onto the list:

11. Fletch. A lot of people, myself included, still quote this movie often (”It’s all ball bearings nowadays!”) This 1985 Chevy Chase Comedy has a handful of memorable lines and funny moments. Fletch’s dream of playing for the Lakers, with a big bushy, white-man afro, and being interviewed by announcer Chick Hearn was endlessly amusing to me as a kid. But in between those memorable lines and short bits of goofiness, there’s not much of a movie here. The film’s producers clearly wanted to showcase Chase’s comedic silliness, but felt compelled to wrap it up in a conventional smart-but-unconventional-cop-gets-results storyline. For every one of Fletch’s great lines, there are three or four attempts that just don’t work. The guy is just a snarky wise-ass, in an early-’80s, Jack Tripper kind of way. Some comedies from the 80s hold up well, and they remain clever, entertaining, and funny. Fletch isn’t one of them — it’s half a dozen good lines, stretched out over 90 minutes of tedious, B-movie junk.

10. Crash. When I walked out of the theater having seen Crash, I thought maybe the movie was supposed to be some sort of parable. It was heavy-handed, unrealistic, and people didn’t talk like real human beings. We weren’t supposed to take this film seriously, were we? Still, it was trying to say something about race and culture and how we’re different, but separate, but connected, yet disconnected… and so on. I at least give the filmmakers credit for trying to look at some serious issues. But the movie oozed a sense of importance that it didn’t deliver. Some of the dialogue was unintentionally funny. The plot twists were manipulative and cheap. I was actually surprised that such a mediocre firm was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. I was stunned when it won, convinced it had to be the beneficiary of some odd vote-splitting list of nominees. Not only was it nowhere near the best film of 2005, let alone among the best movies in recent years. If you look at the nominees for Best Picture since 2000, I’m don’t think there’s a worse movie than Crash… maybe Gosford Park, but that’s only because Crash had Thandie Newton in it, and Gosford Park didn’t.

9. The Shawshank Redemption. Shawshank is on TNT approximately five million times a year. It is the second-highest rated film on IMDB, and it was nominated for seven Oscars. It is a movie that can make grown men cry. Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins deliver great performances. Thomas Newman’s original score is beautiful. It’s an engaging film about perseverance, friendship, will power, and hope.

But then again, does it really belong in the same company as Godfather, Godfather II, Schindler’s List, and other consensus top-ten films? Is it really one of the ten best films of all time? First off, the villain of the film, Warden Norton, is an incredibly cartoonish, two dimensional bad guy. He and Cal from Titanic could have a “pure-evil-for-the-sake-of-being-pure-evil” standoff. Aside from greed, we have no idea what made him who he was. The Warden is pure evil, and is willing to kill the prisoner who can help prove Andy’s innocence in cold blood. And yet, even though Andy is the one man who could expose him and all his criminal dealings, he doesn’t do the simplest thing and just kill Andy. Why not? Because Andy has to wind up hugging Red on the beach years later.

Secondly, think about the scene where Andy locks himself in a room and plays classical music over the loudspeakers to the rest of the prisoners, who stop in the courtyard and stare up in awe and wonder. Are you kidding me? The scene tries to be a powerful, emotional peak in the film, but it comes off as laughably implausible, even in the 1950’s.

Finally, the movie makes it a little too easy on the audience by giving it all the answers. Is Andy guilty? Does he really escape? Will he and Red ever meet up again? Nothing is left for the audience to wonder about, no ambiguity — everything is spoon-fed to the audience in tasty, happy-ending bites, right up to the final “hug on the beach” scene. Wait… this movie ends with happy people hugging on a beach? Yes it does.

8. Chicago. This won Best Picture? Seriously? It must be a musical thing. I don’t get it. How did this movie get an Oscar, but Saving Private Ryan and Letters from Iwo Jima didn’t? I take back what I said about Crash. Compared to Chicago, Crash is Citizen Fucking Kane.

7. Casablanca. Old Hollywood doesn’t get a free pass on this list. And perhaps the most overrated of the classic Hollywood films is Casablanca. AFI calls it the 3rd best film of all time. The IMDB 250 ranks it #8. Almost any list of the top ten films in history includes this Oscar-winning film. When people think of this movie, then tend to think of the famous lines: “Here’s looking at you, kid”… “Play it again, Sam”… “I’m shocked, shocked“… “We’ll always have Paris”… People also remember the look of the film: the glorious, rich black and white, with Humphrey Bogart smoking in the darkness. All of those things make this film a classic, but beyond that, the movie doesn’t quite live up its status as the best of the best. Does it really hold up after almost 70 years later as the highest achievement in filmmaking? I’d have to say no. Ultimately, I think nostalgia makes people give this movie more acclaim and praise than it deserves.

The acting, as was often the case in the 1940’s, is a bit campy and shallow. Bogart’s character is witty, sharp, and cynical, but he doesn’t seem particularly real. There’s a stage-play “acting” style to all the performances. Bogart’s role as Rick is far from his best work. He delivers dozens of quips, but they don’t seem like something a real person would actually say. The characters, aside from Rick and Ilsa, are mostly caricatures. Sam is a piano-playing black sidekick with no other human qualities, despite being one of Rick’s oldest friends. The Nazis in Raiders of the Lost Ark were more complex. The cynical Captain Renault is little more than a memorable bit of comic relief. And while I understand that some of this acting style was common at the time, but even for that era, the acting in Casablanca feels a bit thin. It’s a great story, but it often has the feel of a larger-than-life Broadway play more than a work of cinema. I respect this film, but if audiences watched it for the first time today, few would think the movie belongs in the top ten, even in the top twenty of all-time films. Just because a film is memorable, that doesn’t mean it is great.

6. Field of Dreams. I’ve seen people describe this as the “best baseball movie of all time.” Nonsense. It’s not even the best Kevin Costner baseball movie. It spends entirely too much time prattling on about the “poetry” of baseball and elevating the sport to some kind of mystical, magical form of art. This movie wants desperately to be the ultimate love-of-the-game baseball movie. Baseball is so incredible and magical, it will bring your dead father back to you! So I’m going to call the film’s sugary sentimentalism about baseball strike one. Strike two? This film pumped up Kevin Costner’s ego to dangerous levels and led to the American tragedy known as Waterworld. Finally, it’s obvious to me that this sentimental ode to “America’s pastime” helped inspire the intolerable Ken Burns’ 19-hour Baseball documentary series, which brought over-wrought baseball metaphors and poetry to a new height. That’s strike three. Next!

5. 2001: A Space Odyssey. AFI calls this movie the 15th best film ever made. Science Fiction fans often still speak of this 1968 movie with hushed reverence. The movie was a pioneering film in terms of visual effects that would evolve in the ’70s to make movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters possible. But it lacked the storytelling that made those later films great. In short, 2001 is a three-hour bore. With long, slow shots that go on pointlessly for minutes at a time, a meandering, confusing plot, and the lack of a single interesting human character, this film is a painful cinematic experience. Director Stanley Kubrick seemed more interested in showing what the future might look like in 2001 than in telling a good story. When the two most memorable characters from your movie are a monkey-man who finds a bone and a talking computer, it’s possible that your three-hour science fiction epic needed a lot of help.

4. Gladiator. I like this movie. It’s my favorite DVD for testing out and showing off how cool surround sound can be. It’s an entertaining action movie with a spectacular recreation of ancient Rome. Russell Crowe is memorable as Maximus. But seriously… how the hell did this win Best Picture? For all its entertainment value, it’s a bit like a comic book. The villain, Commodus, is a one-dimensional cartoon. What’s worse, in his famous exchange with Maximus in the middle of the Roman Coliseum (”I will have my vengeance…”), the two speak to each other in normal speaking voices, and yet half the crowd can hear the conversation, including Commodus’ sister, who is about 100 yards away. The movie also has the token black sidekick to the hero, the child actor who really needs a haircut, and a bunch of undeveloped characters that the audience is given little reason to care about. All that said, Gladiator was a fun, summertime, popcorn-crunching movie. I just have no idea how it was deemed the best film in the same year that Memento, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Traffic were released.

3. The Matrix. Matrix was a pretty good film, mixing an intriguing storyline, innovative special effects, and some memorable quotes. Countless movies have tried to imitate its funky style and cool action sequences. It sparked a lot of interesting philosophical conversations about fate, the nature of reality, and choice. It spawned more fan sites, videogames, and pop culture references than almost any film since. Not bad for a sci-fi action summer movie. But for a lot of people, especially younger filmgoers, this movie is their Star Wars. And while I like Matrix, it is a movie with a lot of glaring flaws.

First off, there’s Keanu Reeves, who has the emotional range of a cucumber and brings little to the movie other than a very appropriate look of befuddlement for most of the film. Whoa!

Second, if you think too much about it, the core premise of the movie doesn’t make much sense. If the “machines” are using humans for energy, who bother giving them an imaginary universe in which to live? Why not just treat them like some biological fuel source and let them all rot in a coma-like state, thinking about nothing at all? Wouldn’t that still provide them with the energy they are harvesting? Better yet, couldn’t they just harvest the energy from cows or other big mammals that aren’t so high maintenance?

Third, there’s the ending of this movie, in which Neo is dead until Trinity tells him she loves him, and that makes everything better. Hurray for love! Seriously — the writers seems to have gotten stuck trying to figure out how to revive Neo, and finally gave up. “Screw it,” they must have said, “let’s just say Trinity brings him back with a magic kiss! Genius!”

And finally, Matrix is a bit tainted by the less impressive and more confusing sequel Matrix: Reloaded and the terrible, I-wish-I’d-never-seen-it conclusion to the trilogy, Matrix: Revolutions. The final film was a wholly unsatisfying end to the series and the worst of the trilogy, leaving unresolved a lot of the biggest and most interesting questions raised in the original film. Once you see Revolutions and know that Neo isn’t going to really free his people from the Matrix after all, that Morpheus’ biggest hopes will never be fulfilled, the first movie looks a lot more like a big tease for a payoff that will never come.

2. Dirty Dancing. Since I don’t know many men who like this movie, this one’s for the women of the world to explain. This movie is always on cable. It seemingly has some new commemorative DVD every year. Almost every woman I know adores this film and has probably seen it dozens of times.

I honestly don’t know why this corny ’80s dance movie isn’t largely forgotten along with Grease 2. I just don’t get the appeal of this film on any level. I must be in the minority, but even at the time the movie was released, I thought the music sucked. Moreover, the star of the film is Patrick Swayze. That by itself should have killed this film.

The worst part of it all is the final scene, an excruciating dance sequence where an army of cheesy people dance off the stage and down the aisle of the theater to that unbearable “The Time of my Life‚” song. One writer described the final dance sequence in this film as “the most goosebump-inducing dance scene in movie history.” I’m not sure how many dance sequences induce goosebumps, but the only thing this one should have induced is laughter.

1. Scarface. This movie is #1 and it’s not even close. Not only is this easily the most overrated film of all time, it’s not even a good movie. It’s badly-acted, badly-written, violent crap. Aside from one early part of the film — the “‘chainsaw” sequence, which is extremely suspenseful and masterfully directed — Scarface is a terrible movie.

There is not a single character in this movie you can really care about. Al Pacino’s performance mostly consists of using a terrible, fake Cuban accent and shouting “fuck” every other word. This movie marks Pacino’s first real foray into loud over-acting. And while Pacino’s performances in the Godfather films, Serpico, and Glengarry Glen Ross are rich and complex, in this film, he deliver little more than a loud, two-hour Cuban caricature.

We also never learn why his wife, Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer) ever warms up to him. Like many of the characters in the movie, there’s no depth or complexity to her. She’s just another plot device to give Tony Montana reasons to scream and freak out.

Whenever Tony gets really angry, there’s a bizarre sound effect and a close up of his eyes that’s incredibly silly. It’s like something out of a bad kung fu movie.

The music in this movie is horribly dated —a terrible synthesizer-heavy sound that lived and died in the 1980s.

The movie is vulgar, violent, and bloody and almost all of it is gratuitous. Yes, it’s a gangster movie, so it’s going to have lots of violence, but great films about criminals or mob life find ways to make the audience identify with or care about the main characters.

Scarface is a shallow, ugly movie with few redeeming qualities. It doesn’t deserve a fraction of the attention and praise it has received over the years. It would be better if no one remembered it at all. And for that, it’s easily the most overrated movie of all time.

The problem is that not only do different desktop email clients like Outlook or Thunderbird render HTML email messages differently, popular webmail tools like Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail all rewrite, change, and alter your code to fit it within their web-based email application. Some disable CSS styles, some break any links to external stylesheets, and almost all of them will pick and choose between which CSS elements they will support, and which they will ignore.

But wait, it gets better — increasingly, thanks to Spam and security concerns, the default mode of many webmail clients is to block images from new recipients until a user opts to allow them.

So let’s review: there are countless email readers and applications out there. All of them will render your HTML email differently, supporting all or none of your CSS. In varying degrees they will all rewrite your code. And, quite often, your images won’t be viewable to the end user. Swell.

One solution might be to take Zeldman’s advice and stop using HTML email altogether. After all, email isn’t the web, so why try to treat it as if it were? Save design for web pages and keep email light, text-only, and simple.

But most of us have clients or bosses who already receive slick, cool-looking HTML email in their in-boxes. As consumers, they already see that some people are generating pretty, polished, stylized emails. They don’t care about coding and compatibility problems — they just want something cool, too. “Hey, if Apple can do it,” they say, not unreasonably, “why can’t we?”

Moreover, from a marketing perspective, many organizations find that well-designed HTML emails get higher open and click-through rates than text-only email.

So, it seems, the solution for designers who need to design HTML email is to create designs that work relatively consistently across platforms and email clients. Here are eight tips for making that happen:

1. Make Nice with Tables.

Most good web designers these days have turned away from the use of tables on layout, opting instead for usable, accessible CSS-based presentation and layout. However, with HTML email, a lot of these approaches won’t work. Almost every web-based email client will ignore or mangle CSS-based layout. Those carefully floated and positioned elements will wind up in entirely different places than you intend. The only way to ensure that things line up the way you want them to across the wide range of email clients is to use tables.

Yes, tables. It’s tough to accept, but tables are a necessary evil for HTML email. You don’t have to don’t go back to the worst of table-based layout techniques — spacer images, hacked up artwork, and endlessly nested code. But tables can provide basic structure, columns, and grids for laying out HTML email. It may be a bitter pill to swallow, but if Rocky could team up with Apollo, if Sarah Connor could learn to trust a Terminator, if Johnny Damon could play with the Yankees, you can learn to get along with tables again. You may feel dirty, but you’ll get over it, I promise.

2. Use CSS… just not too much.

Here’s the good news: you can use CSS to style content in HTML emails. But the bad news: you can’t use it too much. Campaign Monitor has an essential, comprehensive guide to which CSS elements work in various email clients, but here’s the Cliff Notes version: generally speaking, you can use CSS to format content, but don’t rely on it for layout. Use CSS to style font sizing and color. Use CSS for basic border and background background color effects. Use CSS to apply some simple padding and margin effects. Beyond that, you’re starting to ask for trouble. When I design an HTML email template, I generally use CSS to handle the presentation of body fonts, headers, and simple alignment and spacing.

3. Ignore the HEAD, focus on the BODY

An important rule to remember is not to link to an external stylesheet. Many email clients, desktop and web-based alike, are suspicious of an email linking to an external file. Some will completely ignore the attempt to import or link to an external CSS file. Moreover, many webmail clients will disregard any code put above the BODY element. So the key is to not only put your CSS style inline in your HTML, but to put it in the BODY of the email, not in the HEAD. With the annoying exception of Gmail, almost every email client will understand and render your inline CSS for basic styling, as long as you put it all in the BODY element.

4. Be smart with images.

Some rules of thumb to remember with images:

Always give images absolute, not relative, paths. Because your message is going to places you can’t predict, all of your images need to be linked with fixed, absolute paths.

Always use ALT tags. They’re not just for good usability and accessibility practices. If an email client has images turned off (and increasingly, email clients turn images off by default) you want them to be able to read a description of the image.

Always provide size attributes for images. If you specify HEIGHT and WIDTH for images, your layout will stay more intact, whether or not someone can see your images.

Before sending out an HTML email, always test it with images turned off. When you try to read the email without any images, does it still make sense? Can a reader still understand your message without the images showing up? If not, go back and rework the design so that, in a worst-case scenario, a reader won’t miss anything important if their reader refuses to display your images. A great tool for testing this is the Web Developer plugin for Firefox. If you don’t have it already, get it now.

5. Go Skinny and Top Heavy.

These days, web sites are getting wider, thanks to the popularity of big monitors and supertanker-sized laptops. But emails can’t afford to get so big. Most people still see email in smaller windows on their desktops. And many only see the top parts of emails, if they skim them through a “preview pane” in their email client. So when you design an email, it needs to be more narrow than many web pages, and it needs to have the most important stuff at the top. Generally-speaking, stick to a width 600 pixels or less when building an email. Anything wider, and a lot of readers will never see the right side of your design.

And if you want readers to see anything more than your logo or some big, pretty image at the top of your email, be sure to get to some real content within the top 200 or 300 pixels from the top of your email. The “preview pane” in Outlook, for example, might only let readers see the a 600 x 200 pixel preview of your message. If you don’t design well for that space, your readers may hit delete before ever bothering to scroll down and find out what you had to say.

6. Design for the Worst-Case Scenario.

Take time to design your email for situations where images or CSS may be turned off. If you haven’t already read Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design, order it now. Cederholm provides excellent techniques and methods for making design that is “bulletproof” to most potential problems. While of some Cederholm’s approaches won’t work in HTML email, his general principles are applicable. For example, if you have an image that might be blocked, be sure that there is a background color behind it that will maintain the general look of the page. Plan ahead.

Here’s another example. For one email template I built, we had a sidebar with a special header. To match a non-standard font from their branding, I used a graphic. But since I can’t guarantee that everyone will see this image, I need to make sure that an image-less or unstyled version of the same email will still convey the same basic information. I do this by wrapping an H5 tag around the image. Here’s the HTML:

<h5><img src=”[absolute path to image]/head-goodnews.gif” alt=”GOOD NEWS” width=”140″ height=”20″></h5>

The H5 has the following CSS applied to it:

h5 { font-size: 120%; color: #990000; margin: 0 6px 6px 0;font-weight:bold; border-top:solid #cccccc 1px; line-height: 1.8em;}

Viewed normally, all the H5 does is add a light gray line above the image. Since there’s no text there, it doesn’t need to apply font-sizing or color to anything. Interestingly, though, if the image is turned off, and it will still style the ALT text according to the H5 CSS. So, as you can see below, it will still make the header the right size and the right color. It won’t match the font I used in the image, but at least it will be a close approximate match, and it will still style the line above the header. Finally, if I turn off both the image and the CSS, the H5 still gives the ALT text the standard H5 styling, which is at least better than nothing:
This is just one example, but hopefully I’m making my point. The email should “gracefully degrade” by building it to communicate effectively, even if the CSS or the images get blocked.

7. Provide alternatives.

Your HTML email should always offer prominent links to two alternate versions of your message — a web-based version of the email and a text-only or mobile edition. If you want to make mobile web enthusiasts happy, offer a “mobile edition,” which is just simple HTML with basic content, links, and simple formatting (bold and italic). Yes, it’s more work, but you always want to give your audience a choice. Some people want no-frills text in their in-box, some will never unblock images in their email, but might click on a link to a web-based version of your message instead. And there are always blackberry-addicted readers out there who want to read your message, but need a cleaner, simpler edition. With a little extra effort, you maximize the chances that your audience will see your message. It’s OK if they decide how pretty it looks. Don’t write off any part of your audience because you demand they view your message in a certain way.

8. Test obsessively.

You can design an HTML email that looks wonderful on your screen and in your own email in-box, but that’s just the starting point. You can’t possible test for every email appication in existence, but you should definitely test as many of the major email applications as possible. If you don’t already have accounts with Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail, take a few minutes and set up test accounts. If you use Outlook primarily, download Thunderbird or another free email client as a secondary email application to use for testing.

One method I use is to make this simple is to set up a email group that includes all of my test accounts. When I have a draft, I send a test email to that group in one blast and lets me quickly check how everything looks.

Don’t be alarmed if Gmail looks the worst. Gmail, my email client of choice, is sadly weak in terms of supporting HTML emails and often ignores CSS styling that every other email reader handles beautifully. I hold out hopes that Google may improve on this in the future. But for now, I find that you can use the techniques listed above to get Gmail close to matching the design that other readers will see, but it can be tough to get it to match exactly without doing endless inline styling with font tags.

Finally, if you design on a Mac, be sure to test how things look on a Windows machine — fonts appear smaller on a Mac, so you don’t want to be surprised at how it looks on a PC. Macs are great, but they still make up less than 5% of the overall home computer market. It’s flat-out irresonsible and arrogant not to test on the platform that the vast majority of recipients will use when they get your email. There’s simply no excuse for not testing on a PC.

That’s it for now. This is really just scratching the surface, but hopefully it will save you some time trying to figure out why your HTML email design looks terrible in Hotmail or Yahoo. For more on HTML email design, including best practices and tips on marketing, check out the following:

• Campaign Monitor: Email Design Guidelines for 2008
• MailChimp: Email Marketing Guide
• Loren McDonald: 20 HTML Email Tips

In the meantime, let me know if you have any additional tips and suggestions if your own… HTML email design is an ever-evolving and changing practice. Start with best practices now and you’ll be ahead of the curve.

We’re immersed in a logo-rich environment, which makes it all the more baffling how major organizations and companies can have awful logos as their visual symbol.  It’s not like there aren’t plenty of examples out there for good logos.

Here are eight well known logos that bug the hell out of me:

Amazon.com.  I actually like Amazon’s primary logo. It’s kind of cool – “Amazon,” with a swooshy arrow going from the A to the Z.  So I get it: I can get everything from A to Z at Amazon.com.  And it kinda looks like a smile, which makes me happy when I buy something.  But my beef with Amazon’s logo is the abbreviated, swooshy-arrow logo they put on the side of any box you get from them:

Without the words, it’s just a huge, curved phallic symbol on the side of a box. Not so good. Once you notice that, it’s hard to look at a box from Amazon and not be a little freaked out.

American Lung Association. The American Lung Association does fine and noble work, existing to promote lung health and fight lung disease. But why the outdated, religious-looking logo? I suppose it has to do with tradition. The ALA was founded in 1904, primarily to fight tuberculosis. It adopted the Cross of Lorraine as its symbol, representing their "crusade" against tuberculosis. In 1904, I’m sure this symbol may have had wider appeal and meaning at the time, but that was 103 years ago. Their logo predates radio, television, and the Internet. Most people still had horses instead of cars when someone sketched out this logo, and he probably drew it with a quill feather pen in a log cabin, lit by a beeswax candle.

Today, if you look at their logo, it suggests that the organization is a Christian group, not one of the leading nonprofits in the fight against cancer. It’s a bigger, more influential group than it was at the turn of the last century. And just as it changed its name in from the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis to the American Lung Association, it makes perfect sense to change the logo to suit modern times.

The Buffalo Bills. Poor Bills fans: not only did they have to suffer through four Superbowl defeats in a row, but they now have to live with Dick Jauron as their head coach.  Worse still, they’re stuck with this stupid logo.

Seriously, what gives?  It’s a big blue buffalo, but there’s also some huge red laser beam coming out of its head. Or wait, did someone impale the buffalo with a huge red spear?  Perhaps this buffalo is already dead, and the logo is a top-down view of its carcass, spiked through the skull by red javelin? Come to think of it, that’s not really a bad visual metaphor for the state of Bill franchise. However you interpret the Bills logo, it’s not exactly an inspiring symbol for one of the NFL’s worst franchises.

The Cleveland Browns.  Let’s stick with the NFL for a moment.  As bad as the Bill’s logo is, at least someone made an effort at some point and decided to add the big red laser beam to the side of the buffalo.  They tried to create something. But what’s Cleveland’s excuse for this?

Their logo is a plain orange helmet. Correction, it’s not a logo, so much as it is an illustration of the Cleveland Browns actual helmet. Not even an effort to stylize a “C” or “B”.  Hell, they could have put a drawing of an angry-looking Jim Brown on the side of the helmet and it would be an improvement.  But no, it’s just a football helmet. And it’s orange.

Now if they put the image of the helmet/logo on the actual helmet, now THAT would be cool. It would be like one of those picture-in-a-picture that’s in a picture-that’s-in-a-picture illusions. Something like that might utterly confuse and distract an opponent. But it’s the lack of this kind of out-of-the-box thinking that had made the Browns one of the most pathetic teams in NFL history.

Radio Shack.  It’s bad enough you’re a technology store, supposedly promoting the newest, hottest gadgets and tech products. Yet you’re still saddled with the strange name “Radio Shack.”

Hmmm. Let’s unpack that a bit. Nobody really buys radios anymore and a shack isn’t the kind of place you’d go for the latest in high-tech gadgetry. So your brand name doesn’t suport your product or corporate identity. Ok, so maybe your logo can help express your modern, cutting edge hipness? Maybe not. Your logo is just thick, slabby letters with a red “R” to the right in a circle. Nothing that conveys sophistication, new ideas, or forward-thinking products. Ideally, Radio Shack would rethink it’s entire corporate identity, but barring that, they could at least re-work their logo to convey a better sense of cutting-edge, hip technology, rather than the place you go to get a power adapter

Toshiba.  Let’s stick with technology companies. Toshiba puts itself out to the world as a "world leader in high technology products." They make everything from computers to DVD players to high-def televisions. They boast more than 8000 employees in America alone. And yet, just look at that logo. It looks like an industrial warning sign. Here’s a company fighting for marketshare with Apple, Sony, and Dell, and their branding looks like it was left to someone with five minutes and Arial Black? If you’re trying to sell comsumers on the notion that you’re an innovator of high technology, it might help if your logo didn’t look like something worked up during the Nixon Administration.

Washington Wizards. I’m not going ot get into the sordid history of how the Washington Bullets became the Washington Wizards (ridiculously rigged contest), or even how the beloved mascot "Hoops" was replaced by the forgettable G-Wiz (an injustice I’ll never forgive), but the logo is probably the worst aspect of the Bullets/Wizards re-branding in 1995. It’s busy, complex, and it doesn’t make much sense. The "wizard" appears to be wind-surfing on a crescent-shaped basketball while clearly palming the ball — turnover, Washington. Meanwhile, he’s zapping himself in the head with some magical spell that’s shooting out of his right hand.

Northwestern. It saddens me to put the logo of my undergraduate alma mater on this list, but I have no choice. Just look at that thing. It’s been nearly two decades since I first stepped on the beautiful campus of Northwestern, and that logo looked cheesy and outdated then. And mind you, I was wearing pegged jeans, kung-fu shoes, and poofy over-moussed ’80s hair at the time. Styles change. The Northwestern logo is the design equivalent of a skinny leather tie or a oversized neon-yellow sweatshirt.

For some reason, the school won’t acknowledge that the goofy, space-age, blocky-modern “N” was never a very good concept to begin with. It looks like typeface that someone at Epcot Center would have picked to convey the “fantastic world of tomorrow.”

And then there’s the matter of the angry, four-fanged wildcat who appears to be upset and suffering due to the fact that it got its neck stuck in the bottom part of the N. It’s been at least two decades, and still, no animal control specialist has come to help him get out of that thing. Quite cruel, and quite sad.

Think Iron Chef, but for web designers, and with considerably less killing of live fish.

In essence it’s a geek Olympics!

The concept is simple. Web teams take each other on, at the same location, to build a complete website in 24 hours. No excuse, no extensions, no budget overruns…

Each competition will see a charitable organization selected to be the recipient of a fully functional website at the end of 24 hours. Emphasis will be placed on ensuring that, as far as possible, the charity will be able to leave with a website they can use immediately.

I love this concept.

The kickoff competition will pit Team Australia vs. Team New Zealand. Sounds like this may be the first of many Full Code Press competitions. Very cool idea.

Honorable Mention:

9. The X-Files.

7. The Simpsons.

5. Star Trek: The Next Generation.

3. Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

2. The Wire.

1. Six Feet Under.

With death as an over-arching theme in the show, there was always a looming reminder that life is short, often shorter than we expect. While that would seem like a depressing theme, ultimately Six Feet Under felt like an affirmation for living life as best you could. The closing moments of the fourth season embodied this key idea as David, who had recently experienced a horrible trauma, imagines a conversation with his late father:

Nate Sr.: You hang on to your pain like it means something. Like it’s worth something. Well, let me tell you – it’s not worth shit. Let it go! Infinite possibilities, and all he can do is whine.
David: Well, what am I supposed to do?
Nate Sr.: What do you think? You can do anything you lucky bastard – you’re alive! What’s a little pain compared to that?
David: It can’t be that simple.
Nate Sr.: What if it is?

That quiet exchange captured a simple, key message of the show: life it short, so make it count. Yes, maybe it is that simple.

After the five seasons of the series, you watched various characters struggle with big and small life decisions, and the consequences of those choices. And when it was all over, it was hard not to think about your own life  and wonder if it should be something different, something better.

Not bad for a TV show.

We’ve asked five questions. One single text line would have sufficed.

• 1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to.
• 1 most useful CSS-technique you use very often.
• 1 font you use in your projects very often.
• 1 design-related book you highly recommend to read.
• 1 design magazine you read on a daily/weekly basis (online or offline).

1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to.
Hierarchy of information. I’m amazed how often designers focus on the little details of design — typography, spacing, color — and lose sight of what their design is supposed to help communicate. All of those elements matter, of course, but often, designers lose track of a what reader or viewer needs to take away from the design — what key ideas or message they should remember from looking at a design. If a design leads a reader to focus on the wrong thing, or miss the most important piece of information on a page, than it’s an abject failure.

1 most useful CSS-technique you use very often
Sliding Doors. Gotta love elastic, accesible, stylized design elements.

1 font you use in your projects very often
Verdana. Give Verdana some love. Not fancy, not slick, but it’s universal, readable, and clean.

1 design-related book you highly recommend to read
Bulletproof Web Design. If I had to recommend one book to a web designer trying to learn the fundamentals of clean, accessible design, this would be it.

1 design magazine you read on a daily/weekly basis (online or offline)
Smashing Magazine. Every time I visit, there’s something new that’s either useful or inspirational. Great stuff.

Anyway, I highly recommend the site and the interviews. Meanwhile, somehow the panel organizers forgot to include your favorite friendly-neighborhood poker-playin’, mashup makin’, dog-walking designer. No worries. Here’s the “missing” Matt P answers to the “Design Workflows” questionnaire:

What are some things you do to help yourself into the state of mind necessary for creative work?
I need three things: a clean, tidy desk (random clutter really distracts me), some music (generally uptempo stuff like trance, club music, or film scores), and something to drink. I don’t smoke, so the drink gives me something to fiddle with when I’m thinking.

Do you follow a strict daily (or weekly, etc.) routine with regard to workflow, or is every day (or week) different?
I’m not very good with keeping a strict routine, but I generally try to tackle email, small design tasks, and relatively simple stuff at the start of the day, then focus on the bigger-picture items the rest of the day. Of course, deadlines and panicky people don’t always allow me the luxury of keeping to this routine.

Do you prefer to work in a closed, private environment free from other people and distractions, or in a more open, collaborative environment?
I’m kind of like Shrek. I vastly prefer to work alone, in my own quiet spot. I find the whole concept of an “open, collaborative environment” in the workplace to be an excuse for a lack of sufficient office space. I find it much harder to focus on a big project, especially one that demands creativity, with lots of other conversations, interruptions, and distractions. Collaboration is great, even essential, in creating most good design work, but working in a noisy, crowded workspace isn’t the same thing. I’m a bit of an introvert, too, so I tend to get a lot more done in quiet, private space than in an open workspace where there’s so much more traffic and interaction with other people.

What do you do to get your day(s) started in the right direction?
It’s hard for me to just sit down and be creative. I tend to work better at night, so for me it’s not as natural to have good, original, or creative ideas first thing in the morning. I like to have some “wake up” time before starting a day — walking the dog, listening to an uptempo playlist on my ipod, reading the newspaper, watching TV — letting my senses react to things that have nothing to do with design or work. By the time I get to my desk in the morning, my brain should be warmed up and buzzing with lots of other stimuli.

More importantly than all that, I also start almost every day with a cold blue Lo-Carb Monster. Coffee is lame.

What task management technique do you use?
I keep a to-do list in Basecamp. Each morning I update it, print it out, then highlight the priority items for that day. Sounds good, but I find that the less-urgent items on that list languish for long stretches at a time. Balancing short-term rush projects with long-term big-picture projects is always a challenging balancing act. With high hopes of establishing a more efficient task-management system, I’m reading Getting Things Done and Lifehacker right now.

What things tend to disrupt your workflow?
The usual suspects: non-essential emails, random office pop-ins, espn.com, other people’s phone calls and conversations, IM’s from co-workers. I also have to fight off my urge to check news sites and catch up on what’s going on in the world. As an information junkie, as well as a news, politics, and pop culture geek, it’s hard to fight the urge to check the latest headlines every hour.

What previous experiences have influenced your workflow?
Sometimes I’ve worked like hell on a project for months, and it ultimately got killed. Other times, I have spent two hours on something that I wasn’t totally sold on, but that other people loved and re-used in dozens of different ways. The lesson I’ve learned from this is that the quality and impact of a design isn’t always correlated with the total time you put into it. So often when it comes to design, you have to do the best you can on a project within a limited timeframe and budget and live with it. I’ve never finished a project and thought it was "perfect." But more often than not, I’ve worked on something to the point where I can feel generally positive about it and say "hey, that’s pretty good." Usually, when I get to that point, it’s time to shift focus to the next thing.

What other disciplines influence the way you work?
As a writer, I learned early on the value of being clear and concise, and the importance of stripping away nonessential junk. My high school journalism instructor relentlessly crossed out needless words in my writing. She eliminated almost every adverb I used. She hammered into me the concept that more isn’t better. I apply a lot of that to my approach with design. I hate graphics or visuals that exist only as ornaments. Every element of a design should be meaningful in some way and should help communicate information. If it doesn’t, why is it part of the design?

Is there anyone in particular you have learned from?
I’ve probably been influenced by more designers than I can possibly remember. I always notice great magazine ads, cool movie posters, clever TV spots, or an interesting logo. But as far as specific influences go, early on, I learned a lot from the work of designer Robin Williams. I learned half of what I know about Flash from the gurus over at Kirupa.com. More recently, I’ve been deeply in debt to the work of Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, Charles Wyke-Smith, and Andy Clarke, whose books really helped open my eyes to the possibilities of CSS web design. Someday, I hope someone can say they learned a lot from some of the things I designed or wrote.

What things help keep you focused on the work at hand?
A strong, deep, irrational idea that I’m fooling everyone and need to prove myself all over again with my next project.

Anyone read Japanese?

It’s not an original sentiment, but I’m always amazed how global the Internet is. I make a mashup in Washington D.C., which gets played on a podcast based in England, which catches the ear of a listener in Japan who links to it from his site… And then who know where it goes from there… Is some kid on a Tokyo or London subway listening to it on his ipod right now? I’ll never know…

On a related note, I’ll be adding an audio section to the new site soon… In the meantime, check out my other bootlegs and mashups here on the old page… I’ve got two or three unfinished bootlegs in the works that I hope to post soon…

My Jedi powers are weak, but growing…

Technically, the piece is very well done. The video clips on the monitors, taken directly from the Hillary Clinton’s campaign web site, are desaturated to give them a bleak, ominous look. Her voice is echoed to make it sound broadcast from loudspeakers. Phrases from her speech are overlaid on the screen like lines of propaganda — “we are having a conversion” suddenly seems like an ominous piece of Orwellian doublespeak. The Obama logo on the woman’s shirt curves and folds naturally with the fabric as she runs.

Thematically, it has a simple message — Obama is to Hillary what the Mac was to the PC in the ’80s: different, innovative, and liberating. Obama, the ad suggests, stands for big changes, while Hillary stands for more of the same.

So it came a bit of a surprise to me to hear that the creator of the ad, Phil de Vellis, previously anonymous, was fired from his job at Blue State Digital last week.

de Vellis, who did the ad privately, on his own time, had a clear conflict of interest, since his company was also responsible for building Obama’s campaign web site. Still, the reaction of all seemed a bit out-of-proportion to the impact of the ad. Blue State digital publicly disavowed itself from the ad and de Vellis, as did Obama’s campaign.

After being fired from Blue State Digital, de Vellis defended his work on the Huffington Post, arguing he was proud of the ad and its message that “Obama represents a new kind of politics, and that Senator Clinton’s “conversation” is disingenuous…. The underlying point was that the old political machine no longer holds all the power.”

I’m familiar with the tricky spot de Vellis faced. My day job in Washington D.C. is political. I design for a high-profile nonprofit organization that takes a variety of political positions, but does not expressly advocate for any particular candidates. Every employee is given training and instruction on how to keep our work within the boundaries of election and tax laws. Almost everyone I know in D.C. that works in the political realm has to to be aware of the thin line between what’s allowed and what isn’t. Even if he did this ad on his own time, without the knowledge of his co-workers, surely he had to have some inkling that it might spark a bit of controversy, given his day job.

“Vote Different” is many things — clever, polished, irreverent — but it’s not an “attack ad.” But three things still trouble me about de Vellis losing his job over doing a great ad in his own time.

First, even for those of us who work in Washington D.C. and have political jobs, outside of our careers, we’re still citizens. We still have the right of free speech. We still have the right to express ourselves politically. de Vellis created a clever, memorable video that conveyed his sense about the state of the Democratic Party’s nomination race, and for doing a great job and creating something that got millions of people’s attention, he wound up without a job.

Secondly, the “Vote Different” mock ad wasn’t a vicious smear like the Swiftboat Veterans ads. “Vote Different” is many things — clever, polished, irreverent — but it’s not an “attack ad.” It associates Obama with the novelty and “coolness” of the Mac brand, and the notion of change, while tying Hillary to the cold, gray politics of the past and present. It certainly does not show Hillary in a flattering light, but neither does it demonize her in the manner of typical political ads. In too much of the media and buzz surrounding this video, like this article on NPR, the ad is described as if it was a hatchet job on Hillary. Every two years, airwaves are filled with crass, misleading, distorted political attack ads — this wasn’t one of them and shouldn’t be discussed as if it were.

Finally, there was just something disappointing about how quickly the establishment ran from this ad as fast as it could. Within a day of the ad’s creator being exposed, Blue State Digital fired the creator and Obama’s campaign disavowed it.

I suppose they had to, for a variety of reasons, but it would have been refreshing — “different” maybe — if Obama or Blue State would have just said, “we didn’t know about this ad, but now that we do, we think it’s cool as hell and we love it.”]]> http://mattmedia.net/2007/03/24/cool-ad-youre-fired/feed/ 0 http://mattmedia.net/2007/03/14/eight-cool-and-three-lame-things-i-discovered-at-sxsw-07/ http://mattmedia.net/2007/03/14/eight-cool-and-three-lame-things-i-discovered-at-sxsw-07/#comments Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:42:51 +0000 Matt http://mattmedia.net/blog/2007/03/14/eight-cool-and-three-lame-things-i-discovered-at-sxsw-07/ SXSW Interactive is a great place to discover interesting new stuff. This year was no exception. It’s also a good place to discover stuff you’d rather never see again.

Eight cool things (in no particular order)

1. Cupcakes Take the Cake. I wound up sitting next to the blogger behind this on my flight out of Austin. An impressive dedication to the art of the cupcake…
2. Jamglue.com. Online, web-based mash-up, remixing software. Flippin’ sweet.
3. Doris Haddock. Not sure how I didn’t already know about her, but Doris “Granny D.” Haddock, subject of the new documentary, Run Granny Run, is an amazing woman. A lifelong activist, she walked across America at the age of 88 to raise support for campaign finance reform. At 94, she ran for Senate in New Hampshire against incumbent Republican Judd Gregg, debated him on live TV, and without any television advertising or support from the Democratic Party, managed to get nearly 40% of the vote.
4. Designing for Vertical Rhythm. There’s a lot I don’t know about web typography, but I’m learning…. Very, very geeky stuff, but fantastic!
5. babble.com. From the people who brought you nerve.com, a “magazine and community for the new urban parent.” Well designed, funky, and interesting. I’m not “a new urban parent” yet, but when I am, I can see myself getting into this site.
6. Getting Things Done. I’m pretty sure that at most of the design sessions I was at over the weekend, a) I was the only one without a Mac notebook, and b) I was the only one who hadn’t read or even heard of this book. It seems odd to me that all these rocks stars of the web design community are keen to get time management tips from a guy in a suit and tie, but whatever… I’ll give it a read.
7. Beatport.com. Kinda like iTunes, but for DJ-types and wanna-be mash-up artists, and all the tracks you download are unprotected .mp3s or .wavs.
8. Whataburger. Not as good as In-n-Out or Carl’s Jr. or Fatburger, but better than most places on the East Coast…

… and three lame things

1. Twitter. People at SXSW were into this like crack-covered cheese-fries. I tried it for four days and got strangely addicted to receiving moronic text messages on my cell phone from strangers. It was like the worst, most vapid blog posts in the universe, beamed directly to my phone every 20 or 30 min. If I was a sixteen year old girl, I might think this was a cool idea, but I’m a grumpy old man. No thanks.
2. ChaCha.com. Here’s how it works: I ask a question, hit search, and then the search goes to some other live person, at another computer, who then uses Google or some other search tool to try and give me an answer. What a dumb idea. My brother and I tried it, though, because some PR person was pimping it at a bar and had a scantily-dressed hottie with him, handing out buttons. I stumped ChaCha by asking “how do you play pocket tens out of position in no-limit holdem?” ChaCha’s search assistant took about ten minutes, made idle conversation, and finally said he had no answer. Meanwhile, I found this answer in about five seconds via Google….
3. Austin Pizza. Imagine the worst pizza you’ve ever had, then imagine it soggier, with stranger-tasting sauce and more rubbery cheese. It was like that, only a little worse.

My goals for this new version of mattmedia were threefold:

1) Rebuild the site with usable, accessible, clean HTML and CSS. When I first created the flash-based mattmedia years ago, I was doing a lot more Flash than web work, so it just seemed the right way to go at the time. And back then, Flash sites were still much more fashionable. But over time, I realized that for a number of reason, it was a horrible way to go. The site wasn’t very accessible, it was hard to update, and it had no dynamic content. Over time, it just became irrelevant, other than to supplement my resume.

2) Expand the function and focus of the site. The old mattmedia site was a pure portfolio site, lots of whooshing and sliding around with my work so people could browse things I had created. While this site will still serve that purpose, I’m hoping this relaunch of mattmedia will allow me to add to that more discussion and commentary on design in general, along with an occasional foray into rambling about other non-design topics.

3) Provide a better showcase for HTML and CSS. Now that most of my work involves web site design, it seems more fitting that my portfolio site should feature clean, usable HTML and CSS. Four years ago, a Flash-based site helped showcase my Flash skills at the time, but hopefully, this site will do the same for my more recent focus on web design work. I still do a lot of Flash, and will be doing some exciting Flash-based stuff for work this year, but it’s no longer my primary focus.

As of the launch, there are still a lot of rough edges here. In coming weeks, I’ll be refining the site a lot — opening up commenting, getting the RSS feeds running, adding content features, refining some of the styling, and expanding the depth of the portfolio and resources section. And I’ll keep writing new content. So bookmark this page and come back soon… Going forward, this place will be much more worth return visits. ]]> http://mattmedia.net/2007/03/08/mattmedia-30/feed/ 0 http://mattmedia.net/2007/03/07/five-thoughts-about-the-usa-today-redesign/ http://mattmedia.net/2007/03/07/five-thoughts-about-the-usa-today-redesign/#comments Wed, 07 Mar 2007 14:27:33 +0000 Matt http://mattmedia.net/blog/2007/03/07/five-thoughts-about-the-usa-today-redesign/ USA Today relaunched it’s site this week with a new look and a new set of interactivity and community-building tools. Yep, someone poked USA Today with the Web 2.0 stick.  But does does it work?

Here are my five quick takes:

1. A Newspaper as an interactive community?  On the new USA Today site, the biggest change is the addition of a host of interative, community-building tools.  Readers can not only post comments on news pieces, recommend stories, and rate other people’s comments.  Moreover, you can set up a profile, post your photo, keep track of other readers, and even blog on the site itself.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these things, but do most users that come to a news site want to read what other readers have to say about a news story?  Do most readers really want to create buddy lists of other readers on a given site?  Is it worth re-arranging the whole design and layout of your site to make interaction the central focus of your site?  Ultimately, shouldn’t a newspaper’s web site should be about delivering its professionally-written content to the widest possible audience?  All the extra gadgets and features are cool, but if they interfere with easy navigation, reliable content, and access to good content, why bother? Yahoo News is just a click away…

All the extra gadgets and features are cool, but if they interfere with easy navigation, reliable content, and access to good content, why bother? Yahoo News is just a click away… 2. Thumbnails as navigation?  Prior to the redesign, USA Today’s design was simple and effective — clear navigation, color themes by section, and a rotating multi-header for top stories.  In the new design, they top story space has been replaced with a odd experiment of image-based links.  To the left of the top story, there are four thumbnail images that a user can hover over to preview one of the other top stories. But there is no text to help the user understand what the preview is about, or what the link goes to. A reader has to guess what a postage-stamp sized thumbnail is about and hover over it to get more of a hint.  Is this really a step forward in navigation?  Is USA Today really trying to make finding stories a game?  Cute idea, but not really a design change that benefits readers.

3. Comments above all?  As part of USA Today’s new embrace of reader interactivity, the redesign took a prominent spot at the very top of the page that previously linked to a rotating series of stories and replaced it with a box that highlights, in big text, excerpts of comments from readers.  Visually, it is saying that user comments are as important as any of their stories. The decision to use valuable “above the fold” pixel space for glorifying random comments is a questionable one to begin with, but it’s poorly executed, either way. The widget of rotating quotes shows part of a comment and identifies the author, but doesn’t show what article they are referring to.  Again, you have no idea what it links to. You have to guess what something like “beware of the channels you use to share ideas” means.  Of course, if you click on the comment quote, it will take you to the story in question.  But again, is navigation by guesswork and curiosity really an improvement in design?

4. Icons overload? On the new site, every story now sports icons and numbers that show the number of comments and recommendations for a given article.  It’s a lot of visual clutter.  Seems like USA Today really wants to be the mainsteam media’s Digg or Fark.  But is that their real audience?  My guess is that unlike the tecnho-geeky audience of many news-aggregator sites, USA Today has a lot of older reader who will be a bit baffled by all the funny-looking icons and numbers near every headline. 

5. “A” for effort, “D” for Delivery.  As you can tell, I’m not sold at all that a newspaper should try to fashion itself as some kind of massive, mainstam blog.  But give them credit, they didn’t go at this half-heartedly — it’s clear from the redesign that USA Today now sees reader interactivity as the biggest function of its web site.  In the long run, maybe this will boost USA Today’s traffic and it will become a model for other online magazines and newspapers. 

Or maybe not. 

Ultimately, whether  or not the new focus on reader participation is a good idea, design-wise, I think it’s a mess.  They’ve taken a clean, easy-to-navigate site and made it harder to use. They’ve made such a push for comments, that they’ve buried some of their content to make room for quotes from random readers. If they really think readers are coming to their site to see what other readers are saying, great.  But if most readers are coming to read professional journalism, they’ve done those readers a disservice in the name of “progress”. 

So SXSW rocks.  For starters, there's snow on the ground right now in Washington, D.C.  Austin is in the '70s…   

SXSW 2004 exposed me to some of the best and brightest in the design community. I met a lot of people who were doing interesting, creative, and challenging design work.  Many of the most impressive people I met got where they were only after some gory layoff or dot-com career injury. Hearing so many people's stories of moving from dreary, unrewarding work to something better inspired me to put in my notice when I got back to Washington. One month later, I had jumped from the corporate to the nonprofit sector, kissed half my salary goodbye, but woke up every day to a more exciting, rewarding career.  It wasn't the easiest move to make, but it was the best career move of my life.  And SXSW '04 was a big part of nudging me off the end of the diving board and letting me see that the water below was fine.

SXSW 2005 helped me sink my teeth further into some smarter approaches to web design, Flash, CSS, and interactive community building. Again, the conference gave me a boost that fueled a lot of innovative work I tried to do for People for the American Way.   

Finally, it's always rewarding to be around smart, clever, creative people.  Yeah… those guys, plus my brother, too. 

Here’s what I love. Fundamentally, the logo is clean, simple and modern. It has obvious visual references to classic American flag imagery, but I think it goes beyond that.

The icon is an “O” for Obama, but it’s a rich symbol, with an arch of blue that curves over a red-striped base. In the middle, the white space of the “O” has a slight glow around it. Is is a sunrise? Is it bright light shining over the horizon of red-striped land below? The symbol suggests a positive, hopeful coming together of “red” and “blue”, evoking a famous passage from his 2004 DNC speech:

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too.

We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states…

We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

Usually, a campaign icon is a dull, generic graphic — some red or blue, a few stars, and maybe some big, slab serif typeface to suggest strength and power. Obama’s logo is warm, bright, and uses a simple, effective symbol to convey some of the core ideas his campaign represents.

Not bad for starters….]]> http://mattmedia.net/2007/03/02/obamas-logo/feed/ 0