Been thinking about my own cards, and Inspiredology has the best collection of original, well-designed cards I've seen anywhere. And their name's pretty cool, too.
Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, is sick of the writer's strike and has taken matters into his own hands. Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is a musical super-villain mini-series epic, released free on the interwebz and for $1.99 an episode on iTunes.
No lengthy witticisms, no in depth analysis, no lovely designs. Just my first test post from the new Wordpress app for the iPhone.
So far only one little problem: when I’m writing a new post and tap into categories, once I’m done, the “done” & “save” buttons have disappeared from the top bar, and all the buttons from the bottom, as you can see in the screenshot. This makes it impossible to set categories and save them as the only option is to tap “Posts” and discard changes. This process also seemed to have killed the image I’d already added. Surely just growing pains…
Otherwise it rocks! Looking forward to the next version.
Usually the little bits and pieces of interesting stuff I find online land in my Tumblelog, and Frank Chimero did too, but then I thought this is actually cool enough it should be in the blog. Frank is an illustrator and designer from Missouri who has a portfolio you can click through for ages. But what particularly turned me on were his “Inspirational Design Posters”. Here are a couple of my favourites:
Frank also has a nice little shop where he sells posters. Unfortunately he’s not selling these posters. Maybe if enough of us annoy him about it he will? How ‘bout it Frank?
[And thanks to ilovetypography and the wonderful Sunday Type for making me aware of Frank]
I’m writing just to say hi. I’ve looked at, and occasionally up to you for the seven years I’ve been working in an agency, but I’m leaving the agency microcosm soon and wanted to give you some advice before I go. It’s, um, kind of difficult to say, but, well, we’ve known each other for a while, and good friends tell each other the truth, right? So. Here goes.
I believe you’ve misunderstood the internet.
There, I said it. I know this has got to be embarrassing for you, being an internet awards thingie and all. I guess you didn’t get the memo. Although the truth hurts, I’m sure you’ll come out the other side a happier, shinier Cyber Lion.
Why do you force me to register to see the winners? It can’t be purely so that “the IAF, our official awards partners and relevant Emap Communications brands” can throw a few more nuggets on top of my already overflowing spam folder, can it? That’s not what that extremely creatively worded bit on the rego form meant, is it? And, um, describe my job role? Give you my address? My phone number? Twenty-one mandatory fields? You’ve built a walled garden with high, thick walls, and want a DNA sample before you let me inside? For what exactly? You’re throwing press releases over the wall anyway, so what’s in it for me?
I’m afraid your site’s also doing your clients a disservice, and if they aren’t pissed yet, they sure as hell should be. What? You don’t have clients? Well, who are the agencies who send you submissions (and money) every year? And what if they realised that you’re using the medium for which they win awards (that’s the internet) in such a way that it reduces the chance of people hearing about their good work? If I was them, I’d be pretty pissed.
But, considering the way so many of your clients still use the internet—beautifully designed and animated, closed, unmashable ads that equal little more than click-a-minute-television—I’m honestly not surprised that you’re doing little better. My recommendation, and hope, is that you’ll one day see your role as a leading internet marketing awards thingie as a possibility to espouse and spread the spirit of the web and the methods that actually work. Openness. Transparency. Sharing. Participation.
You see, and it embarrasses me to have to explain this to you, but the internet is all about linking. Copy & paste is today’s marketing. Letting your fans mash your stuff up leads to success. Connecting little bits all over the place is what we do here outside the wall, and how people hear about new stuff. If your stuff’s good, some guy will carry it over the wall anyway, even if he does have to fill your form with bullshit to do it (yes, I’m sorry, but we do lie to marketers). And there’s a nasty chance that guy will own your Google juice, too. Making it easier by not building a wall in the first place just improves your chances of being loved. Have you heard that there’s a 14 year old on YouTube with 45 million views? He certainly didn’t do that with a registration form. How many registered users have you got? And how many registered as “Dr. Mickey Mouse” like I did?
That’s it for now. I hope you take some time to think about this, and it makes you a bigger, better lion.
Yours sincerely,
Matt Balara
P.S.: I didn’t want to say it, but what the hell’s up with your logo? Dude, are you sure you want to wear that in public?
So congratulations to all the well-hidden winners of the Cannes Cyber Lions 2008! For those you you outside the wall who couldn’t be bothered registering, Dr. Mickey Mouse has sacrificed his 100% fake DNA for you. Here are all the winners in a PDF (unfortunately completely devoid of URLs), and here are the links:
There are a hell of a lot of bronze winners, and my copy & paste finger’s getting tired, so if you’re interested in the Cannes Cyber Lions bronze winners, check out the PDF and you know what to do.
A while back I asked here on the blog “What’s Design Mean to You?” Just before reboot I had the idea to ask the smart people at the conference the same question. The result is ten videos: Eckhard Rotte, Andy Budd, Julian Bleecker, Vinay Venkatraman, Marston Alfred, Howard Rheingold, Tobias van Veen, Cennydd Bowles, Stowe Boyd, Kars Alfrink and Thomas Vander Wal. I’ll be posting them here as I get them cut and uploaded.
I quite liked his view on analysis vs. synthesis and the role it plays in design:
Design is one of the professions that bridges the analytical way of doing things with the synthetical way of doing things. If you consider analysis to be breaking a thing down into finite elements, and looking at relationhips inside it and making sense out of it, you can say that synthesis is about the interrelationships and the combinations of things. I think that designers have this unusual intuition for what could be meaningful in this analytical [information]. It’s less rational, and more emotional in its approach.
I failed to mention a pretty important event in my online life a couple weeks ago. Without us actually knowing each other at all, Stowe Boyd invited me to not only redesign his blog, /message (I did mention that), but he also invited me to write with him and a growing cadré of smart people over there. In case you missed it, I wrote my first post, “Why Aren’t You Talking to Me?” on the disconnect between my meatspace friends and my online social life. My second post, “Hello New Social App. Why Should I Use You?” just went online.
From now on I’ll be focussing more on design here, and shifting the whole social/web 2.0 stuff over to /message.
I must admit, the invite took me by surprise (floored me actually) and I’ve been very plesantly surprised by the response to my first post both on FriendFeed and in the comments. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Stowe for giving a relative stranger and unknown blogger a chance.
A while back I asked here on the blog “What’s Design Mean to You?” Just before reboot I had the idea to ask the smart people at the conference the same question. The result is ten videos: Eckhard Rotte, Andy Budd, Julian Bleecker, Vinay Venkatraman, Marston Alfred, Howard Rheingold, Tobias van Veen, Cennydd Bowles, Stowe Boyd, Kars Alfrink and Thomas Vander Wal. I’ll be posting them here as I get them cut and uploaded.
The third in the series is Julian Bleecker, a member of Nokia’s Design Strategic Projects Studio and co-founder with Nicolas Nova of the Near Future Laboratory.
My favourite quote, answering the question, “What is design?”
It’s close to being able to create things for people … understanding people as social entities, not just as masses of tendon, meat and bone.
A while back I asked here on the blog “What’s Design Mean to You?” Just before reboot I had the idea to ask the smart people at the conference the same question. The result is ten videos: Eckhard Rotte, Andy Budd, Julian Bleecker, Vinay Venkatraman, Marston Alfred, Howard Rheingold, Tobias van Veen, Cennydd Bowles, Stowe Boyd, Kars Alfrink and Thomas Vander Wal. I’ll be posting them here as I get them cut and uploaded.
The second in the series is Andy Budd, user experience director at clearleft in Brighton, England.
The microphone on my flip video camera could be better, so I apologise for the windy sound quality. And I was still getting used to video interviews, so I apologise also to Andy for cutting half his face off through much of the interview.
It’s totally off-topic, but I have to admit my favourite quote was this one:
People have suggested that being able to wrangle sharks is actually quite good when dealing with clients…
A while back I asked here on the blog “What’s Design Mean to You?” Just before reboot I had the idea to ask the smart people at the conference the same question. The result is ten videos: Eckhard Rotte, Andy Budd, Julian Bleecker, Vinay Venkatraman, Marston Alfred, Howard Rheingold, Tobias van Veen, Cennydd Bowles, Stowe Boyd, Kars Alfrink and Thomas Vander Wal. I’ll be posting them here as I get them cut and uploaded.
The first is Eckhard Rotte, developer at Neuland in Bremen, Germany.
My favourite quote:
When engineers and designers really work together, that’s good design.
Just before Stowe Boyd asked me to blog on /messagelast week, he sent me this tweet:
hey bro. Nice Tumblr template. I am interested in a reworking of my /Message typepad stuff. Ideas? Costs?
Stowe and I met, very briefly, last year at Reboot. I was impressed by his talk and we exchanged a few words. I doubt he even remembered me. So as two perfect strangers, we connected and sealed the deal with a few tweets. The briefing came in an email. Questions were asked and answered in a free-flowing mix of chat, email and tweets. He was in the U.S. at the time, and I’m in Hamburg Germany.
Since I knew we’d both be at reboot this year, I set myself that as a deadline for the first screens. I’m happy to say that we got to know each other much better, and he liked the design.
As a soon-to-be-freelance designer who’ll be living on the other side of the world as of October, this was perhaps the best possible test of a way of working I hope to practice in the future, and what for the increasing numbers of freelance knowledge workers (is there a term for us that wanks less?) will be the daily grind. Here are my thoughts and what I’ve learned so far:
It works. I honestly wasn’t sure it would. I’m sure it varies from client to client, and Stowe and I are both pretty open, flexible, and used to digital communication, but I don’t see why it can’t work with many other clients too.
Tele-working can improve the process. I’m used to clients that can’t talk before 2 p.m. the day after tomorrow, which wastes a lot of time. Despite the time difference, Stowe and I answered each other’s queries within six hours. At no point did I have to stop working and wait for anything.
Flow beats meetings hands down. Because we were constantly in contact, we didn’t overload each other with masses of information all at once, and didn’t make any decisions which couldn’t be discussed an hour or two later if needed. In a meeting once a month, the pressure to decide is high, and the cost of changing decisions is higher.
Online reputation matters. Stowe’s a bit of a rock-star in the online world, and I’m relatively unknown. He liked my own site’s design and how I write, and asked me to blog and design for him based only on that.
Trust is essential. Stowe didn’t have much to lose by asking me, but I could’ve wasted a lot of time if he turned out to be a jerk. I trusted him due to his reputation, and my trust was well-placed. Face to face client relationships can work (badly) with a lack of trust, online it becomes essential.
Face-time is important. Yeah, we’re both hyperconnected and can do almost everything online, but after reboot Stowe and I know one another better, have some shared meatspace memories, and trust each other more, which can only improve the online relationship.
So what’s come of it? Well, the design’s still in the fine-tuning phase, but the basics are there. Stowe wanted a simple, minimal design which would accomodate the group of bloggers he’s gathering around /message. At the moment it’s looking like this. Keep in mind it’s only an image, you can’t click anything and it only scrolls so far. What do you think?
And do you have any experience working with clients in far away lands? How’d it go?
Nearing the end of the first day of reboot, I realised that I’ve learned from last year’s reboot that it’s stressful and hectic to try and blog during the conference.
I’ve been doing video interviews, asking people the question, “What’s design to you?” The answers have been many, varied and intelligent so far. They’ll go up here on the blog and on my vimeo page as I get them cut and ready for prime-time.
I’ll post a summary of reboot 10 afterwards, but if you’re interested in how it’s going, your best bet is to follow the very active back-channel on Summize.
Dear Cannes Cyber Lions,
