Be honest, your girlfriend simply doesn't drink enough beer, does she? This, unlike some her other faults, CAN be corrected! Just go to Poland.

The Polish company Karmi has released new packaging targeted at women and three tantalizing new beer flavors:

Poema di Caffé (coffee)
Selua (pineapple/piña colada) and
Lamai ( a mix of guava, dragonfruit and mint)

Though this is more properly categorized as a near beer (alcohol content is .1%), the coffee flavor was singled out by the Polish business magazine Handel as Poland's best new FMCG product of 2006.

http://www.karmi.pl

Labels: advertising

Portrait by Primoz Korosec

It is with great sadness that we bid farewell to Alan Fletcher.

I came to know his work only recently with the purchase of his fantastic book The Art of Looking Sideways. The book is a mix of a design explosion, a glimpse into a vast and varied intellect, a superb exposition on what it means to be visually aware and most touchingly, a heartfelt ode to the importance of design both publically and personally.



Stitched together loosely, the book follows the thoughts of the author as the design meanders wildly between expressive, childlike drawings and paintings and hyper-sophisticated typographical treatments. “This book has no thesis, is neither a whodunit nor a how-to-do-it, has no beginning, middle or end,” Mr. Fletcher wrote in his introduction. “It’s a journey without a destination.”


While at Phaidon, he designed numerous books.


A long association with Fortune magazine - and a great amount of mutual trust - allowed him to attempt approaches no other magazine (or designer) could carry off.


The iconic logo for the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Mr. Fletcher is best known for having started Pentagram back in the day and more recently working with Phaidon as a consultant art director. Mr. Fletcher, after reading a book on witchcraft, coined the name Pentagram, meaning a five-pointed star, one for each partner in his firm. The partners adopted it despite some misgivings about the association with witchcraft. He thought it was funny.



He is most often thought of as a conceptual designer. Avoiding ornament and shunning popular visual movements, he was known to strike piercingly at an witty or obscure point… it often wasn’t always the point you thought it was going to be. His designs are almost always striking, or gutsy, as some may call it. He used the word panache to describe it:

“Style is a curious word because it can mean all sorts of things, from mannerism to charisma,” he told English design critic Rick Poynor. “However, as far as I’m concerned, either what you’ve done has panache or it hasn’t. You can’t design panache.”


In the first example of a visual conceit which has since been used and reused, this popular bus advertisment won the heart of London when it appeared.



He is renown in the design world for his eclectic wit, sheer perseverance and a list of accomplished associations with some of the world’s most design-conscious brands: among them the Victoria and Albert Museum, BP, Shell, Cunard, Fortune magazine, Reuters, Time and Life, IBM, furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, Pirelli, Lloyds of London, Olivetti, Domus magazine, Polaroid and Penguin Books.Mr. Fletcher designed everything from corporate identities - logos, literature, advertising, signage, calendars - to toys, books, newspapers and office interiors.


The Reuters logo, retired in 1996, has long been touted as one of the most identifiable, evocative and enduring corporate logos ever. Shame on Reuters for getting rid of it.

Mr. Flether's curioisity was boundless and his allegiance unwavering to the necessity of high art infused into commonplace design. His house is surrounded by an almost illegibly extended tall array of letters, the descenders of which form a fence.

Early Influences on Mr. Fletcher included Alvin Eisenman, Norman Ives, Herbert Matter, Bradbury Thompson, the ex-Bauhaus Joseph Albers ("a bit of a prima donna," according to Fletcher), Saul Bass and of course Paul Rand.



The Kuwaiti Royal Commercial Bank's logo is relatively unknown to the western world, but it was a work of love for Alan Fletcher, who found the necessary Arabic script to be entrancing.



Two fortunate incidents formed Mr. Fletcher's professional life:

In 1957, while still a student at Yale, he was visiting Fortune magazine in New York just as news of the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik came through: a cover was commissioned for first thing Monday morning and he was there, so he got the assignment. It was an incredible coup; no student would ever get a Fortune cover commission. He subsequently worked freelance, encouraged by Saul Bass, Rand and Leo Lionni, eventually working full time for Fortune.



Later, He had planned to set up a studio in Venezuela, but a local revolution helped change his mind. As fortune would have it, the last boat out went to Genoa, and he got a job in the design studio of Pirelli in Milan.

Apparently he was the functional opposite of a grumpy old man, and stayed lighthearted till the end. He died of cancer on september 21st, wearing a T-shirt with handwritten words taken from one of his posters:

“I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.’’

Alan Gerard Fletcher, designer, born September 27 1931; died September 21 2006

Labels: advertising, Design

Last week I heard someone banging on my front door. It was the mailwoman letting me know there was a package too big to fit through my mail slot. Judging by the urgency and seriousness of her knock, one would think she was leaving something very important at the front step. I ran down three flights of stairs to see what it was. I was disappointed to find that it was just the new phonebook. This was on Friday. By Sunday, the book hadn’t moved an inch – it was still outside. Finally I reluctantly brought it into the hosue Sunday night.

I didn’t think much about this until I read an article on the WSJ today that featured a story about a taxi company owner who was on welfare because he couldn’t get enough business. He was advertising in phonebooks and he just wasn’t getting the response he was looking for. It’s no wonder he was receiving less than stellar results if my experience is any indication of what’s going on with those books.

Anyway, the cabbie decided to slap together a web site and purchase some google AdWords. Now his fleet is three dozen strong and he is no longer on welfare. Go figure. I highly recommend reading this article – it covers some grass-roots marketing and advertising techniques – it also advices against spending cash on PR firms (the article is good if you are trying to create general and unfocused C2C buzz, but not if you covet focused B2B attention).

Back to the phone book phenomenon. Nobody asked me if I wanted to get a book, they just sent it to me. What a gross waste of money and natural resources. When I asked Verizon not publish my new number on the book, they said they would be glad to do so for a monthly $2 fee!

I can’t remember the last time I paged through one of those bad boys. Why do they keep printing them? How are they still making enough money to cover the production, materials and distribution? How can that business model still be viable?

Is it possible that people who don’t have immediate access to a computer and internet connection scrape up enough mass to constitute and justify an audience for the phonebook? If so, I have a suggestion for the phonebook makers: ask people if they want a copy before they send it out. Sacrifice the cost of reduced circulation, harvest the operational savings and do a better job at syndicating the data online.

First they close a deal with Microsoft that guarantees them about $200 million over three years, then they piss off about a million of their users by “infringing on their privacy”, and finally they enter serious talks to sell for $1 Billion to Yahoo!

What gives?

I just have a hard time understanding what people are thinking some times. For example, what is Yahoo! thinking when they make an offer to buy a website for $1 billion dollars very soon after about a million of its users boycotted the product? Yes, the users more than likely came back and used the site after the boycott was over, but if this is not a good indication of how fickle the market is, I don’t know what is.

At the end of they day, those guys are rich and I am not. So they must know something I don’t know. I started thinking about it, and here is what I came up with:

Five Reasons why Yahoo! would want to buy Facebook

1. 500 million users worldwide that spend at least one hour on the site a month
guaranteed

2. $200 million from Microsoft over the next three years

3. an amazing channel for Yahoo! to push its products to a vibrant demographic

4. Yahoo!’s own social networking effort, Yahoo! 360, sucks and is not widely used or known.

5. being that Yahoo! is a content provider, and developing content is expensive, what better way to continue to be a content provider and not have to do any of the content generation (since that’s done by the users themselves)?

So, go for it. My 19 year old cousin said he is using it less and less - this market is very moody and quick to quit. My advice: approach the deal with a good strategy for what happens after kids graduate or get bored.

There are a series of compelling photos that have been making their way around the net called "mini-planets" and they have a mysterious draw for me. While I know they were digitally composited somehow, and the whole process may have taken mere moments with the latest photoshop filter, I still think they are thoughtful, and quite wonderful.



My sister had a poster on her door as we grew up called the circle of life or something, and it too was a self contained circular montage, but of the eco-sphere - showing the planet with many forms of wildlife and how it all interacts. I used to look at it for hours and try to turn my head upside down to see the bottom as if it were the top. Sadly, I can't find a duplicate of it on the internet or I would show it to you.

Pictures like these make me wonder if we should be spending less time with so many images and more time building layers of content into each one.



I couldn't find who did these Mini-planets, so send me a note if you find out who is to blame and I will add attribution.

This is just a small selection, find more of them here.

Is Apple’s success with the iPod due to control? Many software and computer makers have tried to roll out their own products and have largely failed because of incompatibility issues between hardware and software.

The lesson big players are taking from Apple is to own both sides of the equation. RealNetworks has teamed up with SanDisk to develop an mp3 player that would compete with Apple’s iPod. SanDisk already has 10% of the mp3 player market – and in an environment that is 75% controlled by Apple, that’s pretty remarkable – so it might just work. I do worry about their overall strategy: subscription based access to music. So, users never actually own anything. Which would be fine for a much lower price point, but for about ten bucks a month? Not worth it!

Another big player following Apple’s lead is Microsoft. First with Xbox and soon with Zune, their long awaited music player. Unlike the RealNetworks/ScanDisk cluster-duck that is about to release, Microsoft plans on making its software and device iTunes compatible. Smart move, considering that securing market share will require cannibalizing iPod users.

This is going to be a very interesting holiday season.

Inspired by an article in today's WSJ.

Web sites are becoming easier to use mainly because major web destinations have standardized on several design patterns – transforming them into conventions that smaller sites can model after to satisfy the collective user expectation.

For example, users know how to use tabs thanks to Apple.com, Amazon.com, Yahoo.com, Outpost.com, Buy.com, etc. Tabs and other web conventions make designing for and using the web much easier. Here is a nice summary of the main web design trends today.

In addition to structural conventions, users also have expectations about where things should be located on the page – also known as screen real estate conventions. Back in February, Human Factors International published a newsletter where this idea was explored and substantiated. I was delighted to find out that people expect the main navigation to be on top, ad space on the right, and “back to home” link on the upper left hand. These user expectations make it easier for us to design certain functionality; and it frees us up to focus our attention on designing aspects of the site that are new or don’t fall within established web conventions. Sometimes, they even help design firms turn a profit. Imagine that!

In short, web conventions are good because clients accept them, users expect them and they are easy to design and execute.

Here is the problem though: standards become most powerful when they have good proliferation. Good proliferation is achieved when large websites develop neat design patterns, and other designers borrow them for their own projects. Before no time, users grow to expect certain things to work certain ways, and designers are forced to follow the conventions.

But what if the convention was wrong to begin with?

Think about what’s going on with Digg right now. About 30 people have the influence to surface diggs to the Digg homepage. The topics on the homepage then become the hot issues of the day. Well, the web is very similar. Few companies receive the majority of traffic on the web. If a designer from one of the top companies comes out with something new, and if the other top companies adopt the design into their visual repertoire, then you better believe that that design pattern has a good chance of becoming a convention.

Designers need to be careful. We have to pick the good, ignore the bad and be ready to defend our positions.

As Digg now knows, the crowd is not always right.

News Flash: Information on the internet is public. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection has access to everything everyone publishes. It’s the nature of the internet.

Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users are pissed off (really, read this link... follow the comments... lots of emotion and energy) by two new features it added to the site two days ago: News Feeds and mini-Feeds. The features were designed to aggregate and deliver information users publish about themselves to other users in their network.

So three things about this mess:

1. Being that college students are already publishing this information to the internet, I am surprised that they are upset at Facebook for making it easier and faster for the information to spread. They are saying that it is an invasion of their privacy. Here is a news flash: once information is published on the web it is no longer private. Besides, if they really wanted they could make their profiles private, and avoid this entire mess altogether. What gives?

2. Facebook users are mobilizing against Facebook. Enough to trigger a response from Mark Zuckerberg, founder and Chief Executive. He said “Calm Down. Breathe. We hear you.” Yeah, you better hear them after receiving hundreds of thousands of digital signatures demanding they turn off the new features. What’s amazing about this is that users are so well connected and organized that they can form and deliver a powerful and unified response. They organized a boycott! A boycott, for god’s sake! When was the last time we saw this many people in this age group organize over night? Maybe never, I don’t know… I am juts blown away by the level of sophistication and organization this network has demonstrated. And not using Facebook hurts their main source of revenue: selling ads. So the user network is hitting Facebook right where it hurts, it got their attention and now they are listening.

3. Yes, NOW they are listening. They could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had just done a little market research. A little focus group. Fine, that takes time and money, so read the news and learn from other people’s mistakes. Friendster got a lot of lip last year when they rolled out a feature that told users when other people were snooping. They have learned their lesson – now they hold focus groups before they spend time and money developing “enhancements.” Hopefully, Facebook has also learned their lesson.

All in all very interesting stuff. Users thinking that there is privacy on the web, mass organized social mobilization, and a company rolling out a feature without checking to see if people actually wanted it.

I love the internet.

Ps. the boycott is scheduled for September 12th, 2006 - 600k people have already signed up for it... that's more people than live in Seattle!

Google's come out with a neat little tool that I suspect is part of their master plan to take over the universe: Google Trends can show you the frequency of Google searches on any term with enough search volume.

It also shows you the cities where the most frequent searches on that term occur--people in St. Louis inexplicably look for "cream cheese" on a regular basis, and, no surprise, the search phrase "am I depressed?" is searched the most often in England. (Fact of the week: People in Australia seem to be obsessed with funny cats. No one in the US cares one bit about funny cats, it appears. Bonus points to anyone who can explain why this might be.)

The tool is in beta and it has its limitations. The search volume has to be large, so the terms you can look for need to be fairly generic. I'm not convinced of the accuracy of the data, given the way it flatlines in the graph during certain periods, and the frequency with which certain cities show up in the results. And the reporting isn't very granular.

But the potential is there, and with this tool, Google is continuing to expand an incredibly powerful suite of tools for marketers. Between Urchin & Analytics, combined with a more sophisticated level of reporting on search-term frequency with Trends, and the tools that Adwords already offers, they could be close to a turnkey solution for search engine marketing analysis, management, and reporting through Google alone. It would certainly make our lives easier if we had a unified reporting suite that would allow us to generate complex analytics quickly and make campaign adjustments accordingly. If Google continues to dominate online advertising, such a thing is within the realm of possibility. (They'll need to work on their reporting outputs better, though. Anyone who's run an Adwords campaign knows that reporting and analysis is still a slow and too-manual process--the data exists, but the outputs are clumsy, it's hard to combine different data sources, and the usability is prety shameful.)

Anyway, the fun of it is limited by the search-volume issue. I have to believe that someone, somewhere has searched for my name... but Google Trends can't gauge my popularity. Oh well, at least I'm not Britney Spears! From her high in 2004 it's been nowhere but down, down, down. I hear she's big in Mexico, though.

idfive is a professional brand communication company by trade, but occasionally we step over the line and take a hard look at other design fields just to get a feel for what is going on in the wide world of design. Or maybe it is just to be snippy and childish, I don’t know.

Claire wrote on her whiteboard that dogs make her happy.
Apparently she is not alone. My dog makes me happy too, and if the new wave of dog paraphernalia is any indication, the pet world is overcome with design-y hip-happy dog fun.

As far as I can tell there has always been the Richie Rich 24 caret dog dish, but that kind of Britney Spears gaudiness only goes so far for today’s trendy pooch – the sophisticated urban canine has always craved serious product design and it seems to have arrived.

Here are some examples I found:


Nobbly Wobbly II Dog Toy - space twisty in just the right way.




G2 Special Edition Flower Power Dog Boots - these are horrendous, but also nice, in some upsetting way.




The Wowo pet feeder, by Vurv Design: Bamboo veneer with gloss white. - for the zen dog in your life.


Bettie - Small - Slobber and Spice - I really think no poet has ever combined the terms "slobber" and "spice" before.





Blue Leather contour dog bed. “Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames” - with a pricepoint to match.




William Wegman Collar - classy.




Chill pill - my dog definitely needs a chill pill.


Michael Graves dog toy - space vehicle or dog toy? You decide.




DNA Natural Rubber Dog Toy - ah, chewin on the old double helix.




Double leash - have you ever walked two dogs? Yes, it is insane. This would help.




Scat mat – mildly electrocutes your dog for getting on furniture. I included this because it is psycho.




Princess Leia Halloween dog costume - yeah. Princess Leia is great. This is very disturbing.

Labels: Design