We’ve made a decision to retire this blog. It’s been a great experience to post and share, and all of us at Larsen thank you for your readership.
If you’d like to stay current on our work — and our point of view — please check out our inSights eNewsletter. You’ll find articles on marketing, branding, naming, design, packaging, creativity, and more.
All the best…
Permanent link to this post (66 words, estimated 16 secs reading time)
When you look into it, it is a bit shocking. Or at least it was to me. Here is something to consider when you reach for a bottle of water.
What is the real cost? — numbers based on 2006 information
+ PRODUCING BOTTLES (approximately 17 million barrels of oil used + 2.5 tons of CO2 produced)
+ WATER (it takes 3 liters of water to produce 1 liter of bottled water)
+ TRANSPORTATION (shipping empty and full by truck, boat, plane, train)
+ COOLING (store and home)
+ BOTTLE RECOVERY (Recycled: less than 25%, sent to Landfills/dumps: an estimated 75% , or 6.5 billion+ lbs. per year)
Imagine cruising to work in this 1967 Mustang convertible. That’s what Larsen’s new director of business development, Jim Madson, does. "It has a 289 V8 with a single-barrel carburetor, duel exhaust, and in-dash factory air," says Jim. "It’s a three-speed automatic with factory console wire-wheel covers, hood scoops with blinkers, and a luggage rack — and it's a totally rust-free survivor.”
Jim says Al Hagen from Yesterday’s Autos calls it “one of the best examples of a 1967 Mustang he has ever seen.”
Jim’s other car?
National Punctuation Day is four months away, but there are “signs” everywhere that we should celebrate this unique learning opportunity more often than once a year. How about once a week?
Unlike misspelled words, which we usually recognize immediately, incorrect punctuation often results in a double take. You know something’s wrong, but it can take a moment to figure out what it is. Punctuation problems often result in a misplaced emphasis that can turn a serious warning into an unintended joke. In the example here, from The “Blog” of “Unnecesarry” Quotation Marks, the apostrophes used as quotation marks force the reader to question the sincerity of the store’s dedication to both crime prevention and public safety. It works if the sign were meant to be sarcastic or snarky, but that seems unlikely.
Or shall I say, staying home to staycation?
Memorial Day weekend is here, and if you’re not at the lake or at the shore or in the south of France, you could check out the Urban Dictionary (be forewarned, some entries are rough) for slang to describe whatever it is you’re doing this holiday weekend. Like multislacking.
Another fun, decidedly more educated jaunt is a trip through Merriam-Webster's Open Dictionary.
For unabashed word lovers worldwide, both offer a fabulous, fuel-free, vocation vacation.
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With the NBA playoffs in full swing, it seems fitting to honor one of my favorite athlete-wordsmiths: Darryl Dawkins, aka, "Sir Slam," "Double D," and "Chocolate Thunder." (All self-appointed nicknames.)
Dawkins could dazzle with a dunk and a description of it. Here are his word pictures for his powerful slams:
"The Rim Wrecker"
"The Go-Rilla"
"The Look-Out-Below"
"The In-Your-Face Disgrace"
This is my favorite:
“The No-Playin’, Get-Out-of-the-Wayin’, Backboard-Swayin’ Game-Delayin’ Dunk.”
I’m not keeping score, but that’s four rhyming adjectival compounds all bearing down on one simple noun: “dunk.”
Yes, there is a purpose for snail mail: To use the new Eames stamps, coming on June 17. Design blogs are abuzz about this new issue of 16 stamps commemorating designers Charles and Ray Eames and highlighting, among other iconic images, their molded plywood lounge chair, stacking side chairs, house of cards children’s game, and colorful “hang-it-all.” So if you can’t afford the coveted Eames lounge chair and ottoman — starting at $3,599 — you can gaze at a 41 cent stamp of the same.
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That’s the tagline from the YouTube trailer for The Adventures of Johnny Bunko, the first business book written in manga, the Japanese comic format. Johnny Bunko is the creation of bestselling author Dan Pink and manga artist Rob Ten Pas, and it features six bite-sized career lessons, shown on the official Johnny Bunko chopsticks above.
You can read this book in less time than it takes to enjoy takeout, and once you finish, you’ll never think of chopsticks — or your career — in the same way. Johnny Bunko is a strange, but satisfying meal in itself: career truisms, Japanese comics, spreadsheets, shoe marketing — all mixed in with the right-brain reveries of Pink. I found it a delicious read, as you'll see in this post.
Sure, you recycle. You drive a fuel-efficient car. You even have a compost heap in the back yard. Isn’t that enough? Not by a long shot. You could be drinking solar roast coffee in the morning. Your children could be playing with eco-friendly toys. And your dog? Surely you dress Muffins in organic pet armor. Eh, well, maybe not.
The point is, if you really care about the environment, and you have oodles of excess cash and/or time on your hands, you can take your commitment to a greener earth to the next level.
This post was originally intended to highlight a wonderful thing that happened in the "As Is" department in our local IKEA. It started 3 years ago, when I purchased my first real bed, a HOPEN. After 3 hours of assembly, I realized that my kit was short 1 single bed slat. It wasn't a structurally-integral piece, but it was something that irked me. So every time I went to IKEA I would stop by the "As-Is" desk and ask if they had any extras lying around. Once, an IKEA employee - we'll call her Apathetic Anna - told me what I SHOULD have done when I noticed a slat was missing. Anna said I should have disassembled the whole bed, then repacked the boxes and loaded them in my car, driven them back to IKEA, sat in the returns line for awhile, then picked up a new bed and hoped for the best that this time all the pieces would be included and intact.
This is IKEA problem-solving.
It’s simple, memorable, and relevant. It’s the distinctive new logo for the We Campaign, a project of The Alliance for Climate Protection — a nonprofit, nonpartisan effort founded by Al Gore. The logo appears, at first, to be just one word: “we,” but flip the letter “w” upside down, and it becomes “me.” This clever we/me balance perfectly captures the think globally/act locally philosophy that’s at the heart of wecansolveit.org, the campaign website.
Baby Boomers, the “Me” generation, Yuppies, Guppies, Gen-(pick your letter), meet your latest incarnation: Scuppies (Socially-Conscious Upwardly-mobile Person). Trendhunter.com identifies Scuppies as the upwardly mobile who are hypersensitive to environmental concerns. They recycle with a passion, bike to work, and carry credit cards that donate a percentage of payments to green organizations. The name might sound like a gang of young canines, but smart marketers will want to take note of the trend in their future projects.
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Look at all these sponsors. Head spinning yet? This overwhelming display of 25 silver sponsors greeted me recently in an email promoting Forrester’s Marketing Forum 2008: Marketing’s New Imperative for Success: Engagement.
The number of sponsors (and these are just the silver, there are platinum and gold) and the long title of the event (not one, but two colons) caused me to, well, disengage.
These are great companies sponsoring a great event with great speakers, but the email promotion is not-so-great. It may take the award for the most cluttered email I’ve received this year. So many fonts and colors and type sizes and bullets and icons and links and sponsors…
When is something so bad it’s good? Some things, over time, become valued because they are so unintentionally, but unmistakably, awful. Movies, furniture, clothing…inventions?
Behold the useless invention. The alarm fork. The instant facelift. The eye protectors for chickens. Toss these in the trash? Start all over again? Nonsense. You may have created an enduring work of art. You may have a chindogu.
If your Japanese is a little rusty, chindogu is a word describing the art of the useless idea. Chindogu has been popular in Japan since the late 1980s, and has gained some traction in the United States, (there’s a Chindogu Society America), but unless you’re a frustrated inventor, don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of it.
I read an interesting article on The New York Times this morning that pretty much gave me an "Aha!" moment.
I have been dealing with migraines since my junior year of high school, when in the middle of my physics class I began to lose my vision in the periphery, and freaked out. I got up unexcused and wandered down the hallway until a friend from class walked me to the nurse's office. I can't explain how frightening it was. The up-side to migraines, and I'll take any up-side, is that right before the blinding headache, I get what I can only call a psychadelic show of spiraling fractals that close slowly like curtains across my vision. Lucky me eh? I then remember in high school art class relentlessly drawing one pattern after another, using pattern to create recognizable images, and I have not made the connection to my fondness for drawing organic, sprawling, spiraling patterns until this morning.
I'm saddened to see this on the Atlanta Journal Constitution's website:
"That library, to my way of thinking, was an abortion the day it was dedicated," Fulton County Commissioner Tom Lowe said. "I am a lover of art. I can even stand abstract art. But God darn, who in the world would build something like that? There ain't no damn artistic value to that library."
If you’re planning to participate in this year’s presidential election (and I hope you are) you might want to spiff up a bit before you go to your polling place. AIGA, the professional association of design, and the New York Times have teamed up to document the 2008 presidential election process throughout America.
The Polling Place Photo Project (PPPP) is a first-of-its-kind endeavor to capture the energy and complexity of the voting process through camera lenses. Voters are being encouraged to take cameras to their polling places and document the process as it unfolds, then submit their photos to a URL created for the project.
A unique promotional product page for the Dutch department store, HEMA. Although you can not link to the actual consumer site to shop, it's a whimsical, but effective idea for seasonal retail web marketing. Take a look and wait to see what happens.
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I sometimes glance at this Edward Ruscha painting as I write. It’s titled “So,” and it keeps me honest. It’s a word I always need to remember as I write blog posts, websites, articles, marketing literature, ads, emails….
So?
(Yes, I added the question mark.)
I think of my reader — a customer, a client, a colleague, a prospect, an influencer — saying, perhaps even a bit rudely, SO…? And your point is?
Let’s face it: Readers are bright, impatient, and frequently not paying attention. They’re searching for specific information to inform them, intrigue them, involve them, influence them.
I took a moment the other day to stand on my deck and watch two gray squirrels chase each other around a giant oak in my backyard. They ran in fits and starts, stopping for a split second now and then to flick their tails before taking up the chase again. Their ability to follow each other closely at hyper speed on a vertical surface amazes me in the same way flocks of birds do when hundreds swoop and turn in uniform precision.
The votes have been tabulated and the winner is: w00t. Yes, w00t was chosen by thousands of voters at Merriam-Webster Online as the 2007 Word of the Year. w00t the heck does w00t mean? Good question. Let’s have the Merriam-Webster people explain it:
“This year's winning word first became popular in competitive online gaming forums as part of what is known as l33t ("leet," or "elite") speak — an esoteric computer hacker language in which numbers and symbols are put together to look like letters. Although the double "o" in the word is usually represented by double zeroes, the exclamation is also known to be an acronym for "we owned the other team" — again stemming from the gaming community.”
There it is: The unmistakable New Yorker typeface on a bag of Sara Lee Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread. What’s your opinion? Is it wise to use the famed New Yorker font on anything but The New Yorker? Join the discussion over at MarketingProfs DailyFix: White Bread and The New Yorker: Bread-Brand Confusion?
Design Director Peter de Sibour says there is a difference between The New Yorker masthead, which is, of course, proprietary and the New Yorker font which is based on the original rendering of that famed masthead. (See, for example, the “E.”) Still, to the undiscerning consumer, the fonts are essentially identical. The point is this: as you select a typeface, a color, or any design element for your brand, be aware of its legacy. No brand exists in a vacuum.
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This is typically the time of year that I start to worry about when I'm going to start my holiday shopping. It's three weeks until gift-giving-zero-hour and I've barely put any thought into what I'm going to be getting my loved ones. Although I take solace in the fact that they won't be feeling the same anxiety over what to get me with Core77's handy list of 77 Design Gifts Under $77. I know it's always better to give than receive, so I'd like to take this opportunity to give you an idea of what I'd like to receive. Thanks. No need to wrap it, 'as-is' is fine.
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I have often entertained the idea that everything can be represented visually. Ideas and emotions represented visually as art, and information as mathematics. With graphic design fitting somewhere in the middle of this very wide gulf.
When I say "everything can be represented visually" it may not sound like too big of deal, but it should be noted that by "everything" I mean everything. Every thought, emotion, chemical interaction, and experience. Everything. At the scientific end of the spectrum the search for how to explain our universe and depict it visually has been going on for years. Unified field theories such as Grand Unification Theory (GUT), and the Theory Of Everything (TOE) have been a Holy Grail for the mathematical and scientific community for the past few decades, with none proving scientifically satisfactory. These theories would explain all of the fundamental interactions of nature. From the smallest particles to the movement of the galaxy. Pretty cool stuff.
I get inspired when I read about ideas or concepts that completely break through the wall that separates the expected from the insanely creative. An annual report is an annual report is an annual report. Right? CEO's letter? Check. Yearly business overview? Check. Financials? Check. Oven preheated to 100 degrees? Huh?
Praising the work of other creative agencies can be a bit dicey, but Bruketa & Zinić, a Croatian agency, deserves kudos from everyone in our industry. Brought to my attention by boingboing.net, these creative Croations have designed an annual report for a food company that you must bake to read. One hundred degrees Celsius for 25 minutes. Food appears on plates. Recipes fill once blank pages. It's ingenious.
So who’s the proofreader on this banner ad?
Did the shark, um, snap up the hyphen?
You’ve probably seen this attention-grabbing Live Search ad in your Web travels. Did you click on it? I did. And every entry on the first page of the Live Search results displays the correctly hyphenated adjectival compound: “shark-infested beaches.”
Forbestraveler.com, MSBNC.com, NEWS.com.au…. All of them understand that an adjectival compound preceding a noun should be hyphenated.
At Forbes Traveler, the correctly hyphenated headline is “10 Shark-Infested Beaches.”
Here is a short excerpt from an interview of Paul Rand conducted by Steven Heller in 1994. It gives a good taste of what the whole 90+ minute interview is like. You can find more of them on YouTube here. I'm working on putting together the full version, which I'm sure will make its way online soon enough.
Special thanks to John DuFresne at The College of Visual Arts for supplying the footage.
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To keep up with the crazy vocabularies of those sitting around me, I've become an avid user of word widgets and bookmarks on my desktop at work. Widgets save time and paper cuts, but are they fun? No, that is incorrect. They are not 'fun.' You type in the word - it gives you a definition and synonyms (yawn).
But, I recently discovered a couple of sites that are entertaining and useful - they allow you to connect two completely separate words in a logical way (Lexical FreeNet), or demonstrate relationships through visual mapping (Visual Thesaurus). For those who think visually and want to expand their vocabulary - these are great tools.
