Do you remember ConceptShare? It was that promising web application for designers and their clients. Well it still is, but at that time the company was seen as an innovative one. Right now I can say that the only good thing in ConceptShare is the logo.

Let me explain my negative feeling.
About a year ago, I heard about this company. It was something covered on Cnet’s Webware.com at Under the Radar Conference. This application was presented as a collaboration tool that helps the designer or any user, to get feedback and reviews regarding their visual work. It was developed upon the .net framework using Flash as presentation layer, and at that time ConceptShare was quite a buzz.
Due to ConceptShare’s value, Corel made an agreement and got the web application connected with their main product Corel Draw. So, at that time, ConceptShare was basically the king of visual collaboration on media files. …Not anymore!

My anger…
So, I have nothing against the product. Actually the application is quite useful. But, when all was going well for the company, the web design team went crazy. They went crazy and applied the copy/paste technique. Yes, the site changed its style and copied Apple.com style.
This is not a bad thing, because all designers know that Apple is a trend setter and their website is always next to perfect. I have nothing against inspiration and outsourcing some ideas. But this is wrong, when you copy the overall look, the placement and secondary elements as well.
Below I will show you 2 screens and let you decide weather the redesign was a good thing or bad. Honestly I think they’ve destroyed the visual brand.

Old design Rating:
Copy/Paste Rating:
New Design Rating:
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Graphic Rating:

Well it actually does.
I know that it was a topic about a year ago about the rendering engines in operating systems. Some of the Mac addicts were promoting the wonderful aspects of the text rendered in MacOS. Well I’m not so Mac addict. I mean I truly appreciate the effort in having good designs and nice materials used in their products, but regarding the technical side - the software side … I don’t know about that.

This may sound weird, but even though I am a designer, my work is done on a pc using Microsoft XP. I know that this may sound strange for graphic designers, but I believe that higher quality is found in pc software applications and also great diversity.
Back to the subject, several months ago I’ve worked for a few weeks on a Vista based PC. I must admit that the rendering engine is awesome. Every line of text was properly rendered without any bold effect applied from nowhere like on Safari for example. Even with small font size the rendering engine behavior was flawless. So, now I was back on the Vista and made some rendering test and I achieved better results on Vista than on MacOS. The testing subject was Apple.com. It seems like Microsoft does the job on Apple’s site even though the Mac based machines are sold more quickly now than PCs.

Kudos for the developers for making this great rendering engine!

Graphic Rating for Vista Rendering Engine
Text Render Rating:
Readability Rating:
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Overall Rating: