This is an interesting concept. I can see some of the more conservative designers disagreeing with this approach, but I think that if used with intelligence, and not just as a solely aesthetic exercise, could definitely work.
Closer to our startup hearts, Dopplr also does interesting stuff with their logo, by creating user-specific logos, being each of the colors of the logo the colors of the most recent cities the visitor was at.
We played with something like this at the company I work for - but it was the logo composited with a geotagged image that was closest to the requestors ip. All the images were composited with Imagemagick and cached and the ip lookup and distance calculation is pretty fast using the MaxMind ip database. In the end we ended up just picking the nicest looking image and turning that off.
Honestly, I would imagine that most applications of something like this would ultimately end up with "picking the nicest looking image" and foregoing the dynamic tidbits.
That said, you could mash the geolocation that you did with locally-targeted weather data to create some pretty fun dynamic logo designs that would be fairly unique to the end user. You could even alter the skin of the entire site to match the "mood" of the user's location. The possibilities could get pretty extreme... even if you did eventually turn it off in the end :)
Funny, we thought about doing a "mood mashup" (for a redesign of a site that features a lot of poetry) based on the weather at the requester's location. My input was "what if rain doesn't depress you and instead makes you happy"?
Rain doesn't depress me and actually does make me happy.
That said, I think poetry is typically thematic enough that you could still incorporate some cool weather-based "mood matching" if you used some sort of tagging system.
Quick example: you have a color spectrum below each poem, each user can associate the poem with a color after they read it, and then you link each color to a weather type. On sunny days you would show "yellow" poems, on rainy days you would show "blue" poems, on snowy days you would show "white" poems, etc.
You could even have a color spectrum on your home page as your main entry point into browsing the poetry collection. For whatever color you click on, you get the poem for which the average color tag is the closest match to your selection.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 36.2 ms ] threadCloser to our startup hearts, Dopplr also does interesting stuff with their logo, by creating user-specific logos, being each of the colors of the logo the colors of the most recent cities the visitor was at.
Who said identity had to be static :-)
That said, you could mash the geolocation that you did with locally-targeted weather data to create some pretty fun dynamic logo designs that would be fairly unique to the end user. You could even alter the skin of the entire site to match the "mood" of the user's location. The possibilities could get pretty extreme... even if you did eventually turn it off in the end :)
That said, I think poetry is typically thematic enough that you could still incorporate some cool weather-based "mood matching" if you used some sort of tagging system.
Quick example: you have a color spectrum below each poem, each user can associate the poem with a color after they read it, and then you link each color to a weather type. On sunny days you would show "yellow" poems, on rainy days you would show "blue" poems, on snowy days you would show "white" poems, etc.
You could even have a color spectrum on your home page as your main entry point into browsing the poetry collection. For whatever color you click on, you get the poem for which the average color tag is the closest match to your selection.
Wackiness!