Monthly Archives: October 2012

"A Presentation App That Forces You To Tell Better Stories"

Haiku Deck takes an interesting editorial approach—refusing to support bullet-point lists & instead emphasizing imagery that it helps you find. According to Fast Company,

Using [Haiku Deck] is fiendishly simple: You enter a few keywords of text onto a slide, and the app searches a database of over 35 million Creative Commons images that suit your subject… Finding that compelling image for you, Tratt says, is one of Haiku Deck’s key achievements. “People spend a ton of time doing this manually … so we thought we could really delight our users if we made the process just happen automagically, and then embed the Creative Commons attribution right in the deck.”

After you pick your image, your text is automatically formatted nice and big to fill the screen. A handful of themes offer quick ways to customize your fonts and apply photo filters throughout.

USA Today's (crazy?-)bold new logo

USA Today has rebranded with what’s almost the most minimal logo one can imagine: a pure blue circle. The press release states, “USA TODAY’s logo was redesigned to be as dynamic as the news itself. The logo will be a live infographic that can change with the news.” Armin Vit provides lots of details & perspective at Under Consideration. Here’s a taste of how the logo evolves:

I also enjoyed Stephen Colbert’s somewhat less appreciative take: