Website Design Classics - Feedburner
A lot of the so called Web 2.0 is hype. We hear stories everyday about the next web company that is going to be big. It inevitably offers a business aimed at a tiny niche and will most likely fold within a year. Techcrunch have based a business on charting the rise and falls of this movement.
In fact Techcrunch are on my own potential deadpool list of RSS feeds. They churn out too much content and most is pretty paper thin. From my years of looking at Techcrunch the one unifying theme I could see in these Web 2.0 companies was a common design theme. It is strange that companies which could be overly innovative or specialised, appear to have gathered strength in having the exact same logo. This lead to some clever cats coming up with the quite brilliant Web 2.0 Logo Maker. One company very much considered to be part of the Web 2.0 scene is Feedburner. If blogs are the lifeblood of web 2.0, well then feedburner is the…device that counts the blood. What Feedburner does is tracks stats on RSS feeds and let you knows if you are popular with Nerds or not.
Anyways Feedburner differentiates itself from the majority of the Web 2.0 herd by it’s beautiful logo and efficient use of colour. The logo itself is a simple tricolour of an intergrated circle, crescent and flame. As Feedburner is a global service for all RSS feeds the symbols seem to represent land sea and air. The Central yellow crescent shape is also a powerful historical symbol of the ottoman empire, thus reinforcing the global scope of the product.
Like Google (who recently acquired it), it does without tacky advertising on it’s homepage and keep to the design basics of simple colours, white backgrounds and blue links. One nice feature is that links have a dark blue mouseover effect, which works very well for the primary navigation (Blogs, Podcasts, Commercial)
Do you agree? If not feel free to hurl abuse.
Posted 17.10.07