Brand New Media | Thoughts on (mostly South African) New Media and Design

Between massive deadlines and some travelling, brandnewmedia has been taking a backseat! Well, Springloaded is off again for a couple of weeks till mid April. Once I’m back, I will be putting my head down for awhile (not on my desk) and can get back into the blogging swing of things! I know I will be missed. Hang in there.

Have a wallpaper. Clicking on the image will take you to my wallpapers page. How about that.

On another quick note the SA Blog Awards happened last night! Have a look at all the winners here. Brandnewmedia sadly didn’t make it to the top of the podium, but was one of the runnerups. Thanks to everyone who voted. I love you all.

See you in a couple of weeks.

Stay classy.

March Wallpaper. View. Download. Enjoy.

I’m back. I’ve been away. Did you notice? No? I went away for aaages. No idea huh? Bleak.

Well, I’m back.

And just to get back into the swing of things, here are some links this fantastic Monday to get your procrastinating off to an early start this week.

Typetester - Typetester is an online application for comparing fonts for on-screen use. It handily puts fonts into three different groups: safe list, Win default, Mac default. It’s pretty useful and well worth a look.

For the colour geeks - Little-Known Meanings of Crazy Color Names vol. 3

Drips, splats, splots - I’ve been doing some advertising work for Sega and some of their new games for Viking and House of the Dead and hence have been using a lot of blood splatters etc. Came across this in my Google travels. Design Meltdown looks at sites that used the drips and splatters as design elements.

Search Engine Myths - And Lies! - Full Time Blogger brings to our attention an article by Gobala that reviewed Jon Leger’s “Search Engine Myths Exposed“.

Stat for the week:

Broadband subscribers rose to 829,300 in New Zealand in 2007. Not including sheep.

And in other news, WAYN.com, the social media travel could be up for sale at around £100m, any takers? If you’re thinking about going into digital entrepreneurship, social networks are still the way to go I reckon.

Lastly, and most importantly, the finalists for the SA Blog Awards 2008 have been released and BrandNewMedia is one of them! Amazing! BrandNewMedia has been nominated in the category “Best SA Blog about Design“. Not exactly the Oscars , but hey. Thanks to everyone who nominated this blog! Now if you could repeat the process and vote for BrandNewMedia to actually win the category, that would be awesome. Also remember to vote for Baglett ;)

Oh, and lastly lastly, I had a rant on an earlier post about the website for the new movie Untraceable. I ranted and raved that the website was kak and had nothing on it. Well, apparantly you’re supposed to click on the “The Federal Cyber Crimes Taskforce” link and well, the website is there!

I feel stupid.

It got pointed out to me awhile ago and I still feel stupid. Although in my defense I think it’s a pretty poor call to action. But then maybe I didn’t buy into the whole idea properly in the first place.

Yahoo! is not having a good time of it lately. Bill Gates sure knows how to whip up a sh*tstorm for some people.  Yahoo is now being sued by some of its shareholders now for rejecting Microsoft’s takeover offer. Who would’ve thought?

Read the NMA article here.

There’s a new movie out called Untraceable starring Diane Lane as FBI agent Jennifer Marsh. She is tasked with hunting down a seemingly untraceable serial killer who posts live videos of his victims on the Internet. The catch is, the more people that log onto the website, the faster his victims die.

So there’s been a fair bit of online advertising for the movie along with the usual TV spots and they’ve been punting the movie website www.killwithme.co.uk. So I thought cool, a movie that has a website at the core of its plot, a pretty gruesome plotline and they’ve been pushing the url quite a bit, the website must be pretty cool.

So I checked it out.

What a huge disappointment. There’s no website. Visit the url and you’re presented with a big red ENTER button. Click on ENTER and you’re told, “You may be harming people by visiting this website”, yes, yes, whatever, click.

And there’s nothing there. Nothing, nix, nada. Just a pop up that says something like “where are your morals?”. Big wow. Oh and a button to join the Federal Cyber Crimes talkforce.

What. A. Letdown.

Deadlines.

Have had a couple of those in the past few weeks. Streeeessful.

I’d like to meet the guy who introduced that word into the workplace. I mean it’s got such negative connotations straight off the bat! Idiot. FYI for the curious, the word actually originates from the American Civil War camps. Lines were drawn into the sand and prisoners were told, cross that line and you’re dead. Prisoners and guards were soon referring to it as the dead line.

Nice.

Anyway, apart from the development of some new logos and a very cool rich media banner campaign I’m working on now, a couple of new DVD microsites have been launched in the past few weeks. The first is for The Hoax, which is based on a true story and then Jane and the Dragon (an animated kids series) launched a couple of days ago. Jane and the Dragon also features a simple interactive video for the kids to explore the site. Skeptical as to how far those of you in SA will get on your bandwidth, but have a go!

Also got a new wallpaper coming your way for March.

And lastly, Baglett had me in stitches again with her latest online experience. Here’s part of the post, read the whole account here.

ONLINE ORDERING - SO MUCH FUN

It’s a custom amongst my friends that one of us organises flowers to be delivered to whoever is having a birthday. Even though we could quite easily buy them and drop them off, there’s nothing better than being called into reception to collect them and walking through the office holding them. I can’t say I know what that feels like myself, but I have heard it’s quite something.

Yesterday was my turn to order the little bouquets of magic.

I like to think I’m quite au fait with the internet. I do my grocery shopping online, thanks to YDE I prefer to buy clothes online and all my banking is done online. So you would think ordering a bunch of flowers would be a pretty simple task.

Not a f*ck.

Site number 1: For the FOURTH time, as required, I typed in ALL my details, my ID number, my great grandparents name, my first dogs name, my grade four teacher’s name plus all the recipients details, and the loooooong drawn out birthday message. Just as I pressed ‘confirm’ , the site crashed like Paris’s latest ‘movie’. Again.

Like the end of any relationship, I swore, I cried and moved swiftly on.

Site number two was a South African site but dealt only in Euro’s. Call me old fashioned, but I like to pay in rands, my bank says I should. Shedding another tear, I went down the list.

Read the rest of the post here.

Here’s a cool new project that’s been brought to my attention. Tying in with online social networking, but concentrating on family ties, Kindo is a family tree for the new generation. With some strong South African connections, it’s a new start up and gaining in popularity rather rapidly by the looks of it. It’s just won some seed funding from the founders of Skype, so they must be on to something! Read more about it on TechCrunch, or have a look at the site here. It’s free and very quick to get going which I like. No handing over of your bank details, granny’s middle name or last 5 home addresses, it just takes your email and you’re up and running.

I wonder though. If you’re having a massive fight with a sibling for instance, can you just wipe them off the family tree? That would be awesome. Hey sis, sorry you’re not family anymore. It says so on Kindo.

I deleted you.

Sucks for you hey.

Loooser.

Nice article on Wired.com about how Google got its logo. Ruth Kedar is the graphic designer who developed the now famous logo and she walks us through the process, from initial ideas and thoughts to how it looks today.

Here you go, I created this yesterday and am now thinking of designing one a month. So here it is, a little bit late. I call it “February 1280×1024″. Man, I can be original sometimes. If you want the source file, just let me know.

Transport for London is turning to graphic design to get people on and off the (baaaa) tube in a safe and orderly manner (baaaa).

This is a fairly old story now, but I felt quite sentimental when I read it. Even though I hated it. Netscape the browser is officially no more. It is dead. Long live Netscape. Or as John Cleese would say, “It’s not dead, it’s just stunned.”

Again, this did the rounds a fair while ago, but if you missed it and you’re looking for some vintage old school inspiration, check this out. I love old school design and paraphernalia, can’t get enough of it. I am a hoarder though.

Ahh, logo design. One of the most enjoyable and fulfilling, yet at the same time most frustrating experiences of design. A bit like golf. Or learning to snowboard. Creating a logo is not easy, it’s not even hard, it’s frustratingly hard! It’s an art.

Everyone thinks it’s easy. Find a font, type your company name in the company colours and walah (walah?), you have a logo! Maybe find a cute icon and you’re done. Oh no no no, its not that easy and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. So many friends ask me to “whip them up a quick logo”, I invariably fall for the challenge and many frustrated days later, I tell myself I will never accept another logo design brief. But I always do. Because I love doing it. The pleasure of seeing a new logo come to life, on business cards and letterheads to the website to a TV ad, it’s awesome.

Sometimes it all comes together really quickly and easy, but that’s rare. One (there are many) of the keys to getting it right is a clear understanding of what the client is looking for, not what you’d personally like to do with the concept, because it’s such a subjective thing, it’s a tough balancing act keeping yourself and the client happy.

You might even land the jackpot and get paid £4 million to come up with an absolute piece of poo Olympic Games logo.

Anyway, I could write for days on how to go about creating the perfect logo (is that even possible?), maybe I will post some thoughts on it in the future, but for now I’ll point you in the direction of some great logo design resources.

Switch Design Group in South Africa has been in the press quite a bit recently and while their website is horrible, they have created some of South Africa’s most recognisable and iconic logos such as the Springbok logo, 5FM, Investec and Debonairs identities. Their poster design has also just been voted to be the official poster of the 2010 Soccer World Cup.

http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/ - Great resource for browsing most of the world’s famous corporate identities and allows you to download the vector forms, so long as you have copyright permission of course.

http://logopond.com/ - I look at this all the time. Logo pond is all about logo inspiration and lets you upload your own logo. Other users can then vote on it, yay or nay. If you don’t like the attention, you can set it so that people can’t vote. But what’s the point then eh?

http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/ - I like this one. A blog of opinions on corporate and brand identity work.

http://faveup.com/ - Fave Up is a popular one and is an inspiration gallery for logos as well as business cards and flash sites.

http://www.logodesignlove.com/ - Just found this and it looks well worth a bookmark.

While I was writing these, I remembered Switch Design were also commissioned to create the official identity of the 2010 Soccer World Cup . There’s been a bit of controversy about how they were selected and not a few people think the identity they came up with is average to say the least. Personally I don’t think it’s too bad. Could’ve been better, but overall I reckon it’s pretty flexible and will work easily across a multitude of media. “Not the 2010 logo” has been set up by disgruntled designers who are giving the public and designers a chance to submit their own designs. While there are some really nice ones (and some absolute shockers), I still think I’d struggle to say “Yip thats DEFINITELY better than the one we have now”…

…but then it’s such a subjective thing isn’t it.