Archive : October 2008

To celebrate the end of another packed, exciting week at MxM, we had tea and cake. Tim is an advocate of proper tea, made from leaves, in a pot; so I took this picture for him of a sketch I saw in Howies on Carnaby St.

A fellow typographer has created a great series of postcards that show the subliminal messages sent out when using different typefaces.

With tongue firmly in cheek, some of the postcards are absolutely spot on. Who can doubt that Comic Sans isn’t the hand of God or that the typeface Stencil isn’t Rambo 4?

Joe Heath at BBH just sent me this link to a deck by Paul Isakson at Space150:

http://www.slideshare.net/paulisakson/modern-brand-building-presentation/

It’s a very good slide presentation that says, “The product really is the marketing: make better products first”. IE. planners may have finally got it. It reminded me of the piece below which I wrote a very very long time ago as a result of experiences working with Orange, when at Metadesign. It’s about merging product and brand and service development and the importance of defining narratives in enabling a product or service to realise its true value; apologies for the academic tone – it’s called ‘The communication is the product…’ and it goes like this:

This man here is called Leon. He’s ace, but sadly he’s departed.

Great news for civil liberties in our green and pleasant land: MPs have dropped their plans to extend detention without trial to 42 days.

God, I’ve wanted to do something involving this stary thing for ages. Now Amnesty have done it in a worthy cause. (I wish I wasn’t so shallow).

Lorem ipsum sucks. There, I’ve said it. I’ve come out against the designer’s fall back. Need a block of copy, none available from the client? Lorem ipsum will do. Need some sample user comments? Lorem ipsum. Need a headline to fill that space at top of the page? Want people to focus on the presentation and not the content? Whack in some latin. It’s the catch all filler copy, the designer’s best friend. Yet is lorem ipsum actually a friend to clients and, ultimately, a site’s users?

Whilst there’s widespread cause for panic in these dark days of global economic downturn (which has given rise to Lingo Bingo in our office around terms like ‘challenging economic times’, ‘credit crisis/crunch/crash’ and ‘we’re all going to hell in a handcart’), there is however a small ray of hope on the horizon for us digital folk.

(Photo credit: Ricardo Carreon)

My brother sent me this cool site that lets you upload a photo of yourself, fiddle with some controls, and create a weirdly nostalgic portrait of your changing face across the decades. Check out what you’d look like if you’d been in The Ice Storm. Complete with a period soundtrack. (I used my fave avatar to add to the confusion).

We’ve been using our new Acts As Recommendable plugin on metrotwin.com and it’s been interesting to see how it’s performing in a real-world situation.

Bookmarks (places) are integral to Metrotwin, and a user can associate themselves with a bookmark by ‘Loving it’, saving it to their profile, or by stating they’ve been there.