Noisy Decent Graphics

Google is still the homepage

The Google Trends end of year report is always interesting. The top 3 this year aren't searches - they're navigation. Google is the Homepage. Still. For a whole lot of people.

We used to say this at GDS and 11 years ago in January 2012 I tried to explain What does "Google is the homepage" mean in real life? I didn't invent the expression, of course, I first heard it from Richard Pope who wrote about it on the GDS alpha blog in April 2011, when he laid out A few design rules for Alpha.gov.uk.

I found an earlier mention of it, in December 2008 on the Guardian written by Jemima Kiss. 14 years ago she explains the above example better than I have done. "The first six months of the year were particularly Facebook crazy, but that still doesn't entirely explain why Facebook would be the most searched term of 2008 in the UK. It's not like the URL - Facebook.com - is particularly hard to remember, so perhaps Google is the homepage and people like my Mum forget to type the address into the address bar instead of the Google search box..."

Fireworks at Legoland

Bonfire Night at Legoland starts with Queen's We Will Rock You, with the fireworks playing the Stomp Stomp Clap intro. All firework displays should do this from now on.

Thanks to my special correspondent YT (aged 10) who first alerted me to this story.

If I won the lottery

 

If I won the lottery the first thing I'd do is buy enough toilet rolls and enough bin liners for the rest of my life.

It's tempting to say "anyway" here and just finish the blog post but I thought I'd try and get all Matt Webb about this.

I've long held the theory that we shouldn't run out of certain things in my house. We're a stable enough household with a regular income and predictable demand cycles that some things should be automatic. Of course we're not running our house like a Foxconn warehouse but still how hard would it be to predict and estimate how many bin liners we need?

Asterisk: we live in a house with two teenagers so black swan events do occur.

Of course some people think bulk buying bin liners and toilet rolls is madness, especially beyond a month or so of demand. But the functional designer in me thinks that bin liners and toilet rolls are never going to go out of date and in fact buying them now realises a huge inflation saving! Storage space might be an issue but let's deal with that later.

First let's think about how many you'd need of the rest of of your life. I'm 47 and the average life expectancy of a UK male is 80 years old. So I've got 33 years left to live. (That doesn't sound like much tbh.)

The average UK household uses 100 toilet rolls a year so that's 3,300 more toilet rolls. A hipster toilet roll like Who Gives A Crap costs £1 a roll so that's £3,300.

I can't find stats for black bin liner usage but I reckon we use 3 a week. My 33 years equates to 1,716 weeks. Bin liners cost 60p each so that's £3,088.

£6,694 would buy you enough toilet rolls and enough bin bags to last the rest of your life.

Maybe we should bite the bullet and do that now. Storage might be a problem. Hence the lottery win and I could buy a house with a room just for bog roll and bin bags like the Kardashians or something.

Anyway.

I got ninety nine problems but I chose this one

"We can’t not have problems, we can only choose which problems we have."

From Russell.

24 hour London time lapse

Bizarrely this from the Savoy Hotel, and I don't know why they call it "360°" but it's still a cool video. 

Free business quotes

This is not the point of the article but I couldn't help noticing it's full of wonderful, cynical quotes applicable to almost any business. Easy to reuse. Here's just a few.

"The New York Times is the most important newspaper in the world. But Wall Street, the family that owns it..."

"The Times, they say, is a great place to have worked."

"I also thrived in part because I heeded a colleague’s warning before I started: “Do not, under any circumstances, try to change anything.”"

Inside the identity crisis at The New York Times

 

Not moving the goalposts but making them smaller

Always good to see business jargon made real.

Hull v Birmingham has been delayed because the goals are too big and are being “sawed shorter”.

No, really…

pic.twitter.com/S1dU1Xt1yZ

— HLTCO (@HLTCO) October 16, 2022

You wonder whether some of these signs are art projects

A few of the Dan Wieden tributes

I worked at w+k London for about 4 years. This is a collection of tributes by people I know. Storing them here for myself but I thought you might enjoy them. Trigger warning some of them are on LinkedIn.

Simon McCrudden, former Planner in w+k London
He tells a tale about the Nokia pitch "On Saturday afternoon Dan sat in silence staring at me as I presented him my terrible strategy."

Iain Tait, ECD in w+k Portland and London
"His brilliance was precisely because he was an introvert, not in spite of it." Dan. The quiet titan.

Michael Russoff, creative director working at w+k London during the Guardian and Honda days.
"I never met Dan. I was in rooms where he was. But I never met/met him."

Michael Wolff, designer and founder of Wolff Olins. It's on FaceBook so I'm not sure if you can read this.
"Like Bill Bernbach who, in his leadership of Doyle Dane Berbach, transformed advertising in his day, Dan Weiden took the baton and, with Wieden and Kennedy, continued to lead."

Creative Review
"If you talk to anyone who has passed through a W+K office, you will likely hear mention of the network’s commitment to the ‘work’ coming above all else."

Interview with the brilliant Marina Hyde

"Favourite Newspaper (apart from The Guardian and Observer)?

“Oh, God, it’s hard… I’m never off Mail Online – put that. I bet people don’t admit to it, but I love it. Never off it. And I love the commenters. I read more Mail Online commenters than I read actual newspapers. That’s another bad thing to admit.”"

Full interview 'Marina Hyde on the art of writing a column: ‘It’s a trade. You just have to fill the space’'