IMDb : The new design

IMDb is widely known for two things: the overwhelming size of its movie database, and the fact that it never changes the way it looks.

Well, guess what, IMDb update its look and feel, and it’s not a minor change. It’s fast, it’s functional, and it no longer looks like it was built 20 years ago.

The funny thing is that while I was looking for a blog post announcing the changes, I came across this one from 2009. I haven’t realized that it was from 2009 until I saw the screenshots.

Some time ago the incredible happened: our beloved movie database site IMDb finally realized that it was not 1996 anymore and dared to hire some designers in order to – you won’t believe it – change the design of the page! When I visited the site the other day, I couldn’t believe my eyes

And just so that we keep the history, here are a couple of screenshots of how it used to look:

Great job IMDb! Even if it’ll take all of us a bit to get used to the new design. At least we know it’ll last another decade.

Experiments: Limited Web Experience

Smashing Magazine runs a series of articles by Chris Ashton, a senior software engineer at BBC, in which he experiences the web for one day with a selected limitation. So far he has tried the following:

Unraveling the JPEG

It always amazes me how little do we know about everyday things around us. Today I came across “Unraveling the JPEG” article, which is a deep dive into the JPEG format. JPEG images all around us, but how much do we really now about them? I bet you even the most technical web developers and designers will have their hands full with this, let alone all the non-technical people who snap selfies on a daily basis.

Not only the article itself dives into the technical details, but it also provides an inline JPEG editor, which you can use to play around with the data and see how it affects things. Great job!

CSSFX – beautifully simple click-to-copy CSS effects

CSSFX is a collection of CSS effects with previews and very simple implementation instructions. Just click on the effect demo that you like, and a popup with HTML and CSS code snippets will appear, ready to be used on your site.

There’s also a GitHub repository, if you prefer it this way.

Awesome Design Tools

GitHub hosts numerous “awesome lists” with collections of tools, documentation, and resources on a variety of subjects. So far, however, these seemed to be mostly developer-oriented. It’s good to see that other people are joining in. Awesome Design Tools is a curated list of the tools and resources for designers (web, interface, print, brand, etc).

Not even being a designer myself, I had to Google for some of these things plenty recently. In particular – collaboration tools, color pickers, fonts, icons, screenshots, etc.