Man Interrupted

Springloaded brings you 2000 and design.

Sorry. 2000 and design. Bit weak.

You are no1. Everyone else is no.2 or below…

A new direction

I realised that since no one would take up my offer as my paid PA and do things like update the blog, I’ve decided that Brand New Media will now just become a gallery board of sorts so that I can publish my doodles and attempts at illustration when I feel the urge.  Then in years to come I can look back and cringe with embarrassment.

Watch this space then.

Or not.

SA Blog Awards 2008, March wallpaper, links, apologies and more.

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.

Logo design

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.

Best animated ads of 2007

Check out some of the best animated ads of 2007.  Some classics. I used to LOVE Paddington Bear.  Bit weird, I know.

Lacoste take on dentist for having a crocodile on its signage.

I mean, come now. Give it a rest. Similar to an earlier post I published about MTN vs Nando’s, Gillian Jones vents on Marketingweb about a few other companies who are losing sight of the bigger picture, namely Lacoste and Tiger brands. When will people realise that public perception of your brand is key and running around putting up prices after you’ve screwed your customers already without telling them, or taking on a dental practice in a small England town (who’s residents probably have no clue as to what the Lacoste is and if they did, I’d doubt they be clamouring to buy their overpriced polo shirts) because the dental practice includes a crocodile in its signage, is just not cool. Read the Marketingweb article here.

McDonalds has also been known to swing its big corporate paunch around. In 1994, they forced Elizabeth McCaughey to change the trading name of her coffee shop McCoffee. She’d been running it under that name for 17 years and had called it that as an adaptation of her surname. That wasn’t a first for them either. Wikipedia has more.

eBay is another one. They’re apparantly intent on making themselves the only ‘bay’ on the internet.

It’s a war out there.

War of the Posters – Nandos vs MTN

Which came first? The chicken or the cellphone?

Sorry, couldn’t resist that.

Nando’s has to withdraw its “Yello’ Hummer” advertising campaign following a ruling by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). Nando’s cries fowl, MTN is thrilled.

Now to be honest, I fail to see why MTN is creating such a fuss about this. In my mind MTN has just gone and created a whole lot of negative branding for themselves. Regardless of whether Nando’s did indeed copy their advertising style, it was meant to be a parody, they are not competitors in any way and surely by copying MTN’s style of advertising it was really just more free exposure for MTN and also a compliment to them. People look at it and go “Oh yes, thats the same as MTN’s”. It puts MTN (and Nando’s) at the front of people’s minds. They might have had more of a case if Nandos was continually doing it, but it was a once off and they immediately decided to get involved.

You will never win this one. Accept that Nandos copied you, laugh it off and get on with other business. Now, I just think that MTN are big bullies who can’t laugh at themselves or see the bigger picture. Nandos hasn’t lost anything, in fact they’ve gained free exposure and everybody loves Nando’s tongue in cheek advertising so their reputation won’t suffer. They’ve even come out with new advertising posters in their stores that make a thinly veiled sarcastic apology to MTN.

I’ve seen it so many times and people just don’t get it, they step out thinking that they’re trying to protect their brand when in fact they just damage it. A brand is like a person, it needs to be seen as popular, secure and easy to get on with. If you start trying to protect and defend it all the time, it’ll just be seen as insecure and not worth getting to know.

11 digital forecasts/trends for 2008

Welcome to 2008, may it be a wonderfully crazy digital experience and may all your designs come true. Since everyone is going list crazy with their top 6,7,8,9,10 predictions for the year, I thought I’d swim with the masses this time and give you my top 11 forecasts for the year.

1) Social Networking will continue to be the most talked about digital phenomenon this year. However I feel Facebook’s popularity will decline as it gets too big for its boots too quickly. Personally I feel Facebook is overvalued, over hyped and trying to make too much money too quickly with little consideration for its users. Mark Zuckerberg has recently apologised for it’s Beacon advertising debacle.

2) Mobile (Cellphone) technology will accelerate now that the iPhone has become a reality. One area that Africa is normally ahead of the global community is mobile technology. This is primarily due to the fact that monopolies such as Telkom hold back the internet and people have to find other ways around that. Mobile phones and devices will continue to expand and blur the boundaries beyond just being a phone and more of a tool to update blogs/websites, listen to music, use as a GPS etc. Whatever you do though, do not get a Blackberry! They will NOT make your life easier, they will just make it more stressed.

3) Blogs will continue to grow in relevance in all spheres and more and more companies will start to realise that they can be a great marketing tool and an excellent way to talk to their customers when utilised and updated properly.

4) Google will become more evil, Microsoft will become more evil. Google will get richer, Microsoft will get richer.

5) Content will continue to be king. With all the social networking being done, users need something to network.

6) More and more applications such as Google Docs (offering an online version of Microsoft Office’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint) will be going online and mobile, making them accessible from anywhere. Of course with that comes the inevitable privacy and security concerns.

7) On the actual design front I think we’ll see more fonts with serifs, more illustration enhanced design, rotating featured item/article done with javascript or flash, footers becoming more prominent in the overall site design and the death of titles, images and logos with a reflection.

8) This one is from twentysteps.com; Facebook and MySpace will merge and the new social application will be called MyFace. You will invite people to join by asking them to “Sit On MyFace”.

9) The internet is going through another bubble phase and while it won’t be as bad as the first one, something is going to give. Soon. You heard it here first. There are just too many privacy and security issues springing up and its starting to get out of control.

10) This is more of a hope than a forecast. That the overhyped SecondLife eventually dies.

11) Broadband issues in South Africa will get more and more coverage as businesses start to realise that they need to get their digital act together for 2010, which is now only 2 short years away. Whether those issues are able to get sorted in time is another story.