Case in point, EA’s current home page for The Sims:

With this design they’ve managed to turn a a language selector into a debate about nation. Canadians and Mexicans are not represented by these flags. What do the Spanish speaking contingent of North, Central, and South America click on? The flag of Spain? Customers in Quebec are to look for the flag of France? In the best case, this design is tedious. In the worst case, it’s offensive.

An incredibly poor design decision that would have been more inclusive, but still unclear, with the use of a globe, and solved completely with a language selector (barring any sales based regional requirements, which opens up a whole other issue of whether or not they support North American Spanish or French, etc).

Update, Jun 4:

Just few days later, and I’m at the American Apparel online store. Now this is how you do it right with flags if you’re focusing on region, but not language:

Update, Jun 22:

And here’s yet another reason not to use flags as a landing page language selector: imagine if this was Apple’s landing page.

The post How to turn a linguistic convenience into a nationalist uproar appeared first on Say Yeah!.

For years Americans have enjoyed the advantages of person to person lending and borrowing, but due to strict regulations here in Canada, loans could only be issued by accredited lenders like banks and credit card companies. Working closely with regulators, CommunityLend will soon be offering Canadian lenders and borrowers alike the opportunity to play in the once tightly-closed $100 Billion industry.

With a bright idea in place, and even brighter future, CommunityLend came to us looking for help introducing online person to person lending to the Canadian public. We designed and wrote the CommunityLend site to gradually walk potential borrowers and lenders through this new process, clearly defining what person to person lending is and its benefits to consumers.

While we can’t yet show you the full scope of our marketing, design and application development work for CommunityLend, we encourage you to take a look at the first phase of development which is viewable at CommunityLend. This includes the new design standards and visual language, launched April 2008.

What we’ve worked on:

• Strategic Development from the Brand out.
• Communications concept and marketing web site.
• Application interface design.
• Community site design.

The post Community Lend bringing social lending to Canada. appeared first on Say Yeah!.

b5media’s sales department was looking for a better way to engage advertisers to help sell ad space across their blog network. From concept to copy to design, we worked to define the b5media identity both visually and in the written tone and manner they use to communicate with advertisers.

We began by introducing b5media and the concept of a Blog Network to advertisers.

It was important to explain the value behind the Blog Network in order to get buy in. This wasn’t about selling to a high volume of eyeballs. Advertisers needed to know they’d be connecting with early adopters, influencers, and a highly engaged readership in a targeted manner.

Highlighting the different channels that b5media’s 100s of blogs fit into, followed by detailed statistics on readership, were the final pieces that helped encourage new advertisers to come on board. All of this written in a concise way in bite sized candy coloured sections helped to engage advertisers with this new advertising opportunity.

In the end, we completed this brochure, a slide deck, trade show booth panels, and tshirts, all targeted towards driving new ad revenue to b5media’s diverse stable of blogs.

The post b5media ad sales brochure. appeared first on Say Yeah!.