After working out a partnership with Newsbreak and months of working under the covers, ABS-CBNnews.com has finally unveiled their new and improved website, which features a boatload of new features such as:

• Better and cleaner user interface (less ads too)!
• Dynamic, AJAX-driven content panels
• Kyte powered streaming video feeds
• RSS feeds
• Content search
• Search engine friendly URLs

While some of these features already existed in the old site, it is definitely a huge improvement. Below are screenshots of the old site vs the new one:

Old design:

New design:

With this, it looks like ABS-CBN is finally geared up to go head to head with GMANews.TV and Inquirer.Net, its top competitors.

Inquirer.Net (currently #1):

GMANews.tv (currently #2):

The status quo remains unchanged according to Alexa.com. Only time will tell though, as the new site was just recently launched.

Note that these results may slightly be inaccurate, as there exists two URLs http://news.abs-cbn.com/ and http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/

Can this be considered a successful re-launch? Other bloggers appear iffy. What do you think?

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It seems like a lot of Philippine banks are into rebranding lately, in a Web 2.0-ish fashion. There’s UCPB, BDO, UnionBank, Metrobank and now Bank of the Philippine Islands or BPI.

The rebranding, in my opinion, is a success. They managed to make the font look up-to-date without loosing the class of the old logo.

Lately I’m really loving the font they used. It is very modern and sleek. The problem is, I don’t know the name of the font. Whoever correctly identifies the font wins a cookie.

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Found some very nice designer country logos. Check them out (Click on the thumbnail below):

The original post is in Spanish(?), so I don’t really know who to to give credit to. No Philippines in the list, though

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Today is a sad day.

Gone is the proud old big G boxed in red, blue, and green. It has been replaced by the second g in the Google logo, boxed by a hideous Web 2.0 wannabe rounded box:

It seems like a very minor change. After all, who looks at these icons, right? Wrong. I like to open search results on a separate tab, and before I could always locate the Google tab immediately. But today I hesitated a couple of times as I tried to find the right tab: Where the hell is it? It was then that I noticed the small “g”, unnoticeable and shy, hidden amongst my grayish tabs like it didn’t want to be seen.
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Somebody sent this to me before. I lost the link and tried hard to find the link again. Luckily berg of PW posted the site on the forums. Taken from: http://logologos.blogspot.com/

Electrolux

Quaker

Apple

Wikipedia

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Smart Communications, Inc., a subsidiary of PLDT and one of the top 2 mobile telecommunications providers in the Philippines, is now among the rebranders of 2008. The difference is subtle yet fairly noticeable even to non-designers.

The old “S” now appears blocky compared to the smooth contour of the new “S”. Gone is the bold blue, replaced with a subdued, more saturated sky blue. The black jagged lines (”radio waves”) are replaced by straight swishes of the same sky blue color. A similar swish is enlarged at the bottom, emphasizing the word “SMART” to complete the effect.

Old logo:

New logo:

What do I think of the rebranding? I think it looks nice and makes for very “clean” designs, but it lost some of the boldness and professionalism of the old logo.

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When Boss Greg directed me to the AsiaPac website, boy was I surprised. For a moment I sat there wondering if my eyes were playing tricks on me. The site looked almost like the old CODESIGN Studios website, which I designed in 2005. See below for a comparison (click on the thumbnails for full image)

CODESIGN Studios (2005)

- VS -

Asiapac Net Media Ltd (2007)

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So there I was wide awake at 2am due to the insane heat (or was it because the 1 1/2 cups of freshly brewed black Folger’s coffee that I had for dinner?) I was thinking of what to do when out of the blue I decided to work on the CODESIGN Studios website. It is long overdue for a redesign and I had been playing around with some ideas over the last few weeks but I could never seem to get satisfied. So what the heck, I thought. I’m going to come up with a simple, one-page layout and use it, or it will probably take me another decade before any redesign takes place. So I focused all my energies and this was the result:

Total hours: 4-6 (from ~2am to ~6am)
Home page design, HTML and CSS development, plus a minor color change in the logo (importing from Corel Draw -> Adobe Illustrator messed up with the original color profile, so I recolored the logo instead)

I need sleep. Badly.

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Stumbled upon a site called Designing The News while browsing Bryan Veloso’s blog. The author plays around with typography and similar visual elements to enhance “news” (aka text) and give it a visual flair.

His “Week of the Guardian” series is particularly interesting. I have special interest in the following entries:

“Wednesday”

“Thursday”

“Friday”

The rest of the series can be found below:

• Monday - A typographic and layout based piece previewing the contents of the paper as ingredients.
• Tuesday - A list of headlines contained in the paper illustrated with references to the article or subject.
• Wednesday - A polar graph inspired layout mapping the stories and categories on colour coded concentric circles.
• Thursday - A content map showing the relationships between information inside of a circular container.
• Friday - A text heavy piece highlighting the sheer amount of information contained within in the paper.
• Saturday - A grid based typographic piece, showing patterns and author relationships through the paper.

For more, head over to Designing In The News

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I have recently finished reading Dan Brown’s famous novel Angels and Demons, and as a result, I have stumbled upon the official website of the famed ambigram designer, John Langdon. Incidentally, he is the real person from whom the lead character, Robert Langdon was named after.

Inspired by this style of design, I came up with my own ambigram in one of my logo design projects. The logo below is supposed to read “La Neke”. As you can see, it is still in its conceptualization stage, which starts with a sketch.

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