Global by Design

Does this icon say “language” to you?
It doesn’t to me.
But the OMC design studio feels so strongly about it that it has launched a web site to promote this icon as a global standard.
I applaud the effort and I fully agree that there is a need for such an icon, but I don’t believe that [...]

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It was just over a year ago that Facebook started localizing itself for the world.
As I noted then, the company utilized crowdsourcing to spur its translation efforts. And though volunteers aren’t the only people translating content, a year later, Facebook has done an impressive job of going global.
Om Malik recently reported some key stats from [...]

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For years I’ve been preaching the importance of the “global gateway” — the elements that Web sites use to seamlessly direct Web users to their localized Web sites and content, such as this splash global gateway:

But there is a different type of gateway out there that is worth mentioning — a gateway unique to the [...]

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Web form usability expert Luke Wroblewski provides a very handy article on the challenges of developing Web input forms that work in various countries.
Data input and output is where Web localization projects often sink or swim. And Web forms can give a global marketing director night sweats.
Luke stresses that if you can identify the user’s [...]

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Google features a 4th of July logo at Google.com today.
This is not all that unusual; Google has been doing this for several years now. But there is an inherent flaw in hosting an American visual at Google.com: The .com address is not synonymous with USA.
I know, it’s a picky thing. And yet it’s not such [...]

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