Monowheel by Ben Wilson. This is a totally dead-sexy piece of construction and a tribute to the do-it-yourselfer.
I’m pretty serious about somebody making me one and getting it out to me pronto.
38 things that Ogilvy & Mather have found that helps when creating Advertising that just flat-out SELLS. Ogilvy & Mather have been giants in the advertising world for a while, and they know what they are talking about. David Ogilvy has written us this gem of an article that articulates these 38 things. It’s a great read if you’re at all interested in advertising. Highlights are listed below.
1. How should you position your product? This is by far the most important decision.
2. Create a large promise, a benefit for the customer.
3. Brand image.
4. Big Ideas. Big ideas are usually simple ideas. “THe problem, when solved, will be simple”.
5. First-class Ticket.
6. Don’t be a bore.
7. Innovate.
8. Be suspicious of awards.
9. Psychological segmentation.
10. Don’t bury news.
11. Go the whole hog. This is a great point. Don’t attempt too many things, you’ll achieve nothing. Boil your strategy down to one simple promise, and go the whole hog in delivering that promise.
They also have 12 points in what works well in television, and 13 for print. It’s a great list, and I’m just loving digging through this genius.
32. Yes, people read long copy. Readership falls off rapidly up to fifty words, but drops very little between fifty and five hundred words.(!) “The more your tell, the more you sell”. This is fascinating. That’s a HUGE number, fifty and five hundred with a minor drop-off.
Firebug Lite is a brilliant tool to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
This used to be just a Firefox plugin. Now it’s a brilliant javascript include away from being in any browser.
If you develop for the web, this is the tool for you. You simply must try it out.
The Ultra-Extreme Calorie Restriction Diet Test is a fascinating article of someone trying out CR for two months. I started reading it, and was captivated.
I don’t know if I could count the calories or stay that focused, but the idea is a good one. Basically if you restrict your calories, you’ll live longer. A LOT longer.
Anyways, I found the insight and the article to be most engaging, and quite intriguing.
“We Have Not Forgotten, Mr. President.” Last night, broadcasting live from above a desolate and still demolished Ground Zero, Olbermann delivered a stirring eight minute commentary indicting the Bush Administration’s shameful and tragic response to 9/11. The entire speech is worth watching and reading. The entire speech is transcribed in the link above.
I recommend reading it. It’s pretty great. It had the ring of truth to me.
The National Design Awards are a serious deal. The program “celebrates design in various disciplines as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement.” It’s a big enough deal that the winners are invited to the White House.
This year, however, five Communication Design honorees decided to decline the invitation.
That’s right, they turned down going to the White House. In a letter they sent to the White House, they stated (emphasis mine):
Graphic designers are intimately engaged in the construction of language, both visual and verbal. And while our work often dissects, rearranges, rethinks, questions and plays with language, it is our fundamental belief, and a central tenet of “good” design, that words and images must be used responsibly, especially when the matters articulated are of vital importance to the life of our nation.
We understand that politics often involves high rhetoric and the shading of language for political ends. However it is our belief that the current administration of George W. Bush has used the mass communication of words and images in ways that have seriously harmed the political discourse in America. We therefore feel it would be inconsistent with those values previously stated to accept an award celebrating language and communication, from a representative of an administration that has engaged in a prolonged assault on meaning.
While we have diverse political beliefs, we are united in our rejection of these policies. Through the wide-scale distortion of words (from “Healthy Forests” to “Mission Accomplished”) and both the manipulation of media (the photo op) and its suppression (the hidden war casualties), the Bush administration has demonstrated disdain for the responsible use of mass media, language and the intelligence of the American people.
Chipp Kidd was also invited to sign this document. His response, via email: “…But as graphic designers, we rightly complain that those talents are too often uncredited and taken for granted. Personally, in this case, I think it accomplishes more to stand up and be counted than to stay away.”
I’m somewhat on the fence here. I agree strongly with what these designers (Michael Rock, Susan Sellers, Georgie Stout, Paula Scher and Stefan Sagmeister) are saying.
Design does have power, and Good Design should be used responsibly. Propaganda is an example of this gone wrong. (and yet I still adore propaganda. Maybe for this reason alone.) But Chipp is dead on in saying that it’s important for design to be recognized, because people just don’t realize how important design can be.
Maybe the thing to have done is publish this letter condoning the design actions, and yet still go accept the award. Use it as a soapbox?
Google Calendar has now launched. If you count Beta as launching. Which, if you’re Google, means Yes. Initial impression is good.
[Slashlinks][1] is quite interesting. It’s a Ruby on Rails program that mirrors your [del.icio.us][2] links. Not sucking down, but mirroring those links.
I like the idea of hosting the links yourself. That’s why I keep my own link’s here, so I ‘own’ them. I could run stats on them, modify them, do whatever.
I wish this could suck in from [Mag.no.lia][4] as well. (I say that only because I’m using [mag.no.lia][4] more and more.
I’m defintely going to be installing this and testing it out. Very nice.
[1]: http://slashlinks.eyebeamresearch.org/home
[2]: http://del.icio.us/
[3]: http://simiandesign.com/link-fu/
[4]: http://ma.gnolia.com/
The Top Ten Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed is a great read. I found myself completely captivated reading through each of the entries. It’s the commentary, and the reasons why each movie wasn’t made that make this so much fun.
Aliens3, Star Wars VII, VIII and IX and Snow Crash some of my particular favorites. Defintely worth checking out.
Oh, and he’s 100% right about Doom and Paul Verhoeven.
The [Yahoo! Uiser Interface Blog][1], along with [the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library][2] and the [Yahoo! User Interface Library][3] are really, really great ideas.
It’s still early, but really promising. If you go through the [Pattern Library][2], you’ll see they cover the Solution, Rationale, Accessibility of each pattern. They show you where on Yahoo! the pattern is used, the associted blog article, and code examples. Well, so far only on the [Drag and Drop Modules][2b] could I see the code examples. But if they follow through with this, it’ll be fantastically valuable.
Still early, I just found these sites. But I will be digging into this post-haste. ([via][via])
[1]: http://www.yuiblog.com/
[2]: http://developer.yahoo.net/ypatterns/
[2b]: http://developer.yahoo.net/ypatterns/pattern_dragdropmodules.php
[3]: http://developer.yahoo.net/yui/
[4]: http://www.littleyellowdifferent.com/miniblog/archives/week_2006_02_12.php
