10 posts
Browsing a range of mobile phone websites, I was struck by the incredible similarities of the way different phones are showcased.
Yes there are microsites and flash animations and loads of 360 degree spinning devices, but at their heart, they look the same.
Isaac and I have been discussing how users consume media and news which has raised some interesting questions around online publishing. Specifically: how we construct content templates, how that content looks when it’s in place, art direction at a micro level and how we can create richer, more engaging and, importantly, more ‘useful’ reading experiences online.
Over the last 4-5 years there has been a gradual convergence in how most newspaper sites construct their article pages. Based on a grid system, they employ a wide central column for the body copy and a number of other columns, usually on the right of the screen, for related information, links to other stories, MPUs, tools, etc. We should know, we’ve designed a number of sites for media owners, as well as countless blogs that conform to these conventions.
I love the idea of building a tribe around a story. A while ago, there was a post by Mel Exon at BBH Labs about the Storyteller’s Story, that drew heavily on Dan Light’s description of the marketing machine that was in motion ages before the Watchmen movie was released. The Labs post ended with these lines:
All this leaves me feeling there is a real and significant opportunity for brands to excite and inspire again through storytelling. That it is possible to reinvent a lost art, rather than dismiss it. That storytelling can be a powerful tool to drive new creativity in the interactive space.
Adweek has an interesting article about sponsored blog posts and sites like Gawker and Digg “lending a hand with brands looking to fit into their environments without being relegated to the sidelines with run-of-the-mill banner ads”. I think this is a very smart proposition because it is one way for a brand to get access to a section of their audience that would be very difficult to reach otherwise. They mention the example of Federated Media crafting a sponsored blog post for Virgin America, in the design-conscious Apartment Therapy blog, that spoke of Virgin’s plush leather seats and soft lighting. The idea was to distinguish Virgin from low-cost competitors like Southwest Airlines.
Are you as tired as I am of these people who whinge on about the Web being too big and free and open and rich for their fragile little brains to cope with?
After centuries millenia of restricted access to knowledge being something every hipster should be heard moaning about, it’s now suddenly cool to complain that there’s just ‘too much information‘ out there and that you can’t cope. Yeah man, it’s just too heavy. It’s like you could spend all day every day online, but you still can’t take it all in and it’s completely ruining your life, and making you feel worthless.
That’s the line that unpacks ‘Planning-ness‘ – an ‘un-planning’ conference held recently in San Francisco.
The idea of “making” things as a way of exploring ideas and developing and articulating strategy is close to our hearts at Made by Many and Planning-ness sounds like a veritable Festival of Awesomeness. I’d love to go next time.
But it was this provocative deck by Jason Oke and Gareth Kay that got us really excited. It’s about the failure of ‘Connections Planning’, the discipline’s historical context, and what it seems to be mutating into – or at least needs to turn into in order to continue mutating.
I’ve enjoyed following the debate around Manuel Lima’s information visualisation manifesto, published after he spoke here at Kingly Street last month (see Justin’s post below). The manifesto was sparked by a call from a part of the audience for a critical discourse on data visualisation, so that we could stop just going “Ooohhh” and begin to answer the question ‘What makes a good diagram?’.
Manuel’s response was the succinct and simple yardstick: “form follows revelation”.
He elaborates:
Form doesn’t follow data. Data is incongruent by nature. Form follows a purpose, and in the case of Information Visualization, Form follows Revelation…. Independently of the subject, the purpose should always be centered on explanation and unveiling, which in turn leads to discovery and insight.
Is it just me or is the whole Google Wave thing a bit of a damp squib?
I was excited to get an invitation from @malbonnington last week.
Even though I have a handful of friends using it (without which it would be exceptionally lonely) it’s very underwhelming. I have received a few messages from other people who seem to feel the same way. They seem worried about saying so. Back in May, we were promised a surprise. We were promised a groundbreaking personal communication and collaboration tool in a “very early form”.
Another week, another blog post on the subject of “why creative advertising folk need to embrace ‘technologists and their geeky ways’” once again ignites vigorous debate.
The post in question is by Joe Mele, VP Client Partner at Razorfish, and received a great many comments and a huge number of re-tweets of the @BBHLabs‘ tweet that contained a link to it. The citizens of Twitter seem to react with a combination of self-loathing and schadenfreudian glee to the disruption that social technologies are wreaking on advertising. It’s a little bit dull and frankly misses the point – and it wasn’t quite (I don’t think) what Joe was saying.
[Update: Jeff LaMarche (author of one of the best iPhone books on the market) wrote one of his trademark 'no tact' responses to this post. I'd be very interested to know what people think about his post.]
[Update 2: Guy English (aka kickingbear) chimes in on this debate with what is the best response I've seen from a hardcore Cocoa developer. Basically: Apple's tools are probably better at producing better iPhone apps, but let's see what MonoTouch and Flash can deliver before we definitively say that they are no good.]
Novell recently announced a product called MonoTouch, which allows developers to write iPhone applications using C#, a language invented by Microsoft (but since standardised). It’s a very clever piece of work that allows someone without experience of Objective-C – the only option that Apple gives you for iPhone development – to write an iPhone application with a reduced learning curve.
