I’m in Ann Arbor, Michigan for our annual “visit Carrie’s family and see a Michigan Football game” trip and I ran across this customized mailbox on a walk to the neighborhood park with my daughter.

Zealot fandom at it’s finest.

(If you’re interested, here is a brief history of Michigan’s “winged” helmet design that explains how a functional design element became one of American sports’ most recognizable sybmols.)

I’m probably more excited about this than I should be, but LucasArts is developing a Lego Indiana Jones video game as a follow-up to its wildly successful Lego Star Wars franchise. I’ve been a fan of the lego-themed Star Wars games for a few years (they follow the storyline of the Star Wars films, but with lego characters, vehicles, creatures and sets).

The Lego Star Wars games offer simple, puzzle-based, cooperative gameplay with great in-game visuals and funny animatics (short videos that play between levels) that make light of well-known Star Wars scenes. The menus are well-designed and the control style is simple enough for my 4-year-old.

The Indiana Jones game will be successful for the same reasons as the Star Wars games – simplicity of gameplay, humorous presentation of familiar content, and widespread appeal (in our random survey of roughly two occupants of my home, reviewers aged 4 to 31 gave the games a thumbs up).

With the success of simple games like these (and of the Nintendo Wii which is winning the console war against systems with more advanced technology) it will be interesting to see if other game publishers answer the call for fun, simple games that appeal to a broader audience than hardcore gamers.

I don’t know if you heard, but Fantasy Football is a really big deal and not just to the sports geeks who play it. According to a CNN article from last summer, “there are currently between 15 million and 18 million fantasy sports players in the U.S,” most of whom play online. That’s big business for media companies like Disney (who owns ESPN), Fox and CBS, and the advertisers salivating over the fantasy football demographic – “male, married, in a high income bracket and more likely to do research or make purchases online.”

My latest issue of ESPN the Magazine dedicated 32 pages to the subject, and ESPN has a new “Fantasy Hall of Fame” broadcast and interactive campaign to support their free online Fantasy Football service. The NFL is in the mix too with their “Fantasy Rules” (this commercial is funny because it’s true) to support their League Manager provided by CBS Sportsline.

Fantasy Football is appealing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it enhances a football fan’s experience by giving meaning to every play in every game on every Sunday. It’s too bad that the user user experience offered by most online Fantasy Football sites is convoluted (and not particularly attractive graphically). Rules vary by league, so most systems allow for nearly endless customization of scoring and other rules – unfortunately, these customization features result in user interface complexity.

I’d love to see a new kind of online Fantasy Football service – one that discards the typical scoring systems and other complexities to make it more accessible to casual fans and those who are too busy for a conventional Fantasy league. We’ve developed several very simple sports pick’em games for our client, PicksPal, that are at the other end of the spectrum, but what I want is something in the middle – a game that gives me enough control over a team and league to fee like it’s “mine” but doesn’t demand the obsessive tweaking and stats crunching needed to succeed in most leagues.

Sometimes I have to toss aside my own sense of design and order and allow a client to use what we’ve provided according to their own sense. This isn’t new, but what was new for me today was looking at the home page of one web site and realizing that I view it as scorched earth. It seems horrific to me and I’ve allowed it to go emotionally. I’ve abandoned it. I do not care what is done with it. It is dead to me.

Instead of concerning myself with it, like a field doctor, I triage the remaining pages. These pages I do not mention. The style enemy may notice them and devour them as the home page. So I continue to direct the enemy to the dead page. If need be, I allow other, sickly pages to go, hoping that these will finally satisfy my adversary. I engage in this game hoping that soon he will be filled and move on to devour some other work.

Most of the time I am lucky and our client shares a similar sense of beauty and order with me. In those situations I can be much less dramatic in my approach to the project.

I managed to catch a glimpse of this great commercial for United Airlines between presses on my TiVo remote’s 30 second skip button.

This beautiful piece, titled “Dragon,” was made with stop motion using paper characters on miniature sets. The music is great, too. Watch the commercial first, then check out the making-of video.