IEC (South Africa) website is crap

R690,000 of South African tax payers money has been spent on this design for the upcoming elections…

From News24 – “This is without doubt the worst design I have ever seen,” a blogger called David wrote on the iMod blog. “The level of design is shocking,” Ruark commented. “I know of 6th-graders that do better designs,” Wogan added on the same blog.

These guys designed this in less than 24hrs…

133T Project

In the meantime, a new organisation, the 133T Project, was formed by IT industry professionals in Cape Town last week “to sort out the IEC website”.

“The 133T project began with an attempt to recreate the design of the IEC website in just 24 hours,” Mills, who also is a member of the new organisation, explained.

Check out the News24 story here

Haha. Got to love the level of incompetence, ignorance and denial.

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.

Obama vs Clinton vs Mbeki

Nice post on Mark Forrester’s blog regarding the respective websites of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and our very own Thabo.

Democrats 10 ANC 0.

A thrashing.

Suppose that’s what you can expect when you have no real opposition.

What actually does Web 2.0 mean?

I think very few people actually know. And that includes marketers and advertisers and a lot of other people in the digital industry. Many people call it meaningless marketing, others see it as one of the most important sections of the web textbook.

Well the term covers a lot of ground, but essentially it refers to the web, post the dotcom crash around 2000, 2001. When venture capitalists were throwing millions into startups without asking for anything resembling a business plan, when that 15 year old kid down the road was charging £10 000 to put up a website about grannies cats and it came with the ubiquitous rotating @ sign. Vomit. So now the web pre 2000 is referred to as web 1.0. Got that? Great. The web has grown up a lot since those heady days, the mistakes have (largely) been acknowledged and while it did set the digital industry back somewhat, ok a lot, the web is flourishing once more, but now with more direction and maturity.

The term web 2.0 is generally credited to Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty following the O’Reilly Media conference in 2004. As the story goes, they were brainstorming ideas for a main theme for the conference and realised that there had been a major shift in the way designers, developers and end users were approaching websites and the web in general. Websites that had survived the dotcom bubble crash as well as the new technologies that were developing were fast turning the web into a more streamlined, more user friendly big brother, resource.

As Tim O’Reilly writes, they formulated a list of what they thought were some of the main examples of web 1.0 vs web 2.0:

DoubleClick <—> Google AdSense
Ofoto <—> Flickr
Akamai <—> BitTorrent
mp3.com <—> Napster
Britannica Online <—> Wikipedia
personal websites <—> blogging
evite <—> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation <—> search engine optimization
page views <—> cost per click
screen scraping <—> web services
publishing <—> participation
content management systems <—> wikis
directories (taxonomy) <—> tagging (“folksonomy”)
stickiness <—> syndication

Is it becoming clearer now? Still with me? Brilliant. So basically there wasn’t any deliberate plan to revise the web and update it to version 2.0, O’Reilly just wanted to make the point that after the no rules Wild West Web of 2000 and 2001, the web was starting to matter again. Web 2.0 has taken on many meanings and thus means different things to different people, but you could also argue that we’ve moved onto web 3.0 and even web 4.0.

Some people are starting to argue that we’re entering another bubble and hence may be susceptible to another crash. There’s an excellent essay on paulgraham.com which argues that will not be the case. Venture capitalists are driven by exit strategies and their exit strategy in early 2000 was to sell to gullible investors. There obviously aren’t many gullible investors left, the IPO market is gone. Now the only way to make a profit is to get bought and the people fronting the cash want to be certain that what they’re buying is profitable or is likely to be profitable in the future.

So web 2.0 encompasses many things digital, design has also moved on, a loose list of of web do’s and don’ts regarding design is being implemented, eg, getting rid of ‘under construction’ pages and useless animating elements, rather giving emphasis to style and simplicity and finally realising that content really is king and designing a page around it’s content, rather than all style and no substance. Branding is actually starting to take a back seat to the content, i.e it’s not all about the bigger logo (watch that, it’s a classic), and footers of websites are starting to become very functional areas. People have learnt to scroll. Most people when talking of Web 2.0 and design talk about large text, reflections, cute icons, rounded corners,  strong colours, gradients (used properly) and easily defined sections and areas on a page. Some of these will drop away as other trends replace them and the ones that work will stay.

So there you go and as one of the co-founders of this much used, possibly over used term, I’ll leave the last word to the big guy, Tim O’Reilly,

“The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.”

Long live the interweb. Actually I got the last word.

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.

Professor of Media bans Google and Wikipedia. Uh huh.

As an avid reader of books, literary novels, this article I’ve just come across on theargus.co.uk piqued (yip, word of the day toilet paper) my interest. A professor of media at the University of Brighton has banned her students from Google andWikipedia. If you’ve ever needed to give an example of irony to anyone, head on over to that story!

Her gripe with Google stems from the fact that students are simply repeating whatever they find first on the search engine. They’re just not reading books anymore and she bemoans the fact that in the quest for new technology, books and traditional media have been left behind. While I’m totally on her side in getting students to read more books and experience the wonderful print side of life, I think – as many of the people who left comments pointed out – that the idea of banning Google and Wikipedia and the like, to force students to read is clearly not the right way to go about things. As with most things in life, there needs to be a balance. It should also be up to the University to teach the students how to do proper and legitimate research on the web. Wonder if they’re allowed to read a book about Google?

Knowledge is power as Francis Bacon once opined. Or as someone else said later, books have knowledge, knowledge is power, power corrupts, corruption is a crime, and crime doesn’t pay…so if you keep reading, you’ll go broke.

I may have digressed.

Look, but don’t touch.

Ok, I’ve just read that apparantly top Teaser’s strippers make up to R80 000 a month! A MONTH. I’m too stunned to really continue the point. Read that again and then mull it over in your head.

I know.

Anyway, if you want to see what the rest of us are likely to be earning, Ad Talent have just released their most recent South African salary survey for the advertising and communications industry.

PS Just so you know, if you’re looking for the Teasers website, don’t type in www.teasers.co.za – you get a website about homeloans and bonds! Haha. Which begs the question though, why on earth did they register a home and building loans URL called teasers?? Their name is Interbond?

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.

Bad design kills. Tell your kids.

An oldie, but a goodie

I was looking at the Concept Interactive site today. They offer a 2 year graduate design diploma for budding digital designers and are based in Cape Town. I think they’re the main design school for digital design in Cape Town….well its the only name I could think of.

Their website is crap.

I mean if you’re supposed to be the leading design school offering the best in design and flash expertise, then surely your site should reflect what you teach? Because if their design and digital expertise reflects their web presence, then I wouldn’t waste my money. And after checking out some of the portfolios, I wasn’t that impressed. I realise that funnily enough a lot of digital design schools have less than impressive websites, also digital recruitment ’specialists’, come to think of it. I’ve seen some shockers. I wasn’t expecting anything internationally award winning from Concept Interactive, but at least something that doesn’t look like it was designed by one of their first year students. In 1997. When Flash was discovered.

Which got me thinking, on the whole in my massively uninfluential opinion, South African digital design comes up way short of anything approaching good. Or creative. I’ll include digital advertising with that as well (not the ideas, generally I think SA is up there globally in terms of creative ideas, I’m talking about the execution of the ideas) . There are a lot of good functional websites, but generally good design (and with that as well, proper usability) on the sites is sorely lacking. Having moved to the UK for awhile, I’ve realised how far ahead the UK is compared to SA digital design and advertising. At least 2-5 yrs. Of course, the big blue and green bully known as Hellkom, er Telkom, has had a lot to do with restricting the quality of what goes on the web in South Africa, in turn slowing down the growth of New Media and the quality of design. Hopefully with the increase in broadband availability, this will improve.

And Concept Interactive can get a new website.