Daphne, who used to work in the LA office with me has an excuse for missing these viral Dove Ads - she's in our Sydney, Australia office.
But me, who sits at his computer all day in the second largest city in America, blogging about media stuff?
Sadly, no excuse.
But! To make up for it, in case any of the rest of you are recovering Luddites, I'm including two of the films from Dove's Self-Esteem gallery. (On a side note, I've watched these a number of times and my self-esteem remains remarkably low.)
There's been a heck of a lot of controversy about these films and Dove "taking on" the beauty industry. There's even been venting at Ogilvy, who produced these film, because they also produce ads for a well-known girl's doll that is not so loved by many women.
I'm not sure what I think of the campaign as a whole, is it whitewashing or just a step in the right direction?
Either way, the visuals in these films speak for themselves. Whether that changes your decision whether or not to pop into Victoria's Secret or Abercrombie & Fitch, is up to you.
Onslaught
Evolution
Interestingly, Greenpeace posted their own YouTube response ad (below), protesting Dove's use of palm oil in their products. They claim the palm oil industry is destroying the Paradise Forests in Indonesia and that "as the biggest single buyer of palm oil in the world" they need to help stop it.
As a result, Unilever met with Greenpeace and "agreed to support the call by Greenpeace for an immediate moratorium on deforestation for palm oil plantation".
So maybe one step in the right direction, the Real Beauty Campaign, is leading to other right steps?
There's this interesting brainstorming device on the Getty Images site called Moodstream.
Dial up your mood on a sliding scale Happy to Sad, Calm to Lively, Humorous to Serious, Nostalgic to Contemporary then let Getty overwhelm you with stock photography and footage, plus a soundtrack from Pump Audio (it does skew Adult Contemporary).
Editor in Chief at CreativePro, Terri Stone used to recently to help her writer's block starting her newsletter. But it's mainly a good place to see some of Getty's great images and get the juices flowing for creative design work.
Flashforward2008 is rapidly approaching. Well, not exactly approaching, as it will be in to San Francisco, but you know what I mean. As ever, Aquent is sponsoring, along with Lynda.com.
During the event Lynda's company is premiering Creative Inspirations: Big Spaceship, which is their documentary series which looks "at the inner workings of one of the web's most innovative firms." True enough, they've done work for Nike Air, Adobe, HBO, and a host of others.
You can watch the first three movies gratis here on the Lynda.com site. For the rest, I believe you have to subscribe to their Online Training Library. But heck, for $25 to get inside the heads of the staff at Big Spaceship, that's a very small price to pay.
Don't get me wrong, I like Radiohead and I like the way they often push the boundaries.
Like the fact that the video for "House of Cards" uses 3D recording instead of cameras and that they're encouraging fans to use the images of Thom Yorke's head to make their own videos and post here on YouTube.
I mean, yes, it's incredibly creative and amazingly interactive.
But it that video and that song still creep me out.
Though I'm not really a fan of the word "geek" (wonder why that is?), especially when it's used to refer to someone who is incredibly sharp at what they do, Anne-Marie Concepcion calls herself one and we'll just have to go with that.
Anne-Marie runs DesignGeek Central,which is a great site if you're looking to get help:
As a Designer, Art Director, Creative Director, Project Manager, etc. that is.
Not to push the Eco Point so far that I create backlash make people destroy the Earth just to spite me and my treehugging compatriots, I did want to pass this site along.
Great advice like, 30. Avoid using colored paper stock, 14. Use something besides vinyl for banners, 13. Support your local paper mill, 6. Think about shipping.
Maybe I can just tell the naysayers since Aquent sponsored it, it's a marketing ploy.
We're still recovering from Aquent Prom but I felt I'd be doing everyone a disservice if I didn't pass along this CreativePro story on Photoshop's Camera Raw:
"Camera Raw comes free with Photoshop, but many people ignore it because of its complexity."
For those of you who just love to be a little more interactive yourselves, they're holding a whole People's Choice Awards (which is not trademarked as is TV's popular People's Choice awards) that allows you to look at the pieces and vote on your favorite.
Sadly, there is no ballot stuffing.
You know, there's a public act that's just gone out of favor.
Regardless, this should get your primed for the November elections.
A nice Adobe / Flash pass along Jenn in our office sent to Flash-related Aquent Talent:
Gain more notoriety with your multimedia projects and development via Search engines.
Adobe announced the company is teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).
If you're currently on assignment through us, you probably get a number of emails from your Agent about what's going on around town during the summer, but I've been WOEFULLY poor at keeping up on events on this blog.
I'm sorry, so very, very sorry....
To try to make up for my lamedness, I'm giving you the hip tip on tomorrow's designer roundtable down at Barbara's at the Brewery. It's a group called Kernspiracy and is hosted by our friend Spencer Cross, and is absolutely free.
Okay, you have to buy the drinks.
But the friends, networking, business advice, and cold AC are all included in the price of admission.
The 2008 AIGA Leadership Retreat was held in my home town of Omaha, Nebraska for "three days to connect with and be inspired by other chapters across the country."
And it's odd to think of AIGA leaders from NYC, LA, and SF, going down to Johnny's for the country's finest steaks, a restaurant conveniently located right above a stockyard. (No, I am not kidding. My prom was there. A scene in "About Schmidt" was filmed there. Years ago a steer got loose while everyone was dining quietly on martinis and New York Strips.)
Regardless, the current president of AIGA LA, Michael Lejeune gives a great blow-by-blow on what he learned on the Omahablog portion of the site.
If you're interested in where AIGA is headed, including AIGA China, you should definitely take a look.
The great thing about being a Designer, or just appreciating design, is that great design is absolutely everywhere.
(Sadly, it's also the worst thing, as bad design is everywhere too. But I'm getting off the topic here...)
It doesn't surprise me that many of the print Designers I meet also love architecture, but I rarely hear one talking about the structure and feeling of a great city. It's an odd thing, I think. Just as a great coffeehouse can seem to inspire a design, novel, or a romance, think of what creativity a great city like Paris, Amsterdam, or San Francisco produces.
Which is why, if you're a design aficionado, you should check out the Projects for Public Spaces site, which is a non-profit "dedicated to helping people create and sustain public places that build communities."
These are the people behind encouraging local farmers markets, mixed-use developments, thriving downtowns, and better use of public transportation.
I mean, how can you not love their motto? Building Community, Creating Places, Using Common Sense
Maybe you won't agree with all their ideas (and truly, for Designers, dissension is vital part of the process, right?), but it's always great to see their takes what makes a city so right, and what makes it so wrong.
And the slides, featured last week on slideshare.net last week, have already been viewed over 8,000 times.
Which begs the question (as Matt queried), why is it "fourteen or so years into a business world increasingly dominated by the web, people are still trying to figure out how to make the web work for them?"
I'm personally of the belief that Marketers are always looking at ROI, whether it's for Direct Mail or HTML e-mails. But then again, that may not answer the question why so many people registered.
Regardless, if you're interested in listening to the recorded call, you can still hear Lance Loveday, founder, CEO of Closed Loop Marketing and Sandra Niehaus, VP user experience, creative director of Closed Loop Marketing present the entire Webcast by clicking here and registering.
As always, free.
(Regarding the picture, "Roi" means "King" in French.)
Most surprisingly,for me anyway, Quark is showcasing its major upgrade, QuarkXPress 8. Called a change that brings the app "into the 21st century" according to Creative Pro the new interface makes it much easier to use.
Too late to save it from a takeover by InDesign? Time will tell.
Wouldn't you know, the other big news comes from Adobe.
Monday the graphics giant announced their major Acrobat upgrade, version 9, which includes "native support for Flash and other rich media plus new features for collaboration and sharing". They also launched Acrobat.com, which, according to their site, "is a set of online services — file sharing and storage, PDF converter, online word processor, and Web conferencing — you can use to create and share documents, communicate in real time, and simplify working with others." And it's free.
Dr. Fredric J. Baur, the genius that created the patent for the container for Pringles, passed away recently.
As part of his last wishes, he wanted his remains to be buried in a Pringles can.
He developed many products for Proctor & Gamble, including frying oils and a freeze-dried ice cream. He was said to have been proudest about the patent for the Pringles design.
I just hope that I can come up with something as cool before I die (it does not have to have the multi-usage, however.)
The rumors of October's Adobe CS4 release apparently have been greatly exaggerated.
Photoshop Senior Product Manager, John Nack is saying the information of the release date, passed around by Gizmodo and TG Daily, is bogus.
"I didn't say anything about schedule...Someone pulled a date apparently out of thin air, and now everyone who can copy & paste is dutifully repeating it."
"The fish story grows with the telling, too. In addition to repeating the date, Electronista is inventing new details (e.g. 'CS3 has already had limited support for graphics processing units (GPUs) for certain filters'; sorry, no; 'An upcoming wave of video cards with special physics processing will also help, Adobe explains'; nope, didn't say that; and more). Where do people get this stuff?"
Electronista and Gizmodo both now have updates with Jack's info, though Gizmodo says to "take it for what you will."
(Either Gizmodo knows more than Adobe does, or....?) >Regardless, Beta versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth are all at the AdobeLabs site.
If you have a CS3 license you can download and use these, otherwise, if you're just browsing, you can run the apps for In the meantime, Gizmodo will be predicting the Obama vs. Clinton outcome.
Stay tuned.
Leave it to the fine folks at CreativePro (Terri Stone in particular) to find this on-line competition, which is like Layer Tennis except with fonts.
Creatives go against each other in a "type battle". They start on Monday, end on Friday. There is "no panel of judges and no prize — only the ability to call yourself the best on the block."
Leave it to TreeHugger.com to not only cover dumb (and smart) packaging, but to have a commenting readership smart enough to know what ethidium bromide is.
Here's the product:
And here's the packaging:
There's so many people involved in the costs of packaging, and so many who could benefit from reducing it (you'd have more money for sales, marketing, overhead, and bonuses, for instance).
CommArts is having its Call For Entries for "the most prestigious juried competitions for graphic design and advertising" with winning entries being published in their November 2008 Design Annual and the December 2008 Advertising Annual.
I believe, by using the word "prestigious" they are not referring to its archaic form: "of, relating to, or marked by illusion, conjuring, or trickery"
Otherwise it'd be a waste of your money and talent.
Regardless,here's the spielio:
"Juried by nine top designers and attracting entries from the USA, Canada, England and 40 other countries, theDesign Annualfeatures the best posters, brochures, packaging, trademarks, corporate identity, annual reports, catalogs, letterheads and signage, and is fully indexed for reference. Only 2% of the work entered is selected for the annual. Detailed captions provide the reader with an explanation of the project's scope, the concept and solution."
Past judges have included Saul Bass, Michael Beirut, Lee Clow, Hillman Curtis, Louise Fili, Milton Glaser, Jeff Goodby, Hal Riney, Sam Scali, Paula Scher, Michael Vanderbyl, Lynda Weinman, Fred Woodward and Jeffrey Zeldman.
Any design or advertising project printed, published or aired for the first time between June 3, 2007 and June 2, 2008 is eligible.
But on the subject of Webcasts, Aquent has two upcoming ones you may be interested in:
The first is Managing Your Excel Addiction given by Dan Neff, president of Aquent IT Solutions.
Is your marketing department addicted to spreadsheets? Overwhelming majorities are admitting that the answer is yes. While Excel spreadsheets are the preferred choice to segment, merge, and analyze marketing data, Excel was not designed as a data management tool. In this free and informative Aquent/AMA webcast, Dan Neff, president of Aquent’s IT Solutions, will illustrate how conflicting marketing data is more often the result of a process problem, not a technology gap. Neff will also provide practical examples for working your way out of a spreadsheet nightmare so you can improve your marketing efficiency.
It's on Thursday, May 29th at 10am (PDT) and absolutely free, as usual.
Next up Web Design for ROI: How Design Impacts the Bottom Line with Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus from Closed Loop Marketing.
Learn how to prioritize your design efforts by identifying which elements have the greatest impact on Web page effectiveness. Using a practical, how-to approach to design, Lance and Sandra will discuss the most important concepts and elements for effective landing pages, home pages, category pages, product pages, forms, shopping carts, and checkout processes. They will share guidelines, show case studies, and look at current examples to illustrate what works—and why. When it's your job to make a site beautiful and profitable, you'll want to start here.
This will be on Thursday, May 22nd at 10am (PDT) and is also incredibly free.
Now you can do both with AIGA's DESIGNING THE DESIGNER 2015!
Well, sort of. AIGA (in partnership with Adobe) are trying to grasp the "skills, education requirements and work environments Designers are likely to face in the year 2015".
Essentially they want to try prepare young Designers for the skills and roles that will be expected of them.
So it's a survey.
But it's a little more important than the "Did your server offer to supersize your meal?" survey you probably took last.
No one said working for yourself would be easy (except, of course, Donald Trump), but it does have its perks.
Say working close to your toaster.
Or learning an awful lot about the personal life of your postman.
On the minus side is learning to cope when people keep telling you, "OMG, the economy is in the gutter!"
Especially if its your postman.
Happily, the fine folks over at Creative Pro (Terri Stone in particular) put together a "boat-load" of articles from their Business section on, well, the business of creative.
That is, until I found the final piece of my daughter's pink MALM 3-drawer chest I was assembling was nicked. And I rang customer service to find out how they wanted to go about replacing the piece. And I rang. And rang. I rang for 10 minutes. And no one answered. I rang for two days. And still...
Nor did anyone answer at the HQ IKEA number (they redirected me, after much pushing of buttons, back to my local store where it rang some more.)
There's a lot to like about IKEA, but what's not to love is their customer service. (Please see Danielle Crittenden's blog "Why I Hate IKEA" at the The Huffington Post.)
Maybe one of the execs from the Scandinavian giant will take a moment to attend the latest AMA/Aquent Webcast:
Optimizing the Profitable Link Between Employees and Customer Loyalty Behavior
Michael Lowenstein, Vice President and Senior Consultant at Harris Interactive, points out that research indicates "at least 70% of your customers’ behavior is driven by their interactions with your employees."
Which would explain why there's no rush for me to hustle on back to that big blue and yellow store to get more furniture.
But enough about my allen-wrench assembly skills, here's the delio on the Webcast.


In this free and informative Aquent/AMA webcast, Michael Lowenstein, Vice President and Senior Consultant at Harris Interactive, will present critical insights about the relationship among profitability, employee behavior, and customer loyalty, which will prove that true customer commitment is attainable only when the entire organization understands and performs its roles in providing superior customer experiences.
You will learn how to:
Effectively measure and understand customers’ perceptions
Pinpoint which employee attitudes and actions affect customer behavior
Leverage employee positivism and customer focus
Identify and eliminate employee sabotage
Develop a customer-centric culture
The AMA recommends attendees of this Webcast should include Senior Executives and Managers of:
I'm not going to pretend I'm a Web Developer (even though I play one on TV), so when I recommend something like XRAY, a program that lets you peer beneath the skin of any Web page, I can only imagine how you'd use it.
But the fine folks over at Creativepro were kind enough to include it in their recent newsletter, so I know it must be pretty danged helpful.
XRAY is a free program that lets you "peer beneath the skin of any Web page", so you can tell where the top and left of an element is, how bit the margins and padding are, and how wide a content box is.
You can also get information on an element's parents, sibling, and children.
It's free and runs on Firefox, IE 6+, Camino, and Safari. A sample of what it looks like is below.
Not that you need my lame excuses... but now I'm back and raring to go.
An interesting thing about camping with a group is seeing how each person adapts to the environment, especially when that environment has no water and the weather can vary by 70 degrees in a day. If one person has a great idea, the others will probably use it the next time. (We learned a couple years ago from someone that it was just as easy to pack an espresso maker as it was drip coffee maker. Man, that's a nice lesson at 6am.)
Which brings me to the Core 77 1 Hour Design Challenge. Industrial Designers are given an hour (or so) to take on a design challenge and post their work.
"Can you design a better bike lock in one hour or less? Push aside that looming deadline and pick up your Sharpies….its 1HDC time again! What can you bring to the table to prevent [the stolen] Huffy Heartache?"
Right before Spring is another, fifth season: The Season of Creative Contests.
I'm not kidding (did you think I would?), AIGA and CommunicationArts are opening the floodgates for contestants for their Illustration, Design, and Photography competitions.
Starting with AIGA's 365 Design competition:
Work in all media that has been designed, produced and used in the marketplace between January 1 and December 31, 2007. (The contest) represents the best work across all disciplines of communication design and strategy and "50 Books/50 Covers" represents the 50 best book covers and 50 best book designs for the given year, both chosen by a jury of industry peers.
The contest includes: Brand and identity systems, Corporate communications design, Package design, Editorial design and illustration, Typographic design, Promotional design and advertising, Experience design, Entertainment design, and Information design.
Deadline is March 7th. Entry fees are $35 for members, $55 for nonmembers, per individual entry.
49th Annual Communication Arts Illustration Competition
Any Illustration first printed or produced between March 14, 2007 and March 11, 2008 is eligible. Selected by a nationally representative jury of distinguished designers, art directors and illustrators, the winning entries will be published in the July 2008 Illustration Annual. Over 70,000 copies of the Illustration Annual will be distributed worldwide, assuring important exposure to the creators of this outstanding work. As a service to art directors, designers and art buyers, a comprehensive index will carry addresses and telephone numbers of the illustrators represented.
Categories include: Advertising, Books, Editorial, For Sale, Institutional, Motion/Animation, Self-Promotion, and Unpublished.
Deadline is March 11th. Entry fees are $30 for a single entry, $60 for a series.
49th Annual Communication Arts Photography Competition
Any photograph first printed or produced between March 14, 2007 and March 11, 2008 is eligible. Selected by a nationally representative jury of distinguished designers, art directors and photographers, the winning entries will be published in the August 2008 Photography Annual. Over 70,000 copies of the Photography Annual will be distributed worldwide, assuring important exposure to the creators of this outstanding work. As a service to art directors, designers and art buyers, a comprehensive index will carry addresses and telephone numbers of the photographers represented.
Categories also include: Advertising, Books, Editorial, For Sale, Institutional, Motion/Animation, Self-Promotion, and Unpublished.
Another one from the "I just like it, 'cause it's cool" files: Y Water.
Yes it's Organic with a capital "O". And "nutrient rich" (which I'm on the fence about since it's got sugar in it.) And low calorie.. feh.
It's the bottle that's to love.
Y Water founder, Thomas Arndt, teamed with San Francisco-based design firm, fuseproject, to come up with the new product and brand concept. Each bottle can be linked with other bottles by way of YKnots, a connector attached to each Y Water bottle.
The product isn't even hitting Whole Foods shelves until mid year, but they're already making their rounds in Business Week Magazine and Eastman Innovation Lab's site (the bottle itself is made from Eastman's Eastar copolyester).
I think the hefty price tag of $1.69 each might be a bit of a deal breaker for many parents out there.
But maybe not our kids.
GenY indeed.
(Bottom image courtesy of Eastman Innovation Lab.)
They quote Mark Constantine, the brand's chief executive, commenting on the recent sale of Burt's Bees to Clorox: "You couldn't have a more dramatic difference in image from a chemical bleach company and a natural cosmetics company based on honey and bees."
They also point out other "natural" brands who have sold out in recent years, among them, Bare Escentuals and UK's Body Shop (to L'Oreal).
Of course, I'm just hitting the tip of the iceberg here, but I think that's the point: Now that you know Clorox owns Burt's Bees, will it affect whether you buy the product or not?
There are, I'm sure, myriad reasons that sale happened (outlined in the NY Times article), but does that change your perception when you actually choose which brand to buy? What if Clorox told you they'd stick by the original mission of the Burt's Bees company? (Their site states: "It's a great opportunity to help us better deliver against our mission of making truly natural personal products available to everyone, everywhere.")
Yes, it takes a lots and lots of money to expand a brand globally, but I'm not sure consumers who consider themselves "ethical" buyers really care how big their shampoo company gets.
But, then again, does a company like Estee Lauder really need them when they can turn a brand like Aveda into a global powerhouse?
We've been hosting (with the AMA) quite a few Webcasts for Marketing folks.
And while they've been extremely popular, we've yet to have one exclusively for Creatives.
Until today, my friend.
Well, until February 7th.
That's when Aquent and Aquent Graphics Institute will present 8 "Need to Know" Technology Trends for Creative Managers.
AGI co-founders, Christopher and Jennifer Smith, who have collectively authored more than 20 best-selling Adobe-related books:
"will make sure that you know the eight technology trends impacting creative departments for 2008--and why they're important to your team's success. New technologies designed to help creative departments keep consistent messages across multiple mediums, create more engaging interactive content, upgrade their Web design, improve the approval process, build effective workflows, manage assets, and free up resources. "
(Weird, because I was guessing the 8 tech trends helping creatives would be: better coffeemakers, stress-relieving squeezy balls, sharper pencils, Mighty Mice, moisture wicking socks, GPS-enabled job jackets, better anti-depressants, and the new Sia CD. Which is probably why I'm not hosting the Webcast myself.)
Did I mention it's free, Free, FREE?
Consider it our incredibly creative Valentine's Day gift to you.
That's not, as you may very well suspect, another of my misspellings.
The New York Times and AIGA National want you to take your camera into your polling place and record what you see.
William Drenttel of Design Observer initiated the Polling Place Photo Project in 2006, which is a "nationwide experiment in citizen journalism that encourages voters to capture, post and share photographs of this year's primaries, caucuses and general election."
Plus, if you bring a really powerful zoom lens, a way to get some early voting returns to the press.
Each photo carries with it some information about the polling place itself, such as type of polling place, ballot type, number of people in line, etc. (They're also interested if you have any feedback of what worked and what could be improved.)
Because, as you may well know, there are times when you read an article by someone smarter than you and you end up thinking, "Man have I been passing a lot of bad information around."
So it comes as no surprise that just days after I applauded Apple on the beauty of their iMac that I'd see this article in Gizmodo exclaiming that many Apple products spearheaded by Designer Jonathan Ive are incredibly similar to Dieter Rams' designs for Braun during the 1950s and 60s.
(If you are dying to see something eerie, check out the similarity of the Braun T3 pocket radio and Apple first generation iPod.)
Before we all shout "stealers!", the author of the article is quick to point out "in a world where industrial design and art is constantly being recycled into new work, I just see Apple's products as a great evolution to classic concepts. Now, as I look at Rams' work I can't help but to wonder: which of these old Braun designs will Apple revive next?"
Which makes me feel much better about stealing his article for use here.
Social Bookmarks
_300DPI-2.jpg)
