Sometimes a negative is a positive, especially when it comes from a company that has an even worse online portfolio than I do! Really, folks, I know my site is still in the stone age, but don't talk the trash if you can't back it up with work we can see (the portfolio section, if you can call it that, was some sort of slow-loading Java thingie that never finished loading, and wasn't branded with the same UX as the rest of their site. C'mon, people! Let's use something better than iWeb to build your own site--especially if you offer web design services!)
The interesting thing to me is that these guys are in southern California (a place where I've never had any clients) and work primarily in the entertainment industry (which, aside from being a DP on a friend's short, I've never worked in or for). Love the birdie photo on the right, especially. I mean, really, WTF? Is this how you promote your business? I have a feeling they pulled my name off a Google search for "creative services denver" (picking Denver at random, perhaps) and plucked my URL from there.
Who knows? Who cares, really? Just another example that the internet may be a great place to find good people who can help you to make your business succeed, and it can also be a place full of mediocrity and Red Bull-filled nonsense.
Egotist, You little slice of Heavenly-Smoked Goodness
Ever wanted to spruce up your site with some really appealing feature, but didn't want to take the time or spend the money to do anything, er, substantiative?
From the perfectly imperfect Cat Ad Girl, her latest.
I think that imperfection actually has more visual appeal than the perfect. But that statement, in and of itself, doesn't rule out perfection; it merely redefines it as something that isn't conventionally "ideal".
This post from Steven Heller over at the AIGA on whether or not there's anything funny about graphic design makes some good points. In general, I find that any creative endeavor turns out better (more effective, more compelling, more "tight") when some humor or playfulness has been applied to the process.
And besides, if you can't have fun while you're working, what the hell is the point?
A short excerpt:
Why are puns necessary in graphic wit and humor? The rules that govern verbal language do not translate precisely into visual language. Thus, The New York Times has no rules governing visual puns. Graphic designers’ canon of usage is different because our means of communication—our language, syntax and grammar—are different.
As a Wheat Ridge resident and business-owner, I am annoyed at you northern urbane Longmonters. I’ll have you know the Wheat Ridge Ad Club and Grange has been active since 1863, when a former miner won fifteen racks of woodtype and fresh-off the boat-from-Europe Clarendon type-sets. Did he choose to locate his soon-to-be prosperous business in Denver City? In Longmont? In Cripple Creek? NO! Wheat Ridge was the place for him. It’s the place for me, and it’s the place for any creative and success-oriented marketeers and visual entrepreneurs who want the pristine vistas, carnation greenhouses, and sweet Clear Creek water that we, as educated and righteous folk, DESERVE! Longmonters: throw open your doors, then walk out of them, southward, to Wheat Ridge!
Sometimes the best-branded companies aren't even real.
My favorite fake company is probably Hudsucker Industries, the improbable inventors of the hula-hoop ("you know, for kids!"). After that it would probably be Monsters, Inc., notably for the great pains the production team put into making the Monsters Inc. brand believable (they cited Paul Rand and the vision of a postwar industrial giant, fallen on hard times as the thesis of the brand). But the latest is Buy n Large, the company that put humanity in space and off of the garbage-infested Earth, forever, in the new Pixar film WALL-E. check out their website: it's a lovely dash of Onion-like truthiness, recast for framing the backstory for WALL-E. My favorite article in the Buy n Large PR archives is probably how BnL bought the rights to rebrand north. As in, the direction "north".
So, since the weekend is upon us, go see a movie. And stay away from the NANC-E bot...a nanny robot with pincers like that looks dangerous.
If you forgot to bike to work today, with the rest of us, make up for it by biking in tomorrow. You'll still get credit for it in my book. But only if you wear a tie.
Ever thought your Flash animation was actually working against you? Like it knew you were under deadline, and was trying to make you late? Well, now there's proof.
Tip o' the Wacom Stylus to Heather GM for the twitter about it.
If there's one reason to hire a good copywriter, or at least one to proof your marketing before you send it off to press, it would be exemplified here. I won't point it out to you, but have a look at the featured drink on the front page of this menu I received in the mail, and see if it doesn't make you throw up in your mouth a little bit.
The Republican Party's new brand has the same tagline as an antidepressant? How, um, ironic.
Since I've been out in the field all week, I haven't been as watchful about branding slip-ups as I usually am. But when I came home tonight, I was relieved to find that Jon Stewart was temping for me while I was away. Kudos to the Daily Show for doing my work for me, by finding another example of why brand research matters.
ok, so I am working out right now. even as I blog.
Here's a lovely bit of graphic design interpretation from calorielabs.com. Several states are featured, and I can't decide whether or not I like New Mexico's or South Carolina's flag-as-infographic better. What do you think?
My own interpretation of the Colorado state flag is below:
It's a lot of fun to see an idea as silly as this fleshed out as completely as this, and have it work as well as I think it does. The proof will be in the pudding, though--specifically, in pudding made with milk, located in California.
So where's the Denver creative crew at, for stuff like this? I mean, we have the creativity, but this is more than that; this actually looked like it was a hell of a lot of fun to do.
...when the top posted items in your school's Facebook network are all in Japanese and probably are links to some sort of nifty anime or motion graphics YouTube reel....
Tom Fishburne sends out pithy branding/advertising-related cartoons every weekend. This one, featuring the 8 types of Creative Directors, showed up in my mailbox this past Saturday. Check out the entire cartoon and see which one you identify with/aspire to be/loathe.
I had heard that this happens. But it was the first time it happened to me. I am currently developing a concept for a client of mine who designs lighting. Engineers. Very cool folks--I have a couple of engineeruncles and more than a handful of scientists in the family, so it's cool to create a vision for bringing the fruits of engineers' brains to market. They needed a brand for their product. So I did a little market research, listened to the story of the product, and began to make a visual mark for this light. The logo was a little round thing, with orange and white and a sans-serif typeface. Perfect for the identity of this particular product. The client agreed, and we set off to create a product booklet based on these visual themes. A few weeks later, we meet to discuss revisions to the booklet. After going through some standard stuff ("let's use more arcs and less circles...let's include more technical illustrations....etc. etc."), they say "there's one more thing." They take me back to a computer and type in a URL. It's for a new competitor's lighting product. I look at the brand:
It's orange and white
Sans Serif typography
Circles everywhere
oh, and it has the same NAME as the client's product.
Wow. I actually grasp my head between my hands in incredulity. How did we miss this? Who made this? When did they make it? Why does my head feel like it's about to explode. I had heard that this happens. But it was the first time it happened to me. Of course, this is making us refine the brand for the client a bit. And it will be better than it is now. That's the bright, shiny side of the coin. I am telling myself, as my client told me, that this means we came up with a really great idea that expressed the universal gestalt that exists in the lighting products branding universe at this moment, and we should be proud of that (and they say my version is way cooler, by the way). So it's not a bad thing. But daaaaaaaang. I still have trouble believing that it's not some sort of prank being pulled on us by the lighting industry.
This, from The Net is Dead, via Heather G-M: The sad thing is this is (mostly) true. You can, actually, do anything a table can do in CSS, but there is a lot of tweaking to make things look lovely in all the browsers your client might require. The bit about Internet Explorer is completely true, and probably under-reports the amount of time we spend making any site work as expected in IE. The folks in Redmond follow their own laws. It's like they are vigilantes in an old-west movie, strutting into town while the marshall is out catching cattle rustlers, occupying his office and saying, "law? Law? Ma'am, we are the law, now."