Earlier this year I wrote about Jane, who did an interesting experiment where she took a typical Friday and documented how brands affected her life that day. Now a student in the Visual Communication Design program at Arizona State University obsessively chronicled all the brands, logos, identities and symbols, 1,035 in all, that he interact with throughout a single day and arranged them in order around the clock.

I came across an interesting site today from Ogilvy who ever trying to spin the message has launched a site all about the recession in an attempt to keep brands from cutting their budgets. This site gives you access to a series of booklets with titles like 'Optimizing The Marketing Budget In Recession' and 'Turning Shoppers Into Buyers'. They are target at CMOS and CEOs to highlight strategies and tactics to try and take advantage of different channels through these economic troubles.

Enough about the set-up. So after reading the into to the site I was curious and wanted to see what they had to say about turning shoppers into buyers. I clicked on the link and low and behold a lead generation form pops-up which is to be expected on something like this. I filled out the form and hit download to get the PDF. A few quick seconds later the file had downloaded and popped open in Acrobat. The first thing I noticed was that it was only 1 page which seemed strange but maybe it was some really good and really condensed knowledge. I scrolled down to find.... YOU HAVE GOT TO BE #@$%ING ME.

After all the lead up, after the pitch to position themselves as the shepherd who can get you through the storm all you get is a 1 page coming soon PDF? You expect clients to trust you next year with their limited budgets when they are under intense pressure for results when you can't even come up with the goods on your own advice? I will check back next week and see if any real content shows up and if it does I will write a follow up on what they have to say.

A year and a half ago I wrote about a new technology that Microsoft had acquired called Photosynth that was built on another technology called SeaDragon. Sea Dragon lets you browse graphics and photos regardless of the amount of data or the bandwidth of the network and Photosynth stitches them together into a 3-D space. Both technologies were then and remain very impressive and I see a lot of potential uses for both. Today the SeaDragon technology was release as the first ever Microsoft application for the iPhone. If you listen really hard you can hear Steve Jobs laughing because it seems that this application which Microsoft takes so much pride in can't run on Windows Mobile. This version of the technology is really more of a tech demo and only has about 50 sample images but you can also add your own images through your own Photosynth account. It is pretty slick, it is free and it is worth checking out so one of us can figure out how to work this into an idea and get it to have a wider adoption.

Labels: Design and user experience, Digital culture

Anyone who has ever had to lead and inspire a group of creative people knows how challenging it can be. You have to lead but let them find their own solutions and creative process. You have to set the tone and style for the work but allow for individual creativity. This isn't ever going to be book that will give you all the answers on how to do it. I get a lot of emails from people of all levels asking for advice or ideas on how to do it better as we all move down the road in our career and develop from a creative designer to a creative leader.

I break the problem down into how you manage the creatives who work for you on a day to day basis and creating the long term road map for the group.

The day-to-day creative director
I have found that creatives will come to me for two things on a day-to-day basis – hope and support. Hope because they they need to know that tomorrow is going to be better than today and they are going to be able to do better, cooler, bigger work in that future. I think that if we are really honest we would say that creatives are restless and insecure by our very nature so we need a sense of hope that this personal endeavor will be well received. Support so that they know their work is valued and you are just as passionate about it as they are and will fight to protect the countless hours they have spent creating this work that is very personal to them.

I say that knowing those are very big and general points so I break it down into things that are more executable like the next time I talk with one of them I am sure they walk away from me with:
1 - a plan of action for both of you which will give them hope that things will improve and the two of you will work to fix their problem, challenge, campaign, design, etc. It also sets goals and expectations so that hope will be fulfilled and not become and empty promise which will become more damaging.
2 - an understanding of what I am going to do about the problem because this tells them I understand and value the work they have done and tells them I am going to fight and protect them, their work and our group


From designer to creative director (or how I miss the days I was still a designer)
You get to the point when you decide to transition from a just a designer to a designer and manager and that you need to be able to focus on leadership, vision and hope more than your design ability. In a lot of ways it is a strange system that the higher you go in your career the further you get away from what you love and what brought you into the industry in the first place.

For leadership you need to lay out a clear path for your team and the company right away so they know what is expected of them and what they should expect from you. Vision to me has always been to be the one who is always pushing the team to go 10-20% beyond where they want to so the work gets better than it is now. Hope, so that they know tomorrow will be better than today, that their work will be better than it is today and for you all of that will add up to them staying with you for years.

Along with laying out your expectations for the group you also need to evaluate the talent you have to work with. Trust your gut and make any cuts you need to. The one thing I have learned from working for a lot of epic creative directors is that you always protect your best talent no matter what and let the rest fall where they will. It is never worth losing a truly talented art director because you didn't fire a junior copywriter who is making their life hell.

These things are just the starting point but don't be afraid to actually lead, set the tone and set expectations. Listen to your people so you know what they need, how they work and what you need to do to support it. You are asking them to creating something personal for you while working crazy hours so remember you owe them just as much as they give you.

Labels: Back to basics

I love how digital real estate has become the new commodity to bet between friends and companies. I recently lost a controversial bet on the Steelers and Chargers football game where the winner got complete control of the losers Facebook status for a week to do his worst with. If the touchdown at the end of the game had counted the way it should of then I would have won. The ref's bumbled decision meant I lost and bedlam ensued with me having to post a weeks worth of Miley Cirus status updates.

Last Friday my friends at Firstborn Multimedia took on my other friends over at Big Spaceship in an epic battle of sorts. The two agencies played each other in friendly games of basketball, ping-pong and foosball. Firstborn walked away victorious. It was only then that the truth came out that the real bet was made between both agency CEO’s Michael Ferdman and Michael Leibowitz for whovever wins gets to redirect traffic to their site for who knows how long?! Today Firstborn claimed their winnings with a stab at Big Spaceship’s employees. Click here to check it out. It is funny on it's own. If you have ever met any of the characters involved in this it is hysterical.

Labels: Digital culture

Last night Sony flipped the switch on the long awaited free digital community on the Playstation 3 called Home. If you have ever used Second Life or the Sims you pretty much get the idea of the experience you will find here with the addition of high definition graphics and a lot more advertising. The advertising appears in traditional forms like posters and videos throughout the environment but there will able to custom spaces created through their partnerships with Activision, Disney Eidos, Electronic Arts, Lucas Arts, THQ and UBISOFT. These custom themed spaces will center around games from those companies. Current only two are live for Uncharted: Drake's Fortune and Far Cry 2 with more planned to be released soon. Each player is also given he ability to customize their avatar's look and own property which they can decorate to suite their taste. Here agin we will see partnerships with clothing from Diesel and furniture from high end designer Ligne Roset.

I spent time last night with all of this exploring the world and talking to some of the players who were doing the same. I came away from the experience clearly seeing the benefit to Sony in terms of advertising revenue but could not find an equally compelling reason for gamers to embrace it. They can find a more robust and far less branded experience in Second Life or other games like it. They can chat with my friends over the Playstation Network without the need to go into the environment. I see this as yet another case where when you are trying to build a community it will not flourish until you are able to create a solid value proposition for he community and give them something unique that will make them invest into the community and the world. Obviously with Home still in beta there is time to be able to fix this but all the plans I have seen only look to add more branded content which is sad because this could have been something that could have created a unique brand separator for them instead of just a cash cow.

Labels: Consumer generated content, Design and user experience, Digital culture, Unique interface design

We are all really naive if we think that what is going on in the economy isn't going to find it's way into our professional lives and do it in a big hurry. Today I that reality landed with brutal force at my door and I had three really exceptional members of my studio taken from me. If anyone out there is looking for an interactive art director, information architect or honestly the best young writer I have ever worked for full time or contract work with please contact me and I will put you in touch with them. I will personally vouch for all of them, their talent and the fact that they have all been a very large part of the personal work i have posted here over the past year.

Volvo is one of those brands through the years that keeps flirting with ventures to appeal to the creative class. Now Vice, Yahoo! and British newspaper The Independent have teamed up to find the top 30 emerging creatives from the U.K in a new campaign for Volvo. The website lets you vote for their favorite creative by watching a video about them and their work. The creatives aren't just from advertising and range from tattoo artists to journalists to designers. The winner was determined by fan votes and William Chambers drove away with a newly redesigned Volvo C30 while Katie Paterson walked away with £10,000.

the tie back to the Volvo band and specifically the C30 is that it is supposed to be the zenith of the new Volvo design language sporting the smallest, yet most expressively designed of all Volvos. It is an interesting angle for the brand to try and get a younger customer base and it actually make sense since this model has the lowest MSRP of any vehicle in their lineup. I am not sure of the creative class is quite ready to embrace the historically safe and stuffy brand but it is nice to see them try and branch out in a few different ways.

Labels: Digital culture, Site review

It is true that everything old becomes new again and you only have to look at the recent return of the original computer graphics ASCII art to see that is true. This site and unique animation are just two of the most recent and best examples.

March of Dimes - What Are You Wondering?
This site from the March of Dimes runs an animation of a crawling new born shown in a screen full of questions about parenting and babies. The interface is simple and well executed as you are able to type in a question into a form field and the corresponding questions light up in the field of questions also being used for the baby animation. The combination of style and functionality is too rare and a nice example of how the two can be combined and retain the best parts of both.

AC/DC Rocks Your Excel File

The most recent album from AC/DC dropped recently and the first single 'Rock n Roll Train' had a video unlike anything I had ever seen before. I first saw it on YouTube and someone sent me the actual file shortly there after. The unique thing is that the video is done completely in an Excel spreadsheet file (you can download it for yourself here). They took the video and converted it to ASCII art and when shown like a flip book creates the video.

If trends like this continue I will be back programming my own 8 bit video games out of computer magazines in no time.

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

Burger King recently launched an interesting new online platform called Burger King Studio which is trying to move the brand more squarely into the sight of a younger and hipper youth culture by creating design projects with artists like Joshua Davis. That part of he project is still in it's early stages but there is no shortage of t-shirts for sale. These are kind of interesting with a unique take on the brand image with the best part of the store being the ability to create you own design from a variety of colors and graphics with a Flash based t-shirt designer. So it is an interesting start but like so many other interesting projects that have gone before it the proof will be in seeing what it turns into and if they make it more than a flash in the pan.

Labels: Consumer generated content, Design and user experience, Digital culture