Recently in Agencies Category

@iamkhayyam turned me on to this inspiredology post featuring intriguing examples of "horizontal" web design (i.e., sites that scroll from right to left instead of up and down). Checking them out made me realize a) that I don't see this enough, b) you can use a lot of different visual metaphors to indicate when a site is loading, and c) some human beings are really, truly, super creative.

The majority of these are portfolio sites. If you don't have time to look at all 25, I recommend that you at least take a gander at these four:

Cesar Jacobi/Mutanz- Pythonesque surreal animation and cool t-shirts (among other work).

BBH London - Very elegant, fluid layout and amazing commercial work.

SectionSeven Inc. - Slick 3D foldout animation.

Ole Häntzschel - Clever use of distortion, illegibility, and rollovers.

If you've still got time, here's two more:

Sonido - Nice "Word Search" Menu Metaphor.

Nile Studio - Russian design studio with a typical horizontal portfolio but very trippy cyrillic type work.

Have you seen any good examples of horizontal design that aren't on inspiredology's list? They've got to be out there...

Image Courtesy of Môsieur J..

Back when it was the latest thing, I wrote about Modernista!'s new "website", which is really more like a widget that connects you to Modernista!'s pages on Facebook, Flckr, Wikipedia, etc. I thought then and still think now that this approach is WEB design in the truest sense. They didn't design a something that people view on the web; they designed a way to do something with the web. The essence of the web is connectivity, and the folks at Modernista used this connectivity itself as their site.

The infinite, even fractal, connectivity of the web is uncontrollable, as they themselves highlight at Modernista.com, "The menu on the left is our homepage. Everything behind it is beyond our control." Their site is transparency itself, which means that they don't try and spin the news, for example, even when it's not really that great.

The fact that layoffs are the most prominent news that you'll find on the Modernista! site today (February 18, 2009) led the AdFreak to remark, "Downturn not kind to Modernista!'s anti-site," and AdRants to snarkily quip, "Modernista Promotes Own Layoffs."

I think they miss they point. The web forces transparency on organizations and individuals. The real question is whether you are going to ignore that you are already exposed, or seize the day and expose yourself (you know what I mean).

A couple weeks ago, Mr. Randall Rothenberg published a manifesto on interactive advertising creativity, which I missed at the time but discovered thanks to a post by Alan Wolk on whether or not creativity still matters.

Mr. Rothenberg's lengthy (by web standards - it took me minutes to read rather than seconds) manifesto is a well-written, informed, and impassioned defense of inspired creativity as the heart and soul of advertising, as that which not only gives it value but, more importantly makes it meaningful to the lives of real human beings. Against the rising tide of commoditization, he says, "We must stop acting as if we're selling schmattes, and start acting like the makers of magic that the best of us are -- and always have been."

Aside from pointing out that Rothenberg explicitly confirms my assertion that interactive design is a team sport - "There are several new skill sets creative agencies today must possess to attract, engage, and influence consumers -- Flash video development, software design, information architecture, animation, CRM, iPhone app design, and ActionScript development among them -- and no one individual will have expertise in all" - I would like to highlight one other critical point he makes: Great advertising is not aimed primarily at consumers; it's true "target audience" are the employees of the company that it promotes:

"This is perhaps the most important reason advertising creativity matters. It inspires the marketer. It encourages the sales force. It provides them, and all the other constituencies in and around the company and the brand, the faith that they will be able to sell the product in to the retailer, close the sales on the dealer's lot, win new commissions, and better their own lives. Great advertising is their rallying cry, the flag they march under. The mouseclick must be matched by their heartbeat."

Forget about the customer for a second. Does your creative work actually inspire your colleagues?

The PhizzPop Design Challenge is a web design and development competition sponsored by Microsoft. As I understand it, the overall purpose of PhizzPop is to familiarize the design and development community with the power of Microsoft's Silverlight.

To that end they've arranged a PhizzPop tour through various US cities. In each city, agencies are selected for the competition, trained on Silverlight, and asked to complete a design challenge, and then present their solutions at a rocking event. The next scheduled tour stop is in Los Angeles on February 20, 2009.

This is the third go-around for PhizzPop and this year they've added an online version of the challenge to allow folks to participate even if they aren't located in one of the tour cities.

Why am I pimping PhizzPop on this here blog? Cuz Aquent is a sponsor and Aquent Graphics Institute (AGI) provides the Silverlight training for all participants competing in the Design Challenge. And I've got nothing but love for AGI.

T'other day Amber over at Altitude wrote a post called, "5 Things Good Agencies Do (And one they don't)." She is talking here about any kind of agency - PR, Web, Marketing, etc. - but it struck me that the behaviors/attitudes she describes would also distinguish good consulting firms from bad and even represent standards to which any company could hold their vendors (or to which customers could hold a company). For example, the "good" care about you and your business, can readily point to the results of their work, and, interestingly enough, will tell you when they can't help you.

How would your organization, or you personally, fare if held to these standards?

In other words, how "good" are you?

Image Courtesy of TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³.

Back in the days when Second Life was being hyped as the future of the web, Clay Shirky quipped that "3D is a crappy way to search." I totally agree, in part because I've often had the experience of looking for something in my house, which came with the three standard spatial dimensions, and wishing I could search these dimensions the same way I search the web: textually.

The shortcomings of 3D search were brought home to me when I stumbled across the Seed Gives Life site. The site itself consists of a semi-explorable faux 3D Flash landscape which looks cool, but is kind of frustrating because, although you can poke around a bit in their pretty pastel forest, there isn't much to actually find there.

Then I found their blog and came across this post, msnbc's Ess feed viewer is pretty awesome." Turns out that msnbc is using an interesting technology, Spectra. which allows you to create a 3D newsfeed. Interestingly enough, since the feed can get kind of crowded, making in difficult to pick out the individual items of interest, they provide you with a tool that allows you to filter the feed view using, tah dah, text-based search.

Promise: 3D can provide a rich and imaginative interface.

Peril: It can be just as cluttered, obscure, and user-unfriendly as reality's own 3D interface.

Solution: Infuse the wonderfully awkward and beautifully frustrating tri-dimensional world (or its digital surrogate) with the awesome power of the hyper-dimensional world (sometimes called "the web").

Image Courtesy of advencap.

If you're reading this blog, then you probably read this story in ADWEEK, "Agencies Seek the Right Mix." If you didn't read it, the article describes a kind of power shift in agencies from the "traditional creatives" to the "digital people."

The two quotes that jumped out at me were this, from JWT's Ty Montague:

"It used to be a caste system where traditional creatives came up with the 'big idea' and then turned it over to digital... We' re creating a system where the traditional creatives cannot overrule the digital people."

And this, from Mother London's Dylan Williams:

"Great ideas have always been viral. Digital is just one way to fan flames."

The first quotation tells me that, when Aquent's CIO became my überboss by adding marketing to his numerous responsibilities, this was but a ripple in the stream of the Zeitgeist ... or at least a symptom of this broader trend: Marketing is becoming indistinguishable from a technology, specifically, the Interweb, which contains all media without being a medium itself.

This is a snapshot of Modernista!'s new website. Yes, they are using their Wikipedia page as their homepage (though apparently Wikipedia took it down for a while due to this unconventional usage). They also use Google News for their "news" section and Flickr for their portfolio.

I'm not the first to write about this. PSFK wrote about it last week, as did MarketingVOX and others. Before that, a number of bloggers - Gareth Kay, Paul Isakson, and Tom O'Keefe, among them - weighed in both for and against this novel approach.

Some (like Mitch Caplan) found it "Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant." Others, like Mr. O'Keefe, were less impressed. The pro-camp sees it as the ultimate acceptance of Web 2.0 reality, in which your online reputation defines who you are. The cons see it as lazy, ugly, or just one step beyond what Zeus Jones had already done.

I think the difference between the Modernista! site and the Zeus Jones site is significant insofar as the latter is an actual site with links to Zeus Jones-flavored content, whereas the M! site is really just a widget leading you to M! content across the web.

At the same time, Modernista!'s move reminds us that, in spite of the spatial metaphor inscribed in the term, a website is not a place or a location. It is a set of relations between disparate elements. In fact, the elements related are often sets of relations themselves, such as Google search results.

This may be the reason that information architecture seems more cutting edge than graphic design on the web. When "sites" are reduced to their content, or even more radically, consist primarily of continually changing content from other sites, who cares about white space, color palettes, and buttons?

I know this much, the content doesn't!

The writing is on the FunWall: Marketing is undergoing an unprecedented and overwhelming proliferation of channels. This isn't new news, naturally. It's been going on for a while, what with computers in taxicabs and digital bulletin in elevators and all. But it does seem like every day the web is adding another site, another portal, or another technology that will allow people to connect with each other and, by extension, allow marketers to connect with consumers.

So, in addition to your direct mail campaigns, your advertising (on and off-line), and your promotions, you, Mr and/or Ms. Marketer, need to figure out whether or not you should be blogging, vlogging, Twittering, or podcasting. How can you use Facebook and MySpace? How can you leverage LinkedIn and Plaxo? Where is your sim in Second Life? Your Halo tie-in? Your product placement in Grand Theft Auto? An what about that other cool thing you read or heard about but aren't even sure what it's for?

Everyone feels like they should be doing all or some of the above, but there are so many possibilities, and so much on your plate already, that it's hard to know where to start. To help clear the air and provide some sort of guide to the perplexed, I hunted down a couple of new media-savvy marketers and asked them quite simply: How can marketers best figure out what they should get into and what they can profitably avoid?

1. I checked out their "new" website (launched in April) the other day and was struck by the Yugo Nakamura-esque look and feel of it all. (I was trying to find out if he had anything to do with the site, but my email to W+K's PR folk has gone unanswered.) There is some dispute as to whether the site is cool or lame, cutting edge or same-old-same-old, reflective of their interactive capabilities (or lack thereof), etc. I'm not qualified to weigh in on that subject, but I do appreciate that the site demonstrates at least one way for a multidimensional information space, in this case, the world of an agency's work, to be portrayed as an interactive, 2-D space.

2. Russell Davies, who used to work at W+K, but now apparently works for a "global, small business" called, "Open Intelligence Agency," wrote a post almost a year ago, and several months after he had left, entitled, "7 things I learned at wieden and kennedy (portland edition)." A number of blogs linked to the post at the time, but I just read it yesterday. Aside from reminding me that blogs are collections of permanent ephemera, his list of learnings included this old chestnut: The key to creative genius; work harder. How's the old equation go? 1% inspiration/99% perspiration? Having ideas is easy - doing things requires effort.

3. The local W+K offices have blogs dedicated to their work and office hijinks (to provide but one example). They also use the blogs to introduce new folks. In this post introducing a new member of the account management team in London, the newbie is compared to Lisa Stansfield, in part because they both come from the same town and have both traveled around the world, in part because they "both commend themselves to the eye." As much as I admire that turn of phrase, I'm fairly certain that I couldn't get away with referring to a co-worker thusly on this blog. Is it because I used to work in HR? Is it because I work at a staffing agency instead of an ad agency? Or is it just because I work in the United States and not London? Hmmm.

4. I believe that W+K has been a client of ours at one point or another, at least in Portland. (This more in the interest of full disclosure than as a kind of special pleading.)

5. One other thing from the Mr. Davies' "7 Learnings": You can tell from the work if people enjoyed making it. I think you can make a similar statement about customer service; you can tell from the way they treat you if someone enjoys their job. It should also make people consider their resumes, portfolios, blogs, etc.. How much joy do yours emanate?