I am very happy that HOW Magazine has chosen my blog as one of their new Top 10 Web Sites. I must be doing something right since I'm on the list with Cirque du Soleil though I wouldn't expect any acrobatics here anytime soon.

Labels: Shameless self promotion

Coudal Partners is a design, advertising and interactive studio out Chicago who will broadcast the first live game of Photoshop Tennis today. It is a technique I have used with my designers for years and it is where two designers (or two small teams of artists) will swap a file back and forth, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a "volley" and then we post that to the site. This allows the group and the work to quick explore new directions and not get stuck in the vision of just one person. This match is being called 'Layer Tennis' since they will be using multiple applications like Photoshop and Flash. It will be interesting to see if how this turns out and the differences between the matches as they have them planned every Friday afternoon for the rest of the year. Todays match will be between Shaun Inman who is the designer and programmer behind Mint and Kevin Cornell who is a freelance illustrator and designer.

Labels: Digital culture, Great exhibition, Great resource

Fashion designer Mark Ecko recently bought Barry Bonds' 756th home run ball at a Sotheby's auction or just over $752,000. Ecko then did something wonderful and fascinating by letting the public decide the fate of the ball. The options were banishing the ball into outer space, giving it to the Baseball Hall of Fame or branding it with an asterisk to represent the popular thought that Bonds used steriods to accomplish the feat. Over 10 million people voted and yesterday Ecko revealed the landslide decision yesterday on the NBC's Today Show where 47 percent voted to brand it and 34 percent voted to give it to the Hall of Fame. So the ball will be branded with an asterisk and the Hall of Fame has decided to accept it. It is a fascinating series of events where an online has been able to let the people have their voice and mark a piece of history forever with their opinion.

Labels: Digital culture, Viral

I spent a lot of years running the interactive portion of new business pitches at my last agency. I realized along ago that more often then not they are not determined by the quality of the creative that gets produced. They are determined by who knows who and how cheaply you are willing to do your craft.

You may have read about the nightmare that was the Wal-Mart Ad Agency review over the past year. The Martin Agency was the eventual winner. I almost went to work there because they do great work. I have a huge amount of respect for their creative director Mike Hughes and have good friends who work there.

A few weeks ago they launched Wal-Marts new tag line of "Save Money. Live Better" but it has sparked all kinds of head-scratching around the industry thanks to a the fact that that a shop other than Martin actually came up Wal-Mart's tag line. I first heard about this through former co-workers who now work at GSD&M who create a similar tag line, "Save More. Live Better," which they had previously pitched when they were Wal-Mart's agency. Wal-Mart has responded by saying that "Shop Smart. Live Better." was on the creative brief that each finalist received. Martin then recommended the testing of a few tag lines and "Save Money. Live Better" emerged.

So just to recap: Wal-Mart went through two agency reviews and an embarrassing scandal only to result in an ad campaign that amounted to the re-use of something from the creative brief used before the review.

Labels: Branding

Came across this site today for Jam3Media. The home page is minimal design where the thumbnails of the work re-arrange to make up the names of their clients when you lick on them. One you go in to the work they use a simple but very nice cursor replacement that eliminates the need for any sub navigation. I think this technique is under utilized because, like in this case, it can create a very intuitive and simple simple user experience that eliminates the need for translation to a global audience.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional design, Exceptional experiences

So a really frustrating update that due to a business conflict I am not going to be able to make it to MAX this year. Sorry to everyone I was supposed to meet up with and hopefully we can do it next year.

There is an interesting and almost underground movement going on with some of the designers I knew here in New York City and about a dozen other cities around the world called Pecha Kucha (pronounced peh-chak-cha) which is a Japanese word for chit chat. Designers come together for a night to have a forum where their work can be easily and informally shown without having to rent a gallery or chat up a journalist. Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each giving them a total of 6 minutes 40 seconds before the next presenter is up. An average night has about 14 presenters and this keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show. It was all devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Klein Dytham Architecture in Tokyo in 2003.

The funniest part is that the 20x20 format of Pecha Kucha is now being adopted in the business world with business presentations being run in a strict 6 minutes 40 seconds, with all discussion and questions held to the end. This forces presenters to be more focused in their message, allow them to flow uninterrupted and ultimately to avoid the "death by Powerpoint" syndrome of long and tedious Powerpoint presentations.

If you live in the New York City area the next meeting will be October 10th and you can learn all about it here. Want to find one in your city then click here. Want to do your own presentation then click here.

Labels: Digital culture, Great resource

Good copy can make even a simple 'coming soon' page funny and effective. I saw this one today for a web designer in the UK and it made me laugh and made an impression.

Most night you can find me winding down the day on my PS3 blasting away in Resistance Fall of Man. Being 34 and a gamer does make me feel old at times when all the advertising you see is fast cut montages geared to excite the fast twitch brain muscles of the younger Mountain Dew soaked gaming audience.

Yesterday I saw the first video game commercial that was mature and thoughtful entry into this advertising category. The spot is a teaser for the upcoming release of Halo 3 and looks and sounds very much like something taken directly from HBO's Band of Brothers. I personally don't have any connection to that material since I have never owned an Xbox or played Halo my friend and piers who are my age were really effected by it as I passed the link around. My friend who first sent me the link had the best comment when he said "The only real concern I have is that I feel awkward feeling more moved and inspired by the Halo war museum than the Bush wars.".

Labels: Digital culture, Exceptional creative, Integrated advertising, Viral

I was watching football this weekend and saw the seemingly Twin Peaks inspired new commercial with Payton Manning for Sprint. Maybe it is me but I just didn't see how something that high concept would play with the male dominated football crowd. The end was tagged with the URL ManningsMind.com so I cruised over to check out the site.
It is basically a simple trivia game wrapped in a football game. You answer multiple choice questions of varying difficultly with the difficulty equating to different amounts of yardage. Like any football game you have to keep getting first down and scoring points to win. It is engaging for a little while but does get repetitive quickly.

The design is pretty vanilla with simple video responses from Manning and a nice but quickly repetitive hologram style animation of the play after you answer each question. I did run into technical problem with the site though and played through the game four times and 2 of the times the game completely froze up on my around the 3rd quarter.

You would have thought that Sprint could have done more than create this disjointed campaign with Manning. It will be interesting to see if they stick with this campaign or creating something new.

Labels: Design and user experience, Gaming, Site review

I thought this site was an interesting use of the Papervision 3D technology to create an interface. The simple use of the icon replacement is a simple but effective usability hint.

SONY Bravia adverts which I have highlighted before are back for round 3 and this time it is here in New York. This latest installment hasn't been released yet but from what I can tell and have seen this latest version will large scale claymation of rabbits using about 2.5 tons of clay, 3 weeks and about 40 animators to create. No claymation of this scale with this many animators working at once has even been attempted so it will be intersting to see the results though no release date has been given.

Labels: Viral

So I keep hearing chatter in the hallways of different agencies about OpenAd.net. The site is a Slovenian based online marketplace where advertising and design ideas from about 9,000 creatives worldwide are bought and sold. Companies or agencies can become a member, hold a pitch or find idea in the gallery, select ideas and license them. It launched last year and has mainly served European clients but it is quietly being tested by U.S. marketers like Gillette who used it a few months ago and heard pitches from creatives in 21 countries for their disposable razors for the Fusion shaver. You can see the potential power of the site since the winners were a Slovenian student, a British photographer and an American creative director, all of whom based their submissions on an initial idea from a small agency based in India.

Depending on who you talk to OpenAd will be a major disruption to the global ad-agency model or just another generic online resource. I think it is interesting idea that could finally take advantage of the new flat-earth economics and communication advantage provided by the web but I don't think this is going to put any agencies in jeopardy any time soon. This model is for one-off idea creation and it doesn't offer the strategic and brand guidance, account management or executional capabilities you find in big agencies. I look at it as a way that I could supplement my creative team during large projects or campaigns or a way to bring fresh thinking to brands we have been working on for a long time. It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next few months when OpenAd gets a brick and mortar office here in New York with another office planned some time in the future for the West Coast.

Labels: Design and user experience, Digital culture, Great resource

I came across the portfolio site for Tokyo base creative director Kashiwa Sato which is simple, abstract and beautiful. You use the shifting colored blocks to navigate to his equally colorful and well designed work.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional creative, Exceptional design, Site review

Adobe has been de-volving the logos of all their products over the past year as they fold in all the Macromedia products into their stable. Last week at Photoshop World in Las Vegas they revealed that the first product to emerge from the generic colored block identity will be Photoshop with this new logo. It leaves me flat to have a product used by creative people that has a such boring Microsoft look alike icon. Maybe this is their play to get more mass market recognition as they once against forget about their base customers and supports.

Labels: Branding

Typography Kicks Ass. As a design you http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifjust have to love the sound of it. I came across which is a nice example of found typography. It uses a random set of letters published on Flickr to display a user generated message. Each letter is also linked to the respective image on Flickr so you can roll over it to see the credits. You can create your own message and send it to a friend of just share it with the community in general.

Labels: Design and user experience

Microsoft finally launched their version of a "Flash killer" called Silverlight which was announced in the spring and officially launched last week. It has initially been getting praise for its ability to stream high-quality video. The Halo 3 Sneak Peek on MSN is the only real consumer site I have seen the technology deployed on and I didn't think the video looked like anything special at all.

I would have thought Microsoft would have taken some notes on the miserable failure of Adobe's "Flash killer" Live Motion some years back and really created something different that would have designers wanting to switch. For me, high quality video alone isn't nearly enough of a reason to ask my users to download a new player and for me to learn a completely new tool set. So while I love the idea of someone finally pushing Adobe to really move the Flash platform forward I think it is going to be a tough road for Microsoft without a lot more work and functionality for us to get excited about.

Goodby has launched another new campaign for Comcast cable called "TripleSlanguage". The campaign and site promote Comcast's on-demand Triple Play Service by using a color-coded deck of flash cards introduced new terms including "Karaocasting" "Snurfing", "Telebinge" and "Phoruption". The site creates a fun and compelling experience as you want to try and figure out what the words means before flipping the card over to see the definition and corresponding animation. You can also take a quiz to see what you have learned and submit your own words to be included in the deck.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional creative, Exceptional design, Exceptional experiences, Integrated advertising

Having lived in Dallas for years I was able to see first hand how many people are true devotees of this temple of high-end retail. It made me too twice today when I saw that Neiman's has taken over the YouTube home page to promote its 100th anniversary with designers, former associates and Neiman Marcus executives talking about the company and what its legacy means for fashion. It does seem like a very strange pairing since most of Neiman's core audience is the ladies-who-lunch crowd but I have seen where other high-end luxury brands have found success on YouTube. The numbers say they may have made a smart move since ComScore data says that YouTube.com indexes higher both in people ages 35 to 54 and in high-income households than the general Internet population.

But like everything the research doesn't ensure success and though it is still early the numbers look pretty weak since the video only has around 130,000 views and a two star rating. I think that the mediocre results are going to change because even thought this is a small experiment Neiman's has a few things working against them. First, that the brand has been so old school for so long makes it hard to make a channel shift like this. Second, that this content will only resonate with people who have been to a store and had a reaction like the people in the video. If you don't have that experience to ground the content then it just seems overly pretentious.

Labels: Online advertising review, Viral

I'm 6'4" and finding anything unique or creative to wear is pretty much impossible. I have struggled with this almost all my life since designers seem to think that as your height increases so does your love of Hawaiian print.

A few weeks ago I met Dan Butler is the designer and creator of Handmade in Brooklyn and was blown away. He designs a line of very unique and extremely well designed shirts that are inspired by everything in Brooklyn as well as his own internal landscapes (personal journals, etc.). He was kind enough to work with me to create some of his designs in sizes I can wear

The main stream continues to seek out and embrace the homogeny of fast food cuisine, art and fashion. We get comfort from consistency and being part of the crowd. We need to embrace and support as many designer like Dan as we can find. I highly encourage you to order any of his fantastic works and any of you in the New York area can find selling his designs in Union Square most weekends.

There are sites that remind me that we can get too caught up in creating overblown interfaces and that simplicity can be powerful and refreshing. Checkland Kindleysides is one of those sites that uses simple and beautiful animation as the centerpiece for their site.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional design, Exceptional Flash, Site review

So you have probably seen by now that Apple announced a slew of new iPods yesterday including an iPhone like iPod touch. That was great and very cool stuff. Everything fell off the rails at the end of the presentation when Steve Jobs announced that they dropped the price of the iPhone $200. I got my iPhone for free and it was even hard for me to swallow that a short two months after launch they drop the price that much and slap your die hard fans, people who slept in the street and paid the premium to support you in the face. A friend pointed out that he could have returned it through his credit card who guaranteed the price for 60 days but this change came on day 63 so he was out of luck. I understand wanting to have a strong holiday season but I struggle to understand why you would anger your core audience so much.

UPDATE:
So I just saw the letter from Steve Jobs posted on Apple.com where they say they are going to give a $100 store credit to all 8GB iPhone customers. It is a fast move to appease the masses.

I love to cook so I was intruiged when I got the link to the new MyAmoy site which will let you cook stir fry online. You can choose four ingredients and a sauce which range from the pedestrian to the outrageous and then save your creation for the world to see or download. The production value is nice this good use of video and animation but the biggest things that it is missing is that there is a baked in assumption that we know what the hell this is promoting. I know this a UK site so I am not the audience but you would think something that basic would have made it into the site.

Labels: Design and user experience, Exceptional Flash, Site review