Simply Google

John Maeda of Laws of Simplicity fame has created an official theme for iGoogle.  iGoogle constructs a homepage for your browser much like yahoo provides.  It is an interesting theme of shapes and colors that change each time you access it.  Probably too much color for me but I am going to live with it for a while to see if it grows on me.  Thanks to Len Accardi of my University of Pennsylvania HCI class for calling my attention to this.

One suggestion on studying Maeda's Laws of Simplicity .  Although the web page is a great place for discussion and listing of the laws, you have to read the book with Maeda's commentary to get the full impact of his study of simplicity.  One particularly discouraging comment of a student in one of my classes was why not just list the laws rather than requiring the book.  One really has no chance of getting what Maeda's is trying to accomplish without reading his book and commentary regarding the laws.

His book will definitely make my Valentine's Day list of books to suggest to your significant other as potential Valentine's gifts for yourself.

Later!

Comments

[Gregg Vesonder]

As i experiment with the theme a bit - it changes according to the time of day - anxious to see what it will be tonight.

[jmoiron]

Sounds similar to RedHat/Fedora's new (as of core 8) desktop background theme, which changes slightly once per hour to reflect time time of the day, transitioning between colors evocative of dawn, day, dusk, and night. You can see the images here:

http://people.redhat.com/duffy/artwork/infinity-24/

Or read a bit more on the effort:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/F8Themes/Infinity/Round3Final

[Tochi Iheagwara]

While I do like the iGoogle home pages (colors and all), it has not been intuitive for me in pulling related news feeds for the tabular page setup. For example, If I would like to look at feeds related to my companies news that is making headlines. Perhaps I need to spend more time figuring out key words and the like, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of its 'convenience' in a browser?

[Software Testing Services]

Google is most popular search engine. I love to work on it. One can also change the look of homepage and change according to his or her own choice. Also there are several add-ons available to make it attractive.