Today, everyone was linking to the new Qwikster landing page. Most people who saw it probably thought about the business implications of Netflix spinning off the DVD rental part of their company, or wondered if they would have to recreate their rental queue. I got annoyed by all the different light sources in the image.
This is what it’s like to have a design education. You are immediately irritated by the shadows on each piece of clip art in the image. It’s a gut reaction, like fingernails on a chalkboard — the image just looks wrong.
You are annoyed by the basic breakdown of the theater metaphor — here we are in our theater, eating popcorn, prepared to watch a movie or play a game, but apparently we’re facing into the projector? Which is kept behind the curtains for some reason? And why does everything have a shadow except the tagline?
To be fair to the poor designer who assembled this frankenstein, it’s difficult to create a scene out of disparate images like this, and they probably had to do it on a very tight schedule. I don’t mean to pick on them… but the shadow on that game controller is killing me.


