Blamblog - Brett Lamb's Blog

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Something Bad, Something Good

The Globe Redesign Reconsidered
I picked up a copy of the Globe & Mail the other day, hoping that my initial reaction was simply 'the shock of the new'. Sometimes our initial reactions to things are overly-positive, sometime a bit too negative. I was expecting the latter to be the case ...

Instead, the redesign left me even more disappointed. The initial shock had worn off and I spotted deeper problems with the redesign such as the column widths. The new columns are so narrow, sometimes there are as few as two and a half of a hyphenated word on a line. The lack of balance between the column width and the font size with right-ragged alignment makes some articles really difficult to read.

The other thing that really annoyed me was the treatment of the editorial cartoon. The cartoon used to be an element of the page layout and was allowed lots of space ... the issue I picked up had the cartoon squished between two heavy, horizontal lines. Instead of being a key element of the page layout, the cartoon is presented as just filling another content slot.

I can't stand seeing the Globe on the newsstand anymore; I can't believe the mess they've made of it. The fact that they didn't even bother to come up with a new nameplate that matches the redesign just shows how arbitrary the whole thing was.

Casino Royale
I borrowed my brother's DVD copy of Casino Royale and watched it the other night. I'd pretty much given up on Bond films, they seemed like a Cold War relic that didn't translate to the new era. But this new flick restarts the series in grand fashion and suggests that it might even be possible to do a really good one.

Daniel Crag makes a great Bond and stripping out gadgets and cheese and Russians really made the movie seem fresh. The movie looks damn hot and David Arnold's latest John Barry-inspired score makes it feel like a Bond flick without being nostalgic.

The only sour point is a weak opening credit sequence. The song is forgettable and the graphics look like a good idea that they weren't able to pull it off (kind of like the Globe redesign!).

There you go, I watched a video and read the paper ... pure excitement!

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