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Gamma matters
Thoughts about The Internet on August 12, 2011
The eighties were a simpler time. Publishers were happy if their typewriters came with eraser ribbons and users were thrilled if the text on their monitors appeared in white. However, with the advent of the Internet in the late nineties, publishers were forced to prepare their content for constantly changing browsers, ever increasing screen resolutions and – given the explosion of mobile computing over the last few years – a myriad of devices too.
The one thing that you could count on amidst all the change was that your reds would be red, your blues, blue, and your greens, well, green; but how about the terracotta reds, lime greens and cerulean blues? With the increasing age of today’s computer screens and the growth of new display technologies, you now need to consider the influence of color shift and gamma on the colors in your designs too – especially on the colors in between.
If you’ve never heard of gamma before, it’s simply an indicator of how bright your mid-tones are. The concept was crucial in the design of CRT monitors and holds true even for LCDs. It has no effect on black, white and primary colors, but affects everything in between.
The image above illustrates how this photograph appears on my four year old screen with a blue color shift on the left – notice the cooler hues – and how it appears on my new screen with high gamma on the right – notice the dark mid-tones. Of course, you’re probably wondering what I’m talking about, because your screen’s color calibration is entirely different from that of mine. In fact, to you the image may appear washed out on the left and warm on the right.
Sadly, there is neither substantial research on the average color shift and gamma of screens around the world, nor is there a perfect solution to ensure that your colors are reproduced in the exact same manner on every screen. However, you can do a few things to save your designs:
- Calibrate your screen’s colors to prevent your designs from being tainted by a color shift.
- Preview your templates on screens with different levels of gamma, just as publishers test their content on multiple browsers. Try an old laptop, a brand new desktop and so on.
- Embed color profiles in your images so that users with different color profiles can see them as they were intended. Most modern browsers handle this well.
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Screen-frei-days
Thoughts about Life on April 2, 2011
Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I ought to have had my photograph pasted alongside the entry for ‘workaholic’ in the Oxford dictionary years ago. We compete with our classmates as children, burn midnight oil trying to outwit entire campuses as teenagers and bask in the glory of eighteen Watt fluorescent tubes to take on the world as adults.
I did it all to the tee, and that’s when I happened to stumble across Susan Maushart’s winter of disconnect in an article shared ironically through a tweet. For six months in 2009, she and her children unplugged everything with a screen. They began to read the newspaper, her son rediscovered his saxophone, they went to the movies and her daughters even co-wrote a novel.
While I couldn’t afford the luxury of a winter of disconnect at the risk of running an e-commerce business by paper, I could afford at least one day a week without a screen. I picked my Fridays and christened them screen-frei-days, although they sometimes spill over to Saturdays. ‘Frei’ may seem a bit formal – it’s German for free – but it has a better ring to it than screen-free-days.
In the last three months alone, I’ve rediscovered my love of writing, picked up where I left off on barre chords and begun to read twice as much in print – the last, more for typographic gratification than the fact that it doesn’t involve a screen. It’s funny how after waging a battle against print media for your entire career – and let’s be honest, it’s an unspoken part of every online advertiser’s induction – that I’ve realized I’m far happier reading works in print.
If you’ve never had a winter of disconnect or wished you had the time to rediscover all those failed new year resolutions, it’s never too late to discover your own screen-frei-day.
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Viva la revolución
Thoughts about The Internet on June 27, 2009
Change is never easy. The rights we take for granted today were sown by people who believed in their cause so passionately that they would huddle under the shimmer of moonlight at risk of life and limb to bring about change. Of course, things have come a long way since then. First there was email, then blogs and now micro blogs.
I’ve been on email since 1997 and written this blog since 2006, but I have to admit that I’ve never quite felt as empowered to build support for change as I have since I began tweeting earlier this month. If you don’t believe me, start by asking yourself a simple question – how many times have you wanted to drop an anvil on your computer in frustration or go out on to the streets in protest, but just couldn’t convince yourself or couldn’t, period?
Those are the exact questions the people of Iran and the Email Standards Project asked themselves this month – and they did something about it. By encouraging people to voice their opinions on twitter, these two campaigns successfully built support for change. In fact, you too can join the revolution by simply tweeting about something you’re passionate about. For example, you can start by telling Microsoft to fix Outlook 2010 before it’s too late or wake up to find all those great looking emails charred in your mailbox in 2011.
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Dot com ransom
Thoughts about The Internet on August 15, 2008
When wine.com and business.com sold for a record-breaking $2.9 and $7.5 million, respectively, at the height of the dot-com bubble, a growing number of people saw an investment opportunity which we’ve come to know as cybersquatting. In fact, a brand-jacking report released by MarkMonitor this spring shows that the practice has grown by approximately 40% in the last year alone into a multi-million dollar industry.
Despite the apparent lawlessness, a legal framework does exist to protect genuine trademark owners. However, the opportunity cost involved in pursuing a domain name dispute often outweighs what most businesses are willing to invest in their presence on the Internet, let alone the risk of losing a dispute to a legal loophole. Some famous disputes that have made the news in recent years include nissan.com and PETA.org.
Prevalent as it may have been in the rest of the world, cybersquatting hadn’t quite made it to the Middle East until word of Dubai’s growing prosperity began to make the headlines in 2003. For example, Sama Dubai – a leading real estate company and television channel in the UAE have their domain name held to ransom with a rumored seven figure US$ asking price. One among the fortunate few who got away with a bargain is Dubai’s first low cost carrier – Fly Dubai, whose domain name appears to have been sold for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
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Fare and square
Thoughts about Travel on June 5, 2008
In the face of skyrocketing oil prices over the last five years, airlines have had a tough time trying to convince the average Joe that they’re better off flying than taking the train or not traveling at all.
The first and simplest model is that of the base fare, which most low cost carriers have adopted. They believe that if you can attract a prospect with a $10 base fare, that they can then be convinced to purchase a ticket at its actual fare of $200. After all, once you’ve trimmed away your last olive, why take the blame for the mile-high list of airport, bank, fuel company, insurance and government surcharges.
The surprising thing about this model is that it works – or will at least work until everyone else follows suit. For example, imagine picking up a pack of crisps for 5 cents, only to have the cashier hand out an itemized bill with an additional $1.95 in display, storage, transportation, municipality, cleaning and government surcharges. FMCG arguably isn’t the best example, but you get the picture. The restaurant industry reacted in a similar manner when they faced rising taxes a few years ago, only to fall back to all-inclusive prices in due course. Distancing yourself from the reality of an industry to maintain sales targets only breeds commoditization and is at best a short-term solution.
Then there’s the value model, which is by far the most demanding. Instead of competing or justifying price, most premium airlines create value by investing in long-term solutions such as service differentiation, improving brand perception and encouraging travel. This option is particularly difficult for small airlines to adopt because it requires substantial short-term investment. The advantage however, is that the airline and its customers won’t be held ransom to market fluctuations.
Last on the list is the transparent cost model, which airlines usually adopt after either exhausting or forgoing the value creation model. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this one – the airline’s fares fluctuate in proportion to its costs. While it may pinch sales in the short term, you can at least rest in the consolation that the airline isn’t compromising its standards. Airlines in this model tend to either shelve all non-essential services or offer it at a significantly higher premium. The key word here is brutal honesty; anything less and it’s back to the base fare model.
Although the value and transparent cost models may seem worlds apart, they’re actually not that different. The difference lies quite simply in whom the models benefit. While the former benefits the airline industry, the latter benefits passengers. In fact, most airlines choose a balanced mix of the two.
