I’ve long found CNN.com to be at least as funny as The Onion. The robots that control their homepage “top stories” have a knack for ironic juxtaposition, amusing corrections, and being just plain wacky.

All along, though, there was been an odd little blob of pixels floating in the top right-hand corner of the CNN.com homepage that has remained throughout their various design changes. The Netscape logo/wordmark lives up there, taking up what expect would be some of the most valuable “real-estate” on the web.

Netscape lives on as a “brand” at AOL, but seems to have been diluted from having been one of the most powerful company/product names in the history of technology to being a second-rate dial-up provider and 1999-style web-portal. Today, for example, the Netscape.com homepage includes such scintillating stories as “10 Things Credit Card Companies Don’t Tell You”, “The World’s Top Topless Beaches”, and my favourite, “Sexy Pix: 10 Best Rear Views”. Of course, the “news” on Netscape.com is supplied by CNN. It’s synergastic.

What misguided cross-pollinating-eyeball-stickyfication-content deal led to this prominent positioning of the Netscape logo on CNN.com? I can only imagine that some starry-eyed marketing folk signed a 28-year agreement back in 2001 and thought it was the deal of the century.

Today at the Gnome Summit in Boston in the MIT Stata Centre, Jakub Steiner of Novell and I announced the Tango Project. We’ve been working on it for a few months now, just getting the basics figured out before we started bragging.

The Tango Project is a collaborative effort of a variety of free/open-source software designers and artists to work towards unifying the visual style of the free (mostly Linux) desktop.

To start, we have:

1. Base Icon Library – Most of the work here has been done by Jakub Steiner. It’s a beautiful icon set that aims to be relatively at-home on Windows, Mac OS X, and define a strong base style for the Linux desktop.
2. Style Guide – A work in progress, the Tango style guide works to create a color scheme and other key visual guidelines for creating Tango-style icons.
3. Standard Icon Naming Specification – Rodney Dawes has done much of the work to get a common icon naming specification to make it possible to create an icon theme that can work on a variety of different platforms (Gnome, KDE, etc.). There are utilities to map the new Tango icons to the existing icon names on current Gnome and KDE systems.

It’s been fun to participate on the Tango project. I hope others join us and help make the free desktop (more) beautiful.

We don’t often think of Windows 95 as a shining example of user interface design and usability. It was slow on the hardware of the day, it crashed often, and many of its claimed “innovations” were copied from Apple and others.

All of that said, Windows 95 was a big leap for visual user-interfaces at the time. Even if it didn’t break new ground in design, it was significant if only because it brought many of the visual user-interface design innovations of the previous decade to a massive audience.

I was a huge geek/dork, still in high-school, at the time of Microsoft’s development Windows 95. I was one of thousands who paid $49.95 to order a special preview of Windows 95, which was still code-named “Chicago” at the time. Yes, that’s right, I paid for a beta. I can still remember, it came on 37 floppy disks (seriously).

Both Microsoft and their Windows product-line are often considered lumbering behemoths, often with justification. It is surprising to learn that the design process at Microsoft that led to such interface staples as the Start Menu and the window-list task-bar grew out of a small team (approximately twelve people, with another twelve programmers for implementing designs).

The Windows 95 user interface design team used an iterative design process where they would come up with an idea, build a quick/rough implementation, and try it out on users. Then, based on how people fared using the design, they would try again. Rinse, lather, repeat.

This process proved that basic design intuition is often wrong:

“Our first design idea for making window management easier was not very ambitious, but we weren’t sure how much work was needed to solve the problem. The first design was to change the look of minimized windows from icons to “plates”. (See Figure 6.) We hoped that the problem would be solved by giving minimized windows a distinctive look and by making them larger. We were wrong!”

All of this comes from a case study on the interface design of Windows 95. The phrase “We were wrong!” shows up several times in the document. The case study is a fascinating look into what went on, for better or for worse, to be one of the most widespread user interfaces in the history of computing.

Thanks to David Feldman for his article on file browsing in Linux that pointed out this Microsoft case study.