Using Apple’s recent release of Leopard as an example, Scott Stevenson discusses how user interface design isn’t always a logical process backed up with user research and rigourous thinking. Sometimes it’s just because people need to feel new stuff is ‘new’.

Today saw the launch of the site we created for the Thai Woman’s Organisation (TWO). Set up by a group of Thai housewives 20 years ago, TWO is now an official organisation and registered charity that provides essential help and advice to Thai people coming to live in the UK. With the difficulties associated with living in what to them is a foreign country increasing in complexity - be they linguistic, cultural or legal - the website is sure to offer valuable assistance to the help TWO provides.Although a small project for FoxLand it was a challenging one because most of the website uses a Thai font. It was a test of the simple and intuitive content management system we used, WordPress, and a big test for our designer. I’m glad to say both passed with flying colours.

The Functioning Form blog summarises a talk by Liz Danzico about web design ‘rules’ that don’t stand up and should be seen as ‘considerations’.

Call it the influence of MySpace or a reaction to the slick clean design status quo, but the Creative Review blog discusses what it is (possibly) calling “The New Ugly”. The most high profile example of this is, of course, the Olympics 2012 logo.

Milissa Tarquini in Boxes & Arrows discusses the myth of the fold. One of the great false truisms in the field of web design is that users don’t like going ‘below the fold’ - the area on a web page that users would have to scroll down to see. Happily for designers, there is no evidence to support this myth.

Facebook seems to be everywhere at the moment. Everyone suddenly seems to be using it, it’s all over the newspapers and television news, and weblogs debate whether it is the new MySpace/Google/Microsoft/AOL. Recently there has been talk of Facebook bankruptcy and fatigue, but while the discussion is interesting, we love it here at FoxLand where it seems to have taken over from email, texting, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and instant messaging. And that’s only in the last 2 months or so that we’ve used it.

We are delighted that one of our clients, world leading search marketing agency Latitude, had a successful launch of their updated search engine optimisation product recently - Latitude Organic.

Working closely with Latitude’s marketing team we developed the logo and brand for Latitude Organic, along with the design for the website and some additional marketing collateral.

Getting a website to naturally appear in the top rankings of search engine listings is an extremely difficult and time-consuming discipline. However, it’s a discipline that Latitude’s team of experts seem to excel at.

Our challenge was to design a logo and website for Latitude Organic that successfully communicates this expertise. We therefore developed something that was both natural looking with a human focus and that suggests a positive upward movement - in line with the service Latitude Organic offers for its customers.

Sometimes, change is not welcome, and ‘feature creep’ can be a real risk to a product and brand. Allen Salkin in The New York Times discusses an issue that also effects how we change and evolve websites (via Daring Fireball).

While working with People’s Archive, we’ve investigated various video hosting sites, such as YouTube, Vimeo, etc. LifeGoggles has a great page making it easy to compare their embedded players and the quality of their video.

Using Web 2.0, Steve Jobs and the iPhone as prime examples, Bruce Nussbaum in Businessweek argues that rather than just employing designers, CEOs should be designers.

TPdb (Targeted Proteins Database) is a project we have been working on since September 2006 and we are finally able to begin to reveal some of its features and design. The first fruit of our work is a marketing tool, called “What is TPdb?”. It includes various screenshots of the application’s interface, as well as descriptions of what it does and how.

A post from Lines & Colors, a blog about artists and illustrators, on the frustration of many artist’s websites, but there are many points that ring true for anyone.

Along with a whole host of new tidbits about upcoming software at their WWDC, Apple also relaunched their website. Not only have they updated their rather tired looking global navigation, there is a huge range of effective Ajax-style elements that (mostly) add to the usability of their site. Their (possibly Google-powered - if you check their code) search is a particularly nice example which offers popular shortcuts even before you’ve pressed return. The amount of work and attention-to-detail that has gone into this is very impressive.

It’s great seeing such debate about the 2012 logo out there on the web. All the usual arguments are being trotted out, but one of the best pro-arguments can be found at Coudal. Worth a read.

In case you’ve somehow missed the furore - the new Olympics 2012 logo has been revealed. It was devised with help from Wolff Olins (a company some of us have worked with in the past), and they are in the midst of a huge wave of controversy.

We are split as to how we feel about the logo. Some of us dislike it, seeing it as clumsy and patronising in its attempt at appealing to the ‘MySpace’ generation. There was an extreme example of cognitive dissonance in the sight of Seb Coe announcing the logo in a suit and tie. It is like a logo for a nu rave band, the scene of the moment, and it may well feel dated within 6 months.

That said, it is rare for such a high profile logo to be so bold and look so (no other word for it) bonkers - so much so, it would be great if we all ended up loving it. The thinking behind it is solid, and it would have been dull for the logo to have been a polite tasteful design that as Coe put it, would have comfortably sat on corporate polo shirts. A logo is not the brand, so it will be interesting to see how it develops over the years.

Update: Worthwhile further discussion about the logo can be found at Speak Up.