Global by Design

I visited the Live Earth Web site today and was pleased to see that the site supports eight languages, including Chinese, Turkish, and Zulu. It appears that the languages were selected to be relevant to the locations of the concerts.

There’s not much depth to the languages — and some of the links take you right back to English content — but I did find some nicely translated PDF downloads on how to cut power consumption.

And now I’m going to get all picky about something. As many of you know, I’m a bit of a global navigation evangelist. And the language gateway is not well implemented.

See if you can tell what’s wrong:

As a rule, flags should not be used to denote language. The flag for South Africa could stand for any of the country’s 11 official languages.

I recommend removing the flags and using the language names instead (i.e., Español, Deutsch, etc.). It’s a much better way to manage user expectations.

Totally unrelated, I discovered that Live Earth is using a Web hosting service that relies completely on solar power: AISO.net. Perhaps other ISPs will follow their lead.

• Of Flags and Languages: A Live 8 Case Study
• Of Flags and Gateways
• The Swiss Air global gateway: When one flag isn’t enough
• I’ve Never Seen This Global Gateway Before…
• Three rules of global gateway design
• There is No Such Thing as “Rest of World”