iGoogle Artist Themes-Africa Represents!

Desré Buirski, the artist best known for designing Madiba's trademark presidential shirts, represented South Africa and by extension Africa at the launch event of the i Google artist themes project in New York last week. Buirski was one of 60 artists from around the world to design her own theme for iGoogle.iGoogle is the name of Googles personalized home page and allows the user to develop his own theme or use customized themes from well known artists,architects, innovators or personalities!

The iGoogle artists project gives Internet users the opportunity to personalize and make their Google homepage as beautiful as possible.The available artist themes include items dedicated to fashion & Sports icons and entertainment artists such as Dolce & Gabbana,Beastie Boys, Coldplay,Lance Armstrong,Fatima Lopez,Kristina Tadjerof House of Dagmar,Akira Isogawa,IVANAhelsinki,Nobuhiko Kitamura,Liselotte Westerlund,Antonio Gamito,Jean- Charles de Castelbajac,Gustavo Rosa,John Maeda among others.Its quite an ambitious program but quite useful more so in meeting peculiar user experience.

It is expected that companies will use the customized artists themes to brand themselves and their products over the internet! The life of this new product is best captured by Julian Sonego of Google Australia Blog who states:"As you may know, iGoogle has always provided you with great tools to access and arrange the content you want on your homepage. Just like a person's book or music collection is an extension of their personality, a user's iGoogle page is also a reflection of their loves and interests, both in terms of content, and now, visually,"

iGoogle was officially launched on1st May, 2008 in Manhattan Newyork with the various theme designs being projected accross the Manhattan Skyline.I must state as an African Im proud of Buirski's theme design which looks as follows: