This is porn. I should know, I’ve seen some porn in my time, and this is definitely porn. Lovely lovely lovely.
Archive for the 'design' Category
This time: Quantum Of Solace. Quite what’s wrong with a black / green shell I don’t know.
‘The great folks at Getty Images and Flickr are joining forces to create a collection of royalty free, rights ready and rights managed photographs. This announcement is just the first step and there’s a lot to do before we launch. We’ve created a FAQ to address what we think will be the initial questions. ‘
Yes, as I said you should.
Oh and while we’re on the subject: Intel. If you had done Work / Play like I had said you should have three years ago, it would have been better than what you have ended up with now. There.
Found a very quick way to structure a presentation last night. Scribble all your notes on a piece of paper, then just draw lines around the bits that contribute to a single slide. Obvious, but never done it before and it worked well, so will do it again. That is all.
OK so the topic of whether or not to move away from micro-sites is a perennial one, and I’ve just been asked to comment on the topic, so here you go. They are often viewed as being expensive, a pain to manage, transient and sometimes a waste of money. To an extent these points can be true, however micro-sites still have their place and value.
Anonymity
Building buzz around something can require a degree of anonymity. Take the Film and TV industries for example. Films and TV shows are frequently launched with extended teaser campaigns, sometimes along with a complex ‘game’ to reinforce the mystery or history surrounding the concept. The TV Series Lost launched with a plethora of web sites, OceanicAir, The DHARAMA Initiative, The Hanso Foundation as well as the official web site hosted on ABC.com. The point is, placing all these websites on ABC.com would have watered down the experience. Secondly, placing these ‘out there’ on the Internet can even re-inforce the anonymity. If the site is entirely unbranded, one way to find out if it ‘belongs to anyone’ is to do a simple ‘Who Is’ look-up of the domain name and hey presto you have to owner… ABC.com. But if the site is hosted on a URL who’s DNS entry is registered anonymously, the mystery can be retained. This you cant do if it’s sat on the parent companies web server.
Unconstrained Creativity
Agree with this or not, micro-sites hosted outside the confines of a core web site can allow for greater freedom of expression of the brand. Why? Simple, most major web sites these days are hosted of templated content management systems. Frequently, these don’t offer blank canvas that is required to deliver a highly interactive, immersive experience. Yes, this can be done to a degree within a templated site, but not to the same degree as outside. There is an argument to say that the kind of experience as offered via micro-sites should be constrained within a core or master site, but more often than not the freedom simply isn’t there.
Segment Specific
Campaigns, of which micro-sites are generally a manifestation, tend to be targeted at very specific customer segments. Engaging with these segments can be far easier, and less tonally awkward, outside the confines of a ‘master branded’ web site. Even though a brand may have a large teen audience for example, the master brand as reflected on the core web site, may not talk to the audience on their ground. A micro-site therefore may be the best place to do this, where the tone can be altered, without making the bran look like your Dad at a rave.
Another approach, as best demonstrated by Nike, is to make your entire ‘web site’ a collection of what are essentially micro sites: Nike Golf, Football, Nike+, Woman, NikeLab and so on. The master site simply becomes a pointer to a series of highly segment specific, targeted product sites. And lets face it, very few people say Nike.com is a bad thing…
Currently I’m faced with the challenge of answering the questions ‘What is a Brand’ and ‘What what will Branding be?’ both big questions. Branding has moved on a lot in the last ten years as a result of ‘digital’ (though I am fed up with that term so for a change may start using the Welsh: Digidol). Defining what actually constitutes a Brand these days is quite difficult: do for example the manifestations of a ‘Brand’ found online that are not originated by the Brand itself, but by it’s customers or community, actually count as part of the Master Brand or overall Identity? Something we need to answer. Initially I’d say yes, the challenge there is how the Brand influences this.
Anyway, a post on Forrester blogs, slightly un-relatedly, talks about how ‘digital thinking’ should span into other areas of corporate communication such as media relations and investor relations. Though I’m slightly stumped by the overall tone of the article which implies that digital or interactive thinking in these areas would be new. Uh, what do you think we’ve been doing for the last ten years Sherlock, pretty banners and ‘wizzy micro sites’? Anyway, back to Brands and Branding…
I guess the point is that, and sorry to state the obvious, that digital is now so critically important in practically every aspect of doing business and communications, that the art of Branding needs to move bloody quickly to re-define what we mean by ‘a Brand’, and how we articulate it across these channels. This is especially critical as to a large degree the deliverables of Branding exercises are still largely focussed on the non digital, in a visual rather than behavioral way. Branding agencies need to re define their deliverables away from what a Brand looks like, and spend a greater time focusing on how the brand behaves, the challenge with that, is how we articulate to our clients what behaviour actually means.
The Partners live in a really lovely building at the end of Greenhill Rents just off Cowcross Street in Farringdon, London. In their reception they have lots of awards, or more specifically Pencils including a black one. Awards are something they have lots off, in fact I think, hundreds, which for a company of less than 50 people is pretty damn inspiring. The trouble is though, that to me they are a challenge. None of them are so far, I think, for work that is entirely Digital. I have a lot to live up to. Gulp.
Potentially nice wire framing / sketching tool that runs off Mozilla. Incredibly limited functionality at the moment but promising. Huge way to go though before it’s at a point where you could actually use it to do work.
Done by Sapient London and really rather quite good.
I mean seriously…. who the hell writes “Memo’s” these days. Though is does make me feel like I’m working in Sterling Cooper which is a bonus I guess.
I’ve never actually had to use Notes before, apart from trying how to work out how to do web sites using Lotus Domino back in the day. The great thing about Notes is that it really does live up to it’s reputation, whenever it comes up in conversation people wince, groan and swear. Well I can confirm the rumours are indeed true, it really is fucking awful. Sigh.
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