Amazon has just announced their new e-book reader, dubbed the    Kindle. It is supposed to be for reading electronic documents what the iPod is for listening to electronic music. They are even one-upping the iPod by highlighting the Kindles lack of need to sync with a mothership computer.

Kindles Character Issues

My quarrel is with the motion graphic treatments on the Kindle video. In a bid to demonstrate the untethered nature of Kindle, the video features random letters falling down from the sky, semi-Matrix style. The problem is- the letters never connect in any way with the Kindle, and the randomness of the letters only serves up a healthy plate of visual confusion when the point was to demonstrate simplicity... Simplicity even beyond the iPod-iTunes connection. Now no one is going to beat Apple in the Minimalist-Typography awards, but I think Amazon’s video could lose the effects all together. If nothing else, show a stream of words, sentences, paragraphs, anything flowing into the device.

Here is an quick reworking of that title image- a little better: