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Write a song about Ben Terrett in the style of George Michael. 3 verses.

 

There's lots of blogging about AI. Lots of friends are pondering the implications and the opportunities. I know people implementing ChatGPT in their work. At their work. I know people experimenting and building things.

I asked it to write a song about me in the style of George Michael.

Verse 1:
He's a designer extraordinaire, 
visionary with style and flair,
Ben Terrett is the name,
His work will leave you amazed.

With his talents in design,
He makes the world a better place,
From government to start-ups,
He's got the skills to solve the case.

Chorus:
Ben Terrett, oh how you inspire,
Your creativity takes us higher,
You make the world a better place,
With your skills, we all embrace.

Verse 2:
From digital to print,
His work is second to none,
With simplicity and clarity,
His designs always stun.

He's a leader in his field,
A mentor to many,
With a heart full of gold,
His kindness is plenty.

Chorus:
Ben Terrett, oh how you inspire,
Your creativity takes us higher,
You make the world a better place,
With your skills, we all embrace.

Verse 3:
In the world of design,
His name is a legend,
From the UK to the US,
His influence is heaven-sent.

He's a man of many talents,
With a passion for design,
Ben Terrett, oh how we admire,
Your work is truly divine.

Chorus:
Ben Terrett, oh how you inspire,
Your creativity takes us higher,
You make the world a better place,
With your skills, we all embrace.

I've always been anti Helvetica door numbers

But all things considered I'm pretty pleased with this.

Didn't do a single post in February so at least we've broken that curse for March. Just be grateful this isn't a newsletter.

My favourite use of ChatGPT AI so far - the better second draft

One of the most exciting uses of AI is the ability to improve written work through better grammar and structure. By submitting a rough draft to an AI tool, we can get a revised version that helps us to think critically about our writing or even fully completes the task for us. This approach is like having a centaur – a hybrid of human and machine – rather than simply relying on a human or a machine alone. So far, the results of using AI in this way have been positive and I look forward to seeing how it will continue to evolve and enhance our writing in the future.

Ok, that was written by ChatGPT after this prompt with the following text. 

Make this paragraph better "My new favourite use of AI is to write a paragraph and then ask it to make it better. Better grammar, better structure - whatever. After all, a bad first draft is a good idea, so let's get the robots to make the second draft better. So far the results have been good. You get a slightly tweaked structure, that at worst makes you think and at best finishes the job for you. Centaurs not butlers.

It's a bit meta but you can see my point. It works great for emails. 

Anyway.

Entrance

It's just missing the "In Constant Use" sign.

Congratulations Typepad!

20 years old this year. Here's to the OG RSS Typepad massive.

Lovely stuff but 20 years, TWENTY YEARS, TWENTY YEARS. Blimey.

All of the lights

I went to the Outernet the other day and I didn't hate it.

All these screen grabs from Hype Williams's video for Kanye West's All of the Lights. 

 

I'm supposed to hate it.

In the middle of Tottenham Court Road and Denmark Street they've knocked down some old buildings and made some new ones but kept most of the ones with all the guitar shops. On the other side of that they made a "digitally enabled streetscape" and it's controlled by Some Evil Corporation. I know, I know. Told you you were supposed to hate it. This Guardian review by Rowan Moore 'The day the music died?' is the vibe of most middle aged bloggers, I suspect. I mean, yes all that, but it's also some massive, massive screens you can walk through. Right there, on the street. Of course the architecture is terrible but what does that mean these days? He gets close to saying that but can't quite commit.

It’s certainly better that all this is here, and guitar shops kept, than that everything be swept away by a gigantic office block. If it’s brash, then so were the Victorian music halls and 1930s cinemas that are now dearly beloved items of heritage.

One man's brash is another man's dearly beloved heritage. Come on Rowan, you're so close.

 

I liked the massive screens a lot. At the moment they're just filler, the equivalent of gigantic screen savers. But imagine if they were a gig or a performance or even (heavens above!) some sort of VR Metaverse Web3 thing. That would be amazing.

Like the bits Vegas does really well, the visuals and the spectacle. Why should they have all the fun.

Imagine if Hype Williams did it, or let's get Es to do it. Someone who understands film and motion, performance, three dimensional structure and can fill a tight space. That would be epic.

Screen grabs from Mase - Feel So Good video by Hype Williams.

Screen grabs from The Notorious B.I.G. - Mo Money Mo Problems video by Hype Williams. 

Es Devlin's set design for Beyonce's Formation tour.

 

Of course it won't be that, it will be massive banner ads for cars with seven year warranties while zero hour workers stand around the roped off vehicle parked underneath.

But come on, I have hope and optimism and energy and it's January 1st and I'm not letting go of that just yet. 

Happy New Year. @ me.

Interesting Meeting

Customers first

This is a nice way of putting it, "We work for your customers. We may have to take their side at times." From Edenspiekermann.

 

AI like plastic

I think this is a useful analogy.

"[AI tools] will be, in retrospect, like the invention of plastics. There are plenty of valuable things, but ultimately, it will be hard to determine if we have created more harm than good with them."

From Igor Schwarzmann over on LinkedIn.

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’'

What is design? 100 definitions curated by John Sorrell.

In 1994, when he was Chair of the Design Council, John Sorrell was asked what design was. He published several definitions in a book released in 1995 to celebrate the Design Council's 50th anniversary. Now, over 25 years later, he has asked 100 people the same question and has published the answers in this book.

This book is a limited edition for the 100 contributors, of which I was one. Pictured below are just some of the definitions of design, including mine. It's a tough question and the answers are very varied, some quite of the moment. (I nearly wrote modish there but I don't mean it in a negative way.)

I've always really liked Ellen Lupton's 'design is art that people use'. I can't better that so I quoted it as my answer.

You can buy the book here.