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The main thing I don't like is the sizes. It seems like the three separate elements have been stuck together. They all fight with each other. The relative sizes are all over the place. There's no elegance to the spacing. Way to complicated visually.
Moan, moan, moan.
Years ago I saw this album in Tescos. Or Asda. Or Iceland. I kept telling people about it. But I don't think anyone ever believed me. So yesterday I bought it.
Mad, eh?
About two years ago I was looking at a map of the world and noticed that Britain seemed disproportionately large.
My companion remarked that this was because in days of yore whoever was drawing the map always made their country look bigger and more important. This nugget of information sticks in the brain.
So for the last two years I've been taking pictures of Britain on world maps. Not accurate maps, but drawings or illustrations of maps. The differences are amazing. You might assume that all maps were accurate, or at least accurate-ish. But no, designers play fast and loose with the truth making the host country bigger, more important or more central.
Look at Britain in these photos. Look at the size of it compared to Europe. It's the same, but different.
Americans will be used to seeing this map of the world.
Whereas Europeans will be used to seeing this map of the world.
In this instance one isn't more accurate than the other, but the perception is very different and the power designers wield in shaping that perception is huge.
New Zealanders can often play Spot Our Country. Next time you see a map of the world on the BBC News or in the paper, look for New Zealand. Odds are it will have been left out in the name of aesthetics. If it's not left out then it's cropped to within an inch of it's life.
Most New Zealanders would probably prefer their maps to look like this.
The answer to most of these problems is to look at the world via Buckminster Fuller's amazing Dymaxion Map.
OK, OK, we're drifting off the point a little bit. Map projection is a huge topic and this Wikipedia page is a good place to start. There's also a good article called The Map Gap on BBC News.
Back to where we started. Over the last few months I took lots of photos of maps, you can see them on Flickr.
Today I traced over England, Scotland and Wales. Please note these tracings were done quickly and aren't massively detailed. The results are quite odd.
They all look pretty different don't they? You know it's Great Britain, but some of them are wild approximations.
Next I dropped them all on top of each other (here I left off Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland because I wanted to compare just one shape).
That's a bit higgledy piggledy so I filled them all in.
Viola! The mean shape of England , Scotland and Wales by 14 graphic designers. Not very accurate, is it?
This isn't a cartography blog and I know some of these maps are over stylised for a reason but I want to make a wider point about graphic designers and the assumptions we make and how easily they are accepted. If you look at all the maps on Flickr they all look kind of OK. When I put them all together it looks like madness. Like people having been taking liberties with the truth.
Think of other times you do this.
Hierarchies are a good example. The point of bold and italic and underline is to make one piece of text more important than the other. But how many times do you see a poster where the text is bold, italic and underlined? I bet I could get a load of notices like that and achieve the same effect as the 14 shapes above. Everything would be bold.
Premiumisation - there's a word that really fucks me off. I once heard the MD of a famous packing company droning on about how his firm's USP was that they could design premiumisation into any old piece of packaging. In case you're wondering, that means lots of over elaborate folds, some foil blocking and a healthy does of script and moody photography. Problem is, take a look at the chocolate cakes in Tescos, I bet you'll find 10 'premiumised' brands, 4 value brands and nothing inbetween.
What I'm saying is that graphic designers have a certain amount of power, people tend to trust what they see without much questioning. We should use that power carefully.
So this balloon thing, good or annoying?
I've wasted a decent amount of time playing it today and I've had fun. I was even 5th at one point! But I can totally understand that it's very annoying seeing all those balloons when you arrive at this site.
On the internet some people seem a little confused by it (I was at first) and some people seem very annoyed with it all. What do you think?
I've made a list of what I think are good and bad points.
Good
It's genuinely fun when you start playing. It takes a while to get into it but once you do it's quite addictive. And I've never seen anything like it before.
It doesn't seem impossible. A lot of online competitions feel like you've got absolutely no chance of winning, this one doesn't feel like that.
The techie stuff is very, very clever. If you stop and think - what they're doing is pretty amazing and it's being done well and pretty slickly too.
It looks gorgeous. By that I mean the craft, the edges of the balloons, the little balloon loading bar, the detail on the strings - all fantastically well done.
Bad
There's no getting round the fact that basically it's annoying when you visit a site you love and all these balloons are there. I know you can click it off and I like it when I'm playing the game, but it's not hard to envisage people getting annoyed at this.
It's a little clunky. I mean a teeny, weeny, weeny bit clunky. Because what they're trying to pull off is so complex I can forgive a bit of clunkyness. But still, the clunk is there.
Sometimes it repeats that "your balloon has left this site" thing twice. I refer to my point above.
There's my site with a token on it!
I've had some decent traffic from playballoonacy.com today and I'm not writing this so that people from Orange or Poke come on and defend Ballloonacy.
I'd just like to know whether you, my beloved listeners, find the balloons annoying on this site. Should I take them off?
Oh dear. I thought we'd stopped all that.
The first photograph is the new print ad for Lucozade. The second photograph is the gorgeous photography for the V&A's China Design Now exhibition, created by North. The China Design Now stuff was created around August last year (I know, we pitched for the website in September) and the Lucozade stuff went up a few weeks ago.
Shameless, isn't it?
Thanks to Alex and Tom and everyone else who 'sent this in'.
I've just played answerphone tennis with someone I've never met before who works for one of our clients.
They left a message and asked if it was OK if they brought some "stuff" with them to the office for a presentation. I left a message and said yes, but we don't have any PC's, so bear that in mind.
We eventually spoke and after a few pleasantries the conversation went like this:
Them "Do you have somewhere I can print stuff out?"
Me "Err, yes, we have a printer."
"OK, do you have something I could plug a USB stick into?"
"Err, yeah, we do, yeah."
"OK. Do you have PowerPoint?"
"Umm, yes."
"Oh, it's just that your message sounded like you didn't have any computers there?"
"Ahhh I see. When I said we didn't have any PC's I meant that we only have Macs..."
Classic miscommunication. Although if they seriously thought we didn't have any computers I'd be a bit worried.
For the record we do have a PC for testing etc but we keep it quiet...
* I've not been as "punchy" recently as I should have been.
Alex and I were talking the other day about tattoos. I hate tattoos. Alex said that all the graphic designers he knew didn't like tattoos because they could never pick one mark, or design, that they could be sure of liking forever. Let alone a font, "The font is always something Latino and gangster". Couple that with the horrible colour distortion of tattoos over time and you've got a designers nightmare.
But obviously there are designers with tattoos.
And some marks would be OK for life, wouldn't they?
Let's do a quick poll. Are you a graphic designer? Do you have a tattoo?
Or your products, your brand, your communications strategy... I love that. Via Etre.
Surely an umbrella is the worst designed thing there ever was?
Problem 1. They don't do what they are designed to do. If you've been out and about in the UK today and used an umbrella I bet you still got wet. And not just a little wet, quite a bit wet. Wear a hat and buy a waterproof coat. Much better.
Problem 2. They break, easily, all the time, Look at that picture above. Look at this Flickr set. How old is the oldest umbrella in your house? Over two years? Thought not.
Problem 3. They're aggressive little beggars. Nothing frightens me more than a narrow street packed with umbrella users. I raise my hands to protect my eyes and I quicken my pace...
Umbrellas. Dreadful things.
It really is, just to be typing here.
some beholders are blind.
But lately, my mind is thinking more towards design authority.
"Beauty... eye of beholder... yadda, yadda... "
But there are some things that always look good. And some that almost always, don't.
My mind isn't as full of examples at midnight... but there are some principles that good design consists of... and principles that CAN be broken... intentionally---and STRONGLY broken, that can create a provocative, strong design as well...
But those principles (contrast, eyeflow, whitespace, borders, justifications, wise color choice, line length)... they are there for a reason. They help designs be good- er-- well--whatever. They make design better and more effective, webpage, flyer, or buswrap.
And the trouble is, clients, or worse, bosses, can sometimes be more degree-d and trained in business or marketing or whatever, and their position affords them the luxury of coercing you to break those principles for their whim or fancy, or worse yet, for a client's proposal. And not in a strong, edgy, provocative way. In a way that makes you wish you could forget that it was technically your mouse and keyboard, and servitude that made it that way.
Here's to sticking to your guns. design backbone. designing with integrity of principles.
thanks for the wonderful RSS. this lowly designer/ web maintenance guy in Florida has been enjoying the lessons and interesting posts for over 2 years now. keep it up!
Part of All Request Thursday
I got sent this in the post the other day. Actually a few of us got sent this in the office.
I'm about to slag it off pretty heavily. Part of me feels bad about that because I imagine that every time any printer/paper company sends designers a mailer they get nothing but grief and gripes and turned up noses.
But, you know, fuck it.
You can talk the talk but can you walk the walk. This 'talk' is about green printing. Using environmentally friendly papers and stuff. The cover is printed on Greyboard which is basically all the dregs from the recycled mush. Designers always think it looks great. Good start.
Then it takes you through all the different terminology PEFC means, what FSC means. What carbon footprint means. Obviously it uses all their different environmentally friendly papers throughout.
But there's so much of it. It's 32 pages long.
Right at the end it says, "James McNaughton Group now offer a range of carbon neutral paper products". That winds me up. Don't just offer a range of carbon neutral paper products, make the whole bloody business carbon neutral and be done with it. You're either carbon neutral or you're not. It's not an upgrade option.
32 pages of big, over produced, over designed, printed thing to tell me about environment friendly options. That's just not good, is it? I'm picking on McNaughton's (they can take it) but we get sent loads of these all the time and it's really starting to get on my nerves. Another big convoluted bit of print sent to several people at the same address is not the way forward people.
And before someone asks; no, we're not perfect. We're not entirely carbon neutral and we don't use 100% waterless printing. But we don't send people 32 page mailers.
Being the cutting edge hipster that I am, I was looking at the official Paul McCartney website the other day. The website informed me that Paul recently performed with Kylie on Jools Holland's Hootewhatever. The official site then invited me to watch a video of the performance on the popular online video website YouTube.
So I followed the link and was greeted with this.
Now I know the copyright was possibly the BBC's and not McCartney's. But still. Digital eh, some people just don't seem to get it.
I was forced to get a bus earlier today (normally I'm a black cab man, but you know...) and I saw this lady furiously working her Blackberry.
Being rude and inquisitive I peered over her shoulder where I could just make out she had received an email that detailed "nine points for the way forward". This email had been sent to at least nine people and maybe more.
She began her reply with, "What an exciting and informative way to spend the xxx bus route. Totally agree with points 1 and 7..." Jesus Christ. I imagined all the other eight people sat on buses compiling their replies and I thought what an awful way to communicate / conduct a relationship. What a dreadful, miserable, connected world we live in.
But don't worry. I was just having a moment.
Via the wonderful Design Disease Flickr Pool I stumbled upon this interesting little story.
Photo taken from create_up with permission.
That picture above was taken of some wall artwork in a McDonalds in London. It's startlingly similar to David Carson's artwork for the Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile.
You might think they don't look that similar. But take a closer look.
Here's the wall graphic again.
Photo taken from Echoing The Sound, usual rules apply.
And here's some detail highlighted.
Photo taken from Echoing The Sound, usual rules apply. The arrows/highlights are theirs.
Look at the McDonalds logo. Have you ever seen it cut up like that before?
Now look at the on body artwork from the CD.
They even used the same photo haven't they?
This isn't just in London, it's in McDonalds globally. It's very odd that McDonalds would choose to copy NIN artwork from '99. And it's terrible that they would copy artwork in the first place.
I understand David Carson is considering legal action.
What do you think?
It's the 1st February today which means you've run out of time to take advantage of Glazer's fee sale.
Throughout January you have been able to use the design consultancy Glazer and gain 10% off their fee or a whopping 15% if you book before the 11th Jan!
This is a terrible idea. There's no two ways about it, this is an awful idea. I'll hesitate on saying it drags the whole industry down, but it's not far off.
I can understand the attraction to the consultancy.
1. It seems like a fun, PR-able idea, "Everyone on the high street is having a sale, why don't we!".
2.The 10% of fee lost in January will be recouped if that client stays for the year, or many years.
3. January is a quiet month, this will boost sales and give the New Biz people something to talk about.
4. What's 10% between friends anyway?
Firstly it's not PR able, because it's just not that interesting. Client don't expect consultancies to have a fee sale. They probably don't know what your fees are anyway, they just negotiate fees on a project or agency basis. Apple cutting the price of iPhones 10% is news, this isn't.
Design consultancies work had to explain their fees and why they are reasonable. Designers constantly moan that they can't charge as much as ad agencies, lawyers, plumbers, doctors, anyone and then someone knocks a whopping 10% off. If a new client is attracted under this scheme how are they going to feel when the fees go up 11% in February. If they start off being charged 90% an increase back to 100% is an increase of 11% of 90.
Is January really that quiet? Does this make you look a bit desperate? Have the phones stopped ringing? Do you New Biz people need to offer a 10% discount to attract clients?
As I've explained 10% is a lot when it gets put back up. This idea makes the consultancy look cheap and undoes a lot of good work done by a lot of successful design consultancies. It's a silly, flippant idea which doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
What do you think?
(It only seems fair that I contact Glazer and ask them for a comment. More soon.)
After this grumble, I thought I'd keep a list of all the meetings I attended (externally) in one week and all the beverages I was offered. Here are the shocking results.
Number of external meetings attended: 7
Meetings where beverages were offered: 4
Meetings where that beverage was tea: 2
Meetings where a beverage was requested: 1
Meetings where that beverage was tea: 0
The other day I received the following email. (Obviously I've deleted names etc etc.)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
How cheaply could you design two presentation covers A4 size, almost identical but with different titles, for one of our Chinese clients? It could be quite basic, they are a motorcycle battery company.Many thanks
(Their name)
(PA/Office Manager for a financial PR firm in The City).
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
That was it. No 'hello'. No 'Dear Ben'. Just the text above. Oh yeah, and of course the lovely bit about "How cheaply could you design".
So a few deep breaths and then I replied.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hi (person's name),I think it's sad that you chose to start your email with "How cheaply could you". Not even a 'hello'. I imagine you'd feel the same way if your business received a similar email.
I don't think it's a project for us.
Kind Regards
Ben
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Measured and fair, I thought. The person then replied thus.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I’m sorry, I am just very busy. I don’t know your company as I picked it off the net. You must be used to dealing with much bigger more important projects than this small one, I wish I hadn’t troubled you.Best
(Their name)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I imagine most people reading this will agree with what I did.
I'm not posting this so I can get lots of "Well done! You're so right!" comments. I know I did the right thing and you know I did the right thing.
I'm just posting it because out here, at the coal face of the British graphic design industry this is the kind of thing that happens.
Sad, isn't it?
I've got a complaint to make.
I've been to lots of meetings recently. And in lots of those meetings I haven't been offered a cup of tea. Shocking isn't it?
Sometimes, if the meeting is going on a bit, I'll politely ask for a drink. Someone will then bring out some water.
Water?
I love tea, I could drink it all day. I tell them at work, "don't ask, just make a brew". Sometimes when I get in of a morning I make myself two cups of tea, just to get me started. Tea is the drink that built Britain. In fact Russell once told me that because tea uses boiling, and therefore pure water, it stopped factory workers getting cholera and such and therefore that's not just an aphorism, tea actually did build Britain.
So next time I'm in a meeting with you, I'll have a tea, please. Milk no sugar. Thanks. And next time you're hosting a meeting, please offer to brew up.
Some other points; Yorkshire Tea is easily the best and occasionally I'm partial to a latté.
This is probably the piece of design I hate most in the world, right now. There's a high chance that you've got one of these at home.
There's a higher than high chance that if I came round your house and saw that TV I'd take an instant dislike to you. Instantly.
Don't worry, I'm sure there would be mitigating factors and I'd get over it. You read this, which is a start. And you've invited me round your house, which was very kind.
This design kind of sums up everything I hate about bad design in the naughties.
1. It's totally meaningless, devoid of any added value.
2. It's essentially a style that's been ripped off. Hugely derivative of something (probably from Ive) that was once good and then expanded and bastardised to death.
3. It triggers more poor imitations, and leads design buyers to say things like "I want it like they did it".
4. Everyone blindly buys one because everyone else has bought one. No one actually stops to think, do I like this?
5. It's so damn ugly and intrusive. Sat in the corner of your lounge looking shit.
It's changing now, as more and more people are buying "plasma" TV's. But still. You know what I mean.
When this launched I was on holiday. But, these days you can access the world media anywhere. Email on the move, internet on the train, news on the go, the Daily Mail in the hotel lobby.
I didn't blog about it at the time and I kind of thought my views would change with the hindsight that a few weeks gives you. I don't think my opinion has changed, nor has that of anyone else. I was actually invited to the launch event and lined up as a media commentator, but I couldn't make it due to the holiday pictured above. Given what I'm about to say, I think I'd have been on the TV all week.
I like the logo.
As Bono said, "there's been a lot of talk, maybe, maybe too much talk". He was talking about a song, I'm talking about a logo. For my money the best commentary on the whole thing was written by Mark over at the CR Blog.
So let's recap a little. David, really, really hates it. Claire Beale hates it. Beeker's receptionist is worried, Michael Johnson is crossing his fingers and Coudal Partners like what it isn't. Armin likes it and Bowbrick loves it. The Government isn't for turning and Wolff Olins don't ask to be liked. Which is just as well really. There's been a lot of talk about what could have been with, really, the only elegant suggestion being Daniel Eatock's. Although I doubt very much they'd let you do that with the rings.
In the Dead Tree Press the Daily Mail suggested it might grow on you with that special Daily Mail cynicism, the Tory Olympic spokesman called it "hideous" and asked "what do the rejected ones looks like?". Stephen Bailey (yes you read that right, Stephen Bailey) called it a "puerille mess, an artistic flop and a commercial scandal".
Before we continue I think that everyone agrees the 'london'' type is horrible. It is.
Mark's article is called, "Well, at least it doesn't have Big Ben on it". That's a valid point. How many 'British' 'Cool Britannia' 'London' logos have we seen in the Blair Years that have relied upon hackneyed, dated imagery of Big Ben, the Union Jack or Tower Bridge? Likewise how much Gill Sans has been expended in trying to recapture Beck's brilliance? To the rest of the world (and I mean the rest of all the world not just Europe and America) London and the United Kingdom do not mean Tower Bridge and Big Ben. Get over it.
Happily the logo also doesn't feature any jumping, ambiguous androgynous eunuchs like these terrible, lame things do. How the hell these 'bent hairpin designs' convey Olympic spirit is beyond me.
Suitably in this user generated world, hundreds of logo's have been sent in to the media. Most, if not all of them including jingoistic symbols and bent hairpins.
But it's not just the amateurs who are having a try, here's Tyler Brulé on BBC Breakfast slagging off the logo.
And here he is displaying (on very weak looking A4 foam core boards) some ideas his team had "knocked up" the night before. They were shocking as well.
Which brings me on to a wider point. Whether you like the logo or not the way our industry has responded to this has been dreadful. Using terms like "knocking up" on BBC air time don't help designers win more boardroom time. Not liking the logo is one thing, but comments like "£400k? My kid could have done better..." do every working designer a disservice. We all know that it's not a case of emailing Seb an eps and an invoice for £400k. We all know it's a poisoned chalice of a brief, we all know that £400,000 will include miles of implementation and we all know that the ad agencies and the management consultants are charging twice that.
London's Mayor Ken Livingstone even said he'd ask for his money back. If that's the case Ken, I'd like to have a word about a few elements of my council tax bill that I'm not entirely happy with.
A friend of mine used to work for a large accountancy practice in the north of England. He used to audit the books of several Premiership clubs and he reckoned that almost all football transfers were worth about a third of what the press had claimed the fee was. I've always thought it was the same for branding agency fees.
I haven't seen (and I may have missed it) anyone begin to defend the industry and it's processes. Next time you're working with a client who demands his money back after months of hard work, or disputes your already small fees - you've only got yourselves to blame, I'm afraid.
History is not a helpful reference point either.
Sure, the Munich one is gorgeous and so is the Mexico one, but that was 1972 and '19 something I can't quite read'. The thing that worries me is that left to most of the London based, Guardian reading, ironic tshirt wearing design community we would have ended up with another, yes another, HelveticaMunichWankFest, lauded by the design press and irrelevant to everyone else. Meaningless, stylistic rubbish. Graphic design at its worst.
I think it's important to remember, but not essential, that logo is aimed at a younger audience. Generally, the younger you get the less you hate it. For the purpose of this post I asked my 16 year old niece what she thought of it, "Err, it's OK. Not that bothered, really. Why? Did you do it?".
So, I'm pleased that we don't have any Helvetica. Pleased that we don't have any
Tower Bridges or any Big Bens. Pleased that Gill Sans hasn't been used again and pleased that some people don't like it.
What we have is the bravest Olympic logo in decades. A logo with an undeniable energy and an anti-establishment feeling that would be refreshing for any brand but is like an intravenous 10,000 volts for an Olympic logo.
Last, but not least, take a look at Terence Conran talking about the opening of the Royal Festival Hall in 1951. Another big public design project, another huge amount of money and another set of shocking headlines. I bet most of the people who hate the logo would enjoy a glass of wine on the balcony of the RFH.
OK, OK, that's a building and not a logo, but the point is that these huge design projects will always get negative press.
So there you go, I like it. Special thanks to all the people who have written in asking what I thought of the logo, I was strangely touched by all of that.
This is interesting. I spotted it over at Bogdana's blog, which really should be called Blogdana. I'm not really sure why it's interesting, so here's some randomish thoughts.
1. I thought they'd be more 999's. Don't you find that a little unusual? Many countries borrow stuff from Britain because of the Colonial legacy, so I thought there would be more 999's. Maybe that's because the telephone became ubiquitous after the Empire had ended?
2. There's a lot of 9's and 1's. Blogdana makes a good point that, thanks to Hollywood, almost everyone would know the emergency number in America.
3. I was always under the impression that in Britain the number is 999 because in the old days when phones looked like this
(Picture taken from Vintagephone.com with thanks, usual stuff applies.)
three 9's would have been really hard to dial by accident. That means that pesky kids couldn't call an ambulance by mistake. So how is that relevant in the mobile world?
4. Why isn't the emergency number the same all over the world?
I hate chairs.
Well obviously I don't hate chairs, they're good for sitting on etc etc. What I hate is how furniture designers, and normally new, young furniture designers, always seem to fall back on chairs. Every bloody furniture exhibition you go to has the latest chair designs. Do we really need any more fucking chair designs? Surely, somewhere, the perfect chair must have been designed already?
(The classic Ant Chair by Arne Jacobsen taken from the Jacobsen site, with thanks, usual stuff applies.)
The requirements stay the same. People don't change that much over the years, a little fatter, a little taller, maybe, but legs still bend in the middle. People still rest on their posteriors when seated. So the design of chairs gets worse, more complicated, more stuff being added - confusing the issue rather than solving the problem.
(Chair with concrete base by Konstantin Grcic,
with seat in die cast aluminium, treated with sputtered fluorinated
titanium and painted in polyester powder. With concrete base painted
transparent clear. Taken from the Twenty Twenty One site with thanks, usual stuff applies.)
So when I saw this in the Design Museum tank thing, I let out a long sigh.
Poor stuff guys, try harder.
I don’t think I really understand it and I certainly can’t get it to work properly.
I’ve tried using it to “find out what’s happening now” but it always seems out of date. You know, it lists posts as being 30 days old.
I’ve tried using it to search blogs, but Google is always better.
I’ve tried using it to put a search box on here, but that doesn’t work either.
Those tags are just annoying.
So what is it good for? Does anyone else use it? Am I doing something wrong?
I see Russell has joined in. Anyone else care to reveal their darkest blogging moments?
It's true that a lot of blogs can be narcissistic drivel. So, to prove how humble I am, I've complied a list of my 10 Worst Posts.
My 10 Worst Posts
1. Easyspace - OK, Easyspace are a dreadful company, but there's no need for this post. It's not big and it's not clever.
2. Understatement - This just doesn't work as a post. The photo is too small, or needs a border and it doesn't really mean anything unless you read the whole BBC article. Lazy.
3. Sharon Stone - This is silly and something I expect a lesser design blog to write about (whoops narcissism creeping back...).
4. WonderBra - I got way, way too excited about this.
5. Best of Brandweek - This is a waste of time. It's an OK article, but probably not worth downloading. Sorry.
6. Change - Re-reading this, I think it was ill thought out and probably a confusing post.
7. Astrologer - So? What's this got to do with graphic design?
8. Postman Pat - Ditto
9. Brandy - Again a lazy post. It's not really that clever.
10. Spiderman - Who cares? And it's not that great a video anyway.
What do you think? Can you remember any worst posts? Do you have any personal favourites?
If you write a blog why don't you make a list of your 10 Worst Posts?
I wrote this post (What makes a good viral?) back in June. Compare that with this (5 Secrets to a Good Viral Campaign) on the Digital Conversations website, posted 25th July.
Me: Virals need to be funny, rude or useful. Very funny, very rude or very useful. Web 2.0 useful.
Them: Good virals are funny or rude. Sometimes both. Once in a while, they’re just incredibly useful.
Me: Funny - remember that being funny is very, very difficult. Ricky Gervais is funny and Steve Coogan is not. Disagree with me? Agree with me? Then you understand the problem
Them: Funny. This is harder than it sounds. Funny means something different to everyone. Think Dave Chappelle. Now think Dennis Miller. Chances are if you think Dave is funny, you don’t laugh as hard at Dennis. And vice versa. See the challenge?
Me: A viral is not a video that gets emailed round. A true viral campaign is an idea that has a life of its own and spreads in the same way a virus does, prolifically and exponentially.
Them: A good viral is more than a video with a tell-a-friend button. A true viral campaign is an idea that has a life of its own – gaining momentum the same way a virus does.
If you search for “good virals” on Google, my post comes up top. Maybe this explains it. What do you reckon, have I been ripped off? (I'm flattered by the way.)
From the World Cup. Posted a bit late, sorry.
Good Lord this is bad.
You can see the thinking, "AVS. There's a V in advanced. Then the S... A. V. S."
It doesn't work on any level. It's not clever, the acronym doesn't work. It doesn't read well, it doesn't read at all. The type unit is too big. It's clumsy. It's bad.
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