Still think I am crazy?

After five years, the iPod is still not doing certain things well. And for the stuff they think they do well – well, they should think again.

The experts say that people are still having a hard time doing really basic stuff, such as turning it off! (Just in case you didn’t know how, you have to press the Play/Pause button for two heart beats – which makes about as much sense as going to the Start button on the PC to turn it off).

iTunes also misses the mark on other stuff, such as making the shuffle function easy to use, getting music back after it crashes (yes, I know it is hard to hear and accept, but they do crash), and being able to reset the device (which, by the way, requires nothing less than finger-acrobatics).

When looking at what iPod users wish it did, the device starts sounding a lot like Zune.

What do I know? Apple just had a great quarter… Apple Droning abides.

People are leaving MySpace in droves, the WSJ reports. Apparently overwhelmed by spam friend requests, lots of former users are giving up altogether. (My favorite quote from this article: "He realized: "'If it's a picture of someone fairly attractive, they're probably not my friend in real life.'" Poor guy!)

The companies deny there's been an increase in deletions, despite their traffic drops, but to me that means little. Most people don't delete their pages; they just stop going back.

I've long thought these social networking sites were overhyped, just like virtual worlds are now, but had a sneaking suspicion that it might be because I'm too old to get interested in them. But this seems to bear me out. The drop in usage on Facebook and MySpace promises to be an avalanche. Just as these sites became increasingly useful as more people signed up, they will be come exponentially less so as fewer and fewer "real" people return. I predict that within a year, MySpace will be a virtual ghost town, populated only by corporate avatars and porn-spam-bots.

SecondLife, sit up and take notice. The virtual world creators need to be careful about how they handle the media frenzy and new ad dollars and put in policies and safeguards now, not later, to prevent spamming and retain the value of their communities. Otherwise they, too, will eventually die.

(I'd also love to find any writing and research anyone's done on the lifecycles of virtual communities vs. real-life communities. Is it possible they have a built-in expiration, just due to the limited attention people can pay to things not directly in front of them?)

Ted sent around a great link to the Vicoria and Albert's new online Leonardo collection, where they have taken some pains to aniamted Leonaro's sketches. The results are fabulous.



‘The animations have been made using various techniques: a combination of traditional drawn animations and computer-generated animations. The biggest task was to bring those two together, and try as far as possible to emulate the drawings in Leonardo’s sketchbooks.

‘In some ways Leonardo made it easy for us, in other ways not, because of the great complexity of his vision, and the graphic complexity of his drawings. It’s been quite a task to capture this complexity in animations, without changing it in such a way that they are no longer Leonardo’s drawings animated but our drawings. There’s some compromise there, but as far as possible the results come directly from material contained in Leonardo’s sketchbooks.’"

http://www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/1384_leonardo/animated_illustrations/

(The V&A logo was designed by Alan Fletcher, who recently passed away.)

Labels: Design

Ever wonder where some of your favorite pantone colors might show up outside in the world?

Here are some fun examples:

Labels: Design

Apple has revealed that Leopard's interface will be resolution independant. This is a big deal in the development word, as it is the first acknowledgement that screen technology will seriously change the way that many interfaces are constructed. Apple should be applauded for taking such an intelligent step.

From Leopard's development page:

"The old assumption that displays are 72dpi has been rendered obsolete by advances in display technology. Macs now ship with displays that sport native resolutions of 100dpi or better. Furthermore, the number of pixels per inch will continue to increase dramatically over the next few years. This will make displays crisper and smoother, but it also means that interfaces that are pixel-based will shrink to the point of being unusable. The solution is to remove the 72dpi assumption that has been the norm. In Leopard, the system, including the Carbon and Cocoa frameworks, will be able to draw user interface elements using a scale factor. This will let the user interface maintain the same physical size while gaining resolution and crispness from high dpi displays."
http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/

Labels: Design

What? Seriously, “The Kids’ Market in the U.S.,” a study by market research firm, Packaged Facts, concluded that kids between 3 and 11 years old had a total of $18 billion dollars of spending power in 2005 – and growing… they say the number will reach $21.4 billion by 2010.

As kiddies gain more consumer power (read Porter’s “Five Forces”), they will be able to collectively (and probably unknowingly) negotiate better prices.

There are websites springing up all over the place designed to pocket some of this cash. The most interesting ones are the social networking sites for kids.

Sites such as ClubPenguin.com, NeoPets.com , and imbee are all jockeying to capture their share of the action.

As you would imagine, parents are concerned about the hazards of web. Privacy, sexual predators, social development, carpal tunnel, and lack of physical exercise are the things have parents bugging out the most. And since kids in this age group still listen to their parents, these social networking sites face some significant hurdles.

Many of these sites have instituted some sort of “parental permission” mechanism – but none of them (as far as I can tell) have offered what parents really want: a time limit. If one of these sites had compelling content and activities, account activation that is strictly created and controlled by a parent, and an option for a parent to specify the length of time the kid can use the site each day, then I’d bet parents would be more inclined to allow their kids to “play.” As it stands now, parents are “forced” to be the “bad guy” by policing the time their kids spend behind the computer. Under this scenario, kiddy social networking sites would sacrifice session length for increase subscriptions. Not to mention support-equity from parents.

Take a look at the activity around Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites… they are advertising gold mines. If they knew what was good for them, they would invest some cash and develop some vertical stratification.

In the meantime, we, the designers of communicators – the marketers, need to start thinking about what methods we will use to capture the attention of this demography on the web.

Labels: advertising, Old Media Deathwatch

It looks like the New York Times agrees with Claire (and idfive's approach)...

It's a rainy, yucky Tuesday here in Baltimore, one of those days that kind of wants to make you hunker down by your computer with a warm sweater, a cup of coffee, and some nifty new music on the iTunes. In the interests of encouraging hunkering (and slacking) here are a few odd stories to check out while you avoid the bleakness outside:

Yahoo Thwarted by Mexican Authorities in Attempts to Contact Aliens
Appparently Yahoo has decided that it wants to contact aliens by using a high-powered laser to beam messages to the universe. Huh. Well, it turns out that Mexican authorities weren't too enamoured of their idea to mount their ET-contacting laser on the top of The Pyramid of the Sun. Go figure.

uWink Bistro
After nearly a decade of discussion and planning, Atari (and ChuckECheese) founder Nolan Bushnell has finally decided to open a line of video-game-themed restaurants. Sounds a little 1980's to me...


Play Money
Author Julian Dibbell spent a year in cyberspace making money by buying and selling virtual items in video games. Along the way he ran into Malaysian hackers, identity theives, and teen wizards coming to him for relationship advice. Sounds pretty interesting!

Googazon
Is "Googazon" (the combination of Google and Amazon.com) the next Wal-Mart? Eweek takes a look and examines what it might mean to online shoppers (and everyone else).

FlashEarth
A nifty zoomable and browsable photographic representation of the earth using images from various online mapping sources (thanks, Claire!).

Progress in Advertising?
Has the world of advertising made any progress in the last 40 years? Check out this (ancient and highly politically incorrect) commercial and decide for yourself.

Take a look at this:



This is before and after shots of the same model. In the video on the front of the Campaign for Real Beauty, you'll see that she is given better lighting, makeup, hair, etc., and then she's been photoshopped extensively to perfection. Finally, the camera zooms out and we have this billboard, and we see two young women walk by and look at her.

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/

The campaign seems to be specifically asking us to consider that there is a destructive and negative aspect to generating this kind of fake beauty. a) the campaign says, it isn't necessary and b) it hurts women and girls.

My profession is design and advertising. I am employed, in effect, to communciate the best in people and products - to make them look good. My argument is that little retouching is necessary if we can just get the subjects at the right time in the right mood and with the proper expression. That isn't always possible, and inevitably, we are asked by our clients to make them "look good." But what is good?

The dove self-esteem campaign asks us all reconsider the fact that our definition of beauty might be quite damaging to women. This is hardly a new claim, and it has been rattled around for decades in academic circles and among fashion photographers and the like. It has been generally understood that the sociological and psychological effect of these images can be quite traumatizing. But it hasn't been popularized in quite this way before, so Dove should get credit for striking a nerve.

Moreover, Dove seems to be taking the due-diligence side of this issue quite seriously. That is, how much of an issue is this, is it severe, in what ways? A sampling of their poll is displayed on their site below, and it reveals that it is indeed a serious issue:


I spent some time reading the voluminous posts on the campaign's site, and believe me, this is something that everyone has a comment about. While there are many posts from women who seems to be just sighing with relief that anyone will honestly address this topic, a candid question from the southern-spelling poster "not-an-asshole" (a man, I presume) said, "ya'll be wearing makeup tomorrow, hows that different?" Links in the posts to the size zero model who dieed recently, numerous blogs and posts elsewhere show this is a vital issue to many people.

Some other things to see:

A rather well done and disturbing commercial with cute little girls alongside what they think of themselves.
http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/commercial.asp?src=InsideCampaign_commercial
youtube version - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1731400614466797113

slideshow with some data points, some unsurprising, others, quite intriguing.
http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/flat4.asp?id=6128

a fine photo exhibit:
http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca/realbeauty/main2.cfm

The idea that a home, food and personal care products company - unilever - can attempt to redefine what looking "good" is, is wonderfully and terrifically ambitious and - I think - admirable. But the more cynical side of me is simply awe-struck with the strategic side of this campaign.

I imagine sitting in a room and coming up with this campaign.
First, someone says, lets refashion our advertising into some sort of virtuous cause. Causes travel better than ads, and we can probably sell more if we are associated with something good. Second, after discarding "cleanliness is next to Godliness" and "clean is the new black" someone points out that poor self-esteem is a good issue, or at least no one else seems to have claimed it. Someone sheepishly mentions that dove has been on the wrong side of this issue for a millenia. Then as the ideas evolve they realize they have a goldmine of advertising riches on their hands. The models are cheaper. The point is crystal clear. Other ads side-by-side with theirs make their point for them. The message can travel along their entire product line. It will get them free PR placements, a community of associated products can be developed.

So I have a great regard for this campaign and this effort. I think it is worthwhile and - at times - beautiful and impressive.

But lets not forget this company still has some soap to sell. There is no amount of sarcasm in the world to help contextualize this promo that popped up as I visited the site:

Get a FREE* Dove Beauty Tote filled with product samples and help improve young girls’ self-esteem! Click now to order.

Labels: advertising, Design

This months’ Wired magazine had an article about renewable energy. I’ll tell yah, I haven’t been this excited about renewal energy. This method is exiting because its main ingredient is human and animal waste. Yes, that’s right. They are turning poo into ethanol. Tell me that’s not cool as… well, let’s avoid a cliché here.

Needless to say, this has captured my imagination.

First, recycling poo for mass consumption reminded me of Zoo Doo. Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo has been collecting, processing and casting their animal’s waste into figurines that people can purchase at the zoo store. The Zoo Doo figurines are meant to be taken home and placed in the garden. It both looks nice and it acts as a fertilizer. Now, how many other products do you know of that are made out of waste and have both value in form and in function? ("Macs" is not an acceptable answer for this question).

Then, this article reminded me of the 1973 movie “Soylent Green.” While it has nothing to do with turning waste into fuel, it does address the issue of what will happen to people in the future after we have exhausted all of our natural resources – including fruits, vegetable, and meats. “Earth is overpopulated and New York City has 40 million starving, poverty stricken people. The only way they survive is with water rations and eating a mysterious food called Soylent.” Soylent’s secret ingredient (skip this part if you don’t want to know the ending) turns out to be recycled humans.

Finally, I started thinking about what else made sense for us to start recycling. We have looked around the office have identified a couple of candidates: the color blue, transparent .gifs, and "div" tag.

In all seriousness, alternate fuel sources are starting to receive significant support – it is just a matter of time before they are no longer considered “alternative” and become de facto.

Why can’t traditional agencies make online advertising work?

Over the past few months I have been watching my clients struggle conceptually with the online advertising model. But they all seem to be coming around to the idea that it’s the direction they need to head. Many of these clients are seasoned marketing professionals with years of marketing communications experience, and often they are working with traditional agencies on other endeavors.

But their agencies, by and large, cannot seem to guide them at all.

Having come from a traditional agency background, I know what the problems are on the agency side. Nothing about a traditional agency setup—their campaign development process, their billing models, their org charts—makes it possible to effectively execute an online campaign. Furthermore, until these agencies drastically restructure themselves, they won’t ever be able to make it happen.

On the media planning side, unless they’re doing a lot of it, the agencies have little buying power online and little knowledge about what constitutes a good price. Furthermore, they’re trained to think of online as a supplement to the “real” campaign, which limits their creativity in developing the program. If they’re used to B2B or brand/awareness advertising, the direct response model is alien to them—and they have a hard time understanding how to adapt it to increase awareness. They don’t understand the role of search engine marketing in the mix and how to integrate it effectively, and they don’t understand how response ought to be measured.

On the creative side, fat-cat creative directors have zero motivation to move towards online, and this may be the biggest problem. Flying to shoots, long post-productions and the attendant expense account, plus the glamour of seeing your work on TV (“Mom! Turn on ABC, my commercial’s running!”) are irresistible. Making 120x600 skyscrapers is just not as exciting.

Many agency creatives think of themselves as artists. The traditional agency culture obscures the true nature of advertising: it is sales!! The collective fiction of Nielsen and Arbitron ratings allows agency folks to gloss over the unmeasurable nature of the campaign with faux-scientific “metrics.”

Online allows no such gray areas—the creative either works or it doesn’t. This is not about making a beautiful, music-video-like commercial: this is about selling widgets. Exposing the commercial nature of our enterprise is unpalatable to most agency creatives, because it undermines their whole identity as inspired aesthetes who can’t possibly be held to measurable standards.

Finally, agencies will have to reduce their staffing bloat and change their processes in order to play in a world where turnaround times are incredibly fast and metrics happen in real time. The slow-as-molasses branding/campaign brief/heavy account management model weighs the process down. Pitches and client meetings don’t need to have 15 people. Online creative doesn’t require a cast of thousands to produce. A solid team composed of a client services person, a media buyer, and a good two-person creative team is sufficient to execute a large campaign. But agencies will be loath to slim down, because to do so will expose the fact that they’ve been too slow and too expensive for years.

So what does the future hold? Some agencies, probably large ones, will (and have begun to) make the transition. But I think many will suffer, because I suspect even now they don’t see the writing on the wall. After the dollars have already moved, the old-school agencies will try and make the shift, but it will be difficult and generally too late. Meanwhile, upstarts who do know how to do this stuff will be hungry and waiting for the business.

The tectonic shift has only just begun.

Labels: advertising

No no, NOT PORN in the work place, I mean work place images that are almost as interesting as porn.

uhm.

Almost.



I have seen so many beautifully compelling exteriors with soul-deadening interiors that I feel obliged to state the obvious here: people work IN buildings, not on or around them.

Your clients may take a glimpse of your building for a half moment as they walk in, but from then on, it is how the place feels inside that counts.

It is what is on the INSIDE that counts!

And as much as it counts for your clients, it matters tenfold for your poor co-workers, who are spending more than a third of their life cooped up in an unfortunate space.


Wow. An HDR image of a seriously cluttered space!

If you are an employer, you have two employee-attitude-paths that you can go down:
1) you can focus on how to make your employees redundant, thereby decreasing your risk if they leave. And by doing so you may, in fact, be encouraging them to leave. Or...
2) you can concentrate on retention... that is, on what you can do to keep your employees.


Geninne's space

To my mind, the most affordable and effective way to retain an employee is to give them a good and fun place to work. And the most fun places, and this is a very disputable claim, aren't engineered so much as grown.

So what are some things that make a great office great? Well I have combed through these pictures and tried to list some of them that I see.

* people should be in a space that lets them learn;
* plenty of space, so you aren't cramped together;
* new shiny gee-whiz technology.



A simpsons cube at Google's main building, the Googleplex.

Physical health seems relaly important, so here are some thoughts on this.

Your ability to perform your job efficiently and effectively is influenced by any number of environmental considerations:

* warmth;
* daylight;
* glare avoidance (we all use screens, so this matters!);
* ergonomics; and
* positive (but often indirect) lighting.


This is the VW plant in Dresden, Germany.
It is like something out of a science fiction movie.

We have been chatting here at work about ways we could make the office more spiffy, and it isn't at all a mundane subject. Not only do all designerly folks have too many opinions about this, but there is a lot of philosophical implications as well - presumably we should aspire to have our space look like how we want our company to be. Ideally, the external physicality should reflect the internal reality. And presumably the investment in physical space will pay back in terms of retention and creativity.

But there is some hogwash in that sentiment too, since a good designer at a ho-hum desk probably does as good a job as if she were at a great desk. But a moderate or inferior designer, I think, might do much better work. I just don't know.


Yes, that is right, and this guy ain't fooling around - inside the tie fighter's cockpit you can see the cpu, the motherboard, etc.

YOu wnat a place that allows three things to happen either simultaneously or upon request:

* individual distraction-free work;
* undistracted group/team work; and
* impromptu collaboration and interaction


Have you been in a Target recently and seen the wonderful paper cutouts that are floating above you? They were done in this little cramped studio. Tord Boontje's studio in Paris.



Red Bull has a slide to take you from one floor to another. I've always thought a pole would be more fun. But seriously, does anyone expect women in business formal to enjoy this?

Thats right, a conference bike.


This is more a practical joke than a cool workplace, but I like it.



An entire wall made of curvilinear white board with windows. This is a government office! But it is in Europe, darnit. It is called Mindlab at the Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was designed by Bosche and Fjord.


This is the only desk I have seen with a rear view mirror. Joey Manic apparently no longer builds them, but you might be able to get one thirdhand somewhere.

We’ve all seen enough cooking shows on cable by now to realize that much of it is a soft core taste-bud-focused version of porn – or is that just me? Hmm. Maybe I should never use the word “porn” again.

Well some people like to watch Emeril burning some meat - as for me I like to look at other people's desks (probably because mine is so messed up).

Where other people work, where they sit around and ruminate and get things done is the quasi-public private space that can lend insight into how they think, where thy have been and where they are going.



Kathy Sierra writes her GREAT blog, Creating Passionate Users, from within an old trailer.

And it looks almost as comfy from the inside.

With "workplace porn" I guess I am talking about the inevitable wave of pictures of delicious office settings and furniture that crops up around any company hip enough to give its creatives the space to play. And there are SOOO many companies out there who do a fantastic job of giving their people good space.

Anyone remember the shock and awe that arose in 1996 when it was revealed that Netscape - gasp - allowed dogs at work? Surely other quasi-hippy companies have done it as well, but none promoted the "end of business as usual" as did the dot.bombs of those heady mid nineties.


Row of huts at PIXAR


An office alcove at PIXAR

The argument, over and over, seems to be this: “the investment in a compelling space is worth it because it allows our people to perform better.”

I can’t argue against the business case, but speaking from the point of view of someone who has worked in basements, alleys or in row homes, I am just pleased to have a window.

Maybe if everyone's expectations were Dickensian enough, we'd be pleased with heating in the winter and some watery gruel for lunch.



Still, one can’t help but lust after those crazy lunches that google gives away for free, or the fabulous warmth and privacy of the pixar huts.

This workplace seems to be one of the coolest on earth, but it is hard to know. Nice video though:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhlqypFwBaU


the main corporate headquarters of project brasil.

read some more about office spaces here:
http://positivesharing.com/2006/10/10-seeeeeriously-cool-workplaces/


Oh yeah, this is from google. apparently it begins ot get a bit smelly there. Maybe I don't want to work for google after all.

The core of this phenomenon is that we still have a little bit of an industrial model of office design, we still are thinking that we produce some THING, as opposed to some idea.

Knowledge workers produce, handle, massage, refine and distribute knowledge. Sometimes knowledge workers produce consultations, sometime they make entertainment. What knowledge workers need to make this happen, the physical side of their mental canvas, hasn't caught up yet, and it is fascinating to see how many concepts, be they grown, designed or scientifically developed are creating a great landscape of office spaces to lust after.

There is a GREAT summary of different thoughts about well-designed workspaces here.

Labels: Design

This "zoomquilt" is pretty entrancing, but falls off the dada / fantasy bus in some places and gets a little silly.

I would love to see a more serious attempt but until then i'll play here:

http://zoomquilt.tobina.de/zoom.htm

Labels: Design

People are watching less and less TV. We all know that the TV industry is struggling big time. And networks are responding by airing more interesting material. I am having a hard time keeping my TV viewing hours down this season.

Also, commercials are down by 20%. So, more content and less interruptions for consumers - and a heftier price tag for advertisers since networks are reducing supply.

Commercials are getting better, too. They are better produced and more entertaining.

As a result, ads are costing more to produce (due to higher production value) and air (due to reduced supply). So much so, that networks are testing some nontraditional advertising options that reduce airing costs. For example, Cadillac and AOL have been running 5 second “blink” ads. The most common commercial length is 30 seconds, but other popular ad lengths are 15 and 60 seconds.

Creating significantly shorter ads is very challenging. Five seconds is a not a lot of time to convey a brand, message and a call to action.

Sounds like producing ads for the web. Only designing ads for the web is harder because the ad shares the viewing real estate with god-only-knows-what-else.

Traditional advertisers should take a long hard look at some of the techniques that we are using to capture people’s attention.

Labels: advertising