Holiday e-card round-up

A few holiday cards caught my eye this year for a number of reasons so I thought I would list a few.

Cake-O-Matic - Though some users may be put-off by dropping Santa in a blender, Resource Interactive holiday card allows you to create custom fruitcakes from a variety of ingredients including Barbie, Elmo and a Wii.

RGA Holiday Card - This card chose origami as the inspiration for this year’s holiday card. It is not nearly as impressive as their cards from years past and for a card from an interactive company it is not very interactive at all. I expected more from them and would have thought they would have made better use of the medium.


Starwood IMC Holiday Card - What's the holidays without a little shameless self promotion? This card was created by my team at Starwood and was produced by Domani Studios. The string of lights are used as a time line to show all the accomplishments of the interactive marketing group over the past year.

Photoshop CS3 follow-up

So I spent the holiday pounding away on Photoshop CS3 and thought I would give a quick update.

Interface
For me the new interface is probably the most impressive thing about CS3. It seems that after years Adobe has finally gotten together a team that really understand how designer use Photoshop and they have created a new interface that puts everything at your fingertips but keeps it out of your way.

Speed
The speed increase and ability to run on Intel Mac's is a tie with the new interface for the best things about CS3 and I have spent a lot of time thinking about that fact and it makes me mad. When I worked on Exxon I learned the term "begrudging dependence" which is when you will up with something you hate because you have to have it. Adobe left all of us twisting in the wind for nearly a year waiting for this application to get us back to where we were on our old Mac's. I would hope someone at Adobe reads this and shutters at the fact that their tactics are being compared to Exxon. I would have thought they would have taken a page from macromedia's book and the Flash 7 massacre when they tried to court more developers into using Flash and ended up with no new customer and pissed off the rest of their customer base.

Bridge
I have never liked Bridge. It always seemed like the little kid no one in the neighborhood liked but you had to play with because is parents were big shots. I liked it when it was called File Browser and was integrated into the application. My work flow keeps me in Photoshop 70% of the time and not switching between all the different CS products so I was frustrated that I now had to run two applications when I used to just have one. This new version is finally to a place where it is a useful tool that is fast, customizable and something that could help you in your day-to-day work.

I am going to get into more of the new features in the coming weeks and will update you on that when I have it.

Unborn hard rock

Saw this ad for the Hard Rock in Oslo today and loved it. There are times when the best ideas don't need any copy at all. Click the image to see the larger version since the small thumbnail doesn't really do it justice.

Guess the logo

Need a fun waste of time and branding exercise all in one place? Check out GuessTheLogo.com and see how little you really know about online brands and they logos.

Toyota's mind

North Kingdom has launched a new site for Toyota called "On Toyota's mind" that is one of most unique one's I can remember for the brand. I am not sure if it is officially a Toyota site since it is sitting on North Kingdom demo URL. The whole thing has a very Myst meets Sim City feel as you click and explore the world they have created. Clicking on one of the small animations triggers a pop-up that explains the object you clicked on. These are usually mildly interesting collections of photos and videos but they feel very dry and stiff coming from the wildly imaginative and animated world you just left. I think this is where sites like the Creative Mind from Adobe a better job of this idea as they carry it over throughout the entire site.

What the hell happened to having an IDEA?

It would seem that user generated content is now officially a trend as Time magazine has named you as the person of the year for the rise of user generated content. Somehow this trend has gone horribly wrong as Madison avenue is now content to turn the vision of their clients brands over to the consumers and let them do their jobs for them.

Southwest is the latest major marketer solicit clips of users' most awkward or humiliating moments on YouTube. Southwest joins ongoing Superbowl contests from Doritos (Crash the Superbowl) and the NFL (Super Bowl Super Ad), as well as past entrants like Mastercard (Priceless.com) and Converse (Converse Gallery), not to mention the doomed direct publishing model from Chevy Tahoe.

I believe that there can be power when you let consumers become participants and not spectators when it comes to your brands but there has to be line where we as advertising professionals are the experts and guides for our clients. Maybe it is because I am a second generation creative director who grew up with the "old" agency model that believed in good ideas or maybe it is because I refuse to join the growing mass of creatives who are allowing themselves to be reduced to nothing more than the people who dig through piles of YouTube video for the funniest fart joke for their next tv spot. So to those executives who find their ad agencies telling them that their best idea is someone else's idea I would say that if you believe that then you should follow that logic through and fire them on the spot and let a focus groups write your next campaign.

Amaznode

In the past I wrote about AmazType which was a cool reuse of the Amazon API to display search results as the word you searched for. Now there is AmazNode which will display your search results as nodes to show the relationships between different elements in your search. It is interesting to let it run for a while as see relationships start forming between large groups of results.

Adobe releases Photoshop CS3 beta

In early September this year I arrived at my new job and walked into my office to a wonderful site. A sleek black Apple box holding my new top of the line MacBook Pro. Like most designers I suffer from a bad case of technolust and do love the smell of new technology in the morning. The gleam in my eye was quickly replaced by the knot in the pit of my stomach when I discovered that the this new laptop that was more than twice as powerful as my old one was running all my Adobe/Macromedia applications half as fast s that old machine. The new Intel chip that was powering the laptop made Apple's applications fly but all the Adobe/Macromedia application had to run through Apple's emulation software called Rosetta to run on the new Intel chip. So for the last fur months Photoshop has been the bane of my existence as I grind through my new design files. So I was elated when I saw that for the first time Adobe was going to release the new version of Photoshop as a public beta and the new version was re-created as a universal application that could take advantage of the new Intel chip.

I downloaded it tonight and it is impressive. The first thing you will notice is that the trademark logo with the large eye is gone and replaced a slick new blue and white logo. I like the new look but since I have been working with Photoshop since it's first release I did get a little nostalgic to see the end of an era. The interface has been completely re-worked and now has a look that is very similar to the new Adobe interface first seen in After Effects 7. I am going to take it for a test drive over the holidays and will post more through once I have had a chance to really put it through it's paces.

Adobe Kuler

I wandered back through Adobe Labs today and was they have launched a new online application called kuler which is a web-hosted application built using Macromedia Flash and ActionScript 3.0. It lets users quickly create harmonious color themes based on predefined color formulas or by mixing their own color themes using an interactive color wheel. Color themes can be created in a variety of color spaces, including RGB, CMYK and LAB, and can also be represented as HEX values for use on the web. Users can tag themes, comment on them, and share them with others. You can then download any color theme as an Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ASE) file for import into their preferred Creative Suite 2 component and use the theme in their artwork. It is an interesting online application that is unlike anything I have seen online. It is addicting and shows great promise for the future of online creative applications.

Like.com - visual search engine

Like.com is an interesting site and I find what they are trying to do really intriguing. Maybe I am drawn to it since I am a visual person but it is the first site I have seen that uses a visual search engine. You can pick a product ad then highlight what you like about the product and it will return other results based on that look. All the teeny boppers will swoon over the functionality that lets you highlight part of a celebrity and it return items like what they are wearing. Once you get the results you can use sliders to adjust your price range, color shape and other features. The site is still in alpha but I think it really shows promise for what online retail could evolve into.

Roxik digital toy

For the first time in my career I want to hire a designer after seeing just one piece of his work. This digital toy was done by Masayuki Kido from Japan and it is a stunning combination of a physics toy and visual narrative all rolled into one.

Sunday Night Football fake-out

I just spotted something funny while I was watching the pre-show for Sunday Night Football on NBC where Bob Costas, Jerome Bettis and company where they break down the day's scores. The group looks be sitting in front of a large window looking out onto Rockafeller Center. I never thought anything of the view out the window but tonight it was of the famous Christmas tree and skating rink in the middle of Rockafeller Center. It took me a second but then I realized that there is no building with that view in Rockafeller Center and the whole thing is fake. It is probably one of the best real-time green screens I have seen but it is funny that they are faking out most of the country who think they are in a studio with that view.

The rise of the creative class

I have been reading an interesting book called The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida. The book is about how there is a new social class defined by creativity and it is transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. This new class of people is defined by those whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and new creative content and in general this group shares common characteristics, such as creativity, individuality, diversity, and merit. As a designer and someone who falls into this class it is an interesting and thoughtful read.

OfficeMax launches 20 holiday microsites

I was cruising through Communication Arts web site today and saw a headline that OfficeMax had launched 20 holiday themed microsites to promote their brand. I do have to say that the write up did make me laugh as it toted this event as the most sites launched at one time by an office supply retailer which seems to me like kind of a low bar to get over. The sites are simple games, gags and image manipulation that could have been housed under one URL but where is the press in that? Some of the sites include:

Mistletoe In An Elevator - A hidden camera style perspective of an elevator with two office workers entranced by the power of mistletoe.

Conspiracy Carols - Subversive messages buried inside Christmas carols? It's better than playing a Pink Floyd album backwards because you get to write your own message and share it with your fellow conspiracy theorists.

Everythings A Reindeer - In a move usually only reserved for the dog, you can attach reindeer antlers to pictures of your family and friends.

Stuck To A Pole - You can manipulate a small mentally damaged child who has his tongue stuck to a pole to make his perform a variety of mildly funny dance moves, songs, etc..

Elf Yourself - Probably the most interesting of the bunch, you can upload a picture of your face, call the special phone number and record a personalized holiday greeting and your face gets digitally attached to an elf's body and the voice recording gets "elf-ed". It is a nice viral execution that integrates multiple points of information input.

Cirque LOVE

I am a huge fan of Cirque du Soleil and Guy de Laliberté who is their founder and executive creative director. I find him so fascinating sice he has been able to marry stunning creative visions to wild commercial success and retain COMPLETE creative control over all of it. I saw they have launched a new site for their latest show LOVE at the Mirage is Las Vegas and the recent release of the LOVE CD.

Great error message

It is rare that you find a company that can make a 404 message a good brand experience. Overstock.com did just that with their message.

GazMetro

I came across a really interesting site this morning for all things a natural gas company. The new site for GazMetro is really elegant example and seamless example great Flash video. You get to the site to find living thumbnails. You click on one of them and trigger a video that follows a woman around her daily activities in her house. The quality is great and the best thing is that at certain points you are prompted with details of the house and the question "Want to know more?". Rolling over this will stop the video and bring up a small pop-up over the video. It is a really elegant want to handle moving between the main video and these smaller in sets.

Console turf war

There are times when you suddenly develop superhuman powers. You have an almost sixth sense where you can see into a bar where a media buyer is getting drunk out of their mind celebrating pulling off the buy of his life. You then go to the opposite scene where another media buyer is at home slaving over his laptop posting his resume onto monster.com.

This superhuman vision came to me when I was cruising through my bookmarks tonight and hit the PS3 page on Gamespot.com to find a full page media buy for the Xbox360. It would seem that Microsoft is really going for the kill shot with Sony's numerous problems during the PS3 launch and their severe shortage of consoles for sale. This turf war should lead to some interesting advertising in the near future.

VW Rabbt Online Advertising

A friend over at Organic turned me on to the new VW online advertising campaign for the Rabbit. One of the working ad units is shown above. It is a simple idea that is nothing more than subservient chicken in an ad unit but this ad fixes the fatal flaw of that site. This ad actually shows the product and the brand. Type in "run" and the car zips around the ad unit. Type "jump" and the car jumps off a ramp. Type in "multiply" and well - see what happens. Now if only good online advertising would start multiplying like this.

1000 Paintings

So I have been getting a lot of emails from people who are all a buzz about onethousandpaintings.com and I guess I am just not impressed. While it is a mildly interesting phenomenon, I just don't think it is anything to get excited about. For me all it proves is that there are a lot of people out there who are more concerned about being part of a trend than doing something original or creative. Is it just me? Give me your thoughts on the comments.