unexpected nut

I poached this Hillman Curtis quote directly from SvN:

I once gave a talk called “Putting Your Heart into Design” at a design school in Connecticut, and one of the students asked me what advice I had for people who, just starting out, will no doubt be doing the same things all the time, just churning out banner ads — or like me, when I started at Macromedia years ago, building executive presentations over and over. “How do you put your heart into that?” he asked.

I told him about my first year at Macromedia, about the corporate presentations that consisted mainly of bullet points, pie graphs, and dull charts. I told him that I decided to focus on the exactitude of each design, and made each pixel as perfect as I could. I got deep into exploring the Swiss designer Josef Muller-Brockmann and grids. I focused on typography and consistency in design. And through all of the repetition I became aware of the power of restraint and simplicity. On the few occasions that I incorporated motion, I was always very conservative and moved elements in ways that reflected the theme of the presentation. They were not simply gratuitous.

I came to believe that even though a viewer might not be able to point to the screen and indicate exactly where an element had move two pixels from page to page in a presentation or Web site, he or she could sense it, and too many of those mistakes could leave the viewer with a feeling of imbalance. I explained all of this to the student. When I was finished he replied, “So, rather than just taking on jobs you can put your heart into, you should find a way to put your heart into everything you do.” Which was a wonderful way to put it.

From Curtis’ book Creating Short Films for the Web.

Here’s the Globe article and the site itself. The idea is they capture your email address through a sweepstakes offer and help you plan summer road trips that allow plenty of opportunity to stop for D&D iced coffee on the way. Something like that. I don’t have time to delve into the site right now but my first impression was that it looked a little busy and involved.

Makes me wonder about the high-end GPS units you can get these days with “places of interest” marked on the route. That would be a good partnership to go with a campaign like this.

Some interesting stuff going on here for Coke in Europe. I especially liked the intro, nav and transitions, but the main event was just sort of ok. Maybe I missed something by not having a camera and a microphone enabled.

This Ain’t No Disco is a blog that offers us a voyeuristic chance to peek at the interior design of other advertising agencies. It makes me want to run out to Home Depot and get some paint samples…

Gots to love the viral marketing. Stick is simple. Stick is wooden. Stick has a theme song and 11,000 friends. Check out this joint Nestle/Billabong marketing effort and add it to your Top Friends before you find yourself lonely and stickless.

The Glastonbury music fest in the UK is a long weekend of music, fun and mud (it’s held in a field). The telco company Orange sponsors this contest to win 20 pairs of tickets for the festival, and all you have to do is guess where in his field Derek the bull will be at 3pm every day. Yes, guess where a bull will be (he’s GPS enabled, of course, so there’s little room for argument). It’s so random, yet so cohesive for some bizarre reason. The voice over of the farmer adds a nice touch.

In a recent article on Turtorial Blog regarding handy code snippets for web designers, this trick caught my eye. As designers, we all want to style our clients provided (and sometimes hideous) photography to fit in with a site’s overall design - shadows, highlights, rounded corners, etc.. But when it comes time to hand off that PSD template, so that the client can make the same styled images on their own, those niceties quickly disappear. This PNG overlay trick solves that, allowing you to specify a frame that gets applied to images via CSS, allowing even the most inept content creator to maintain a consistent look. Check it.

Only 17 seconds long….
Ouch!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceNf-11-ddI

Remember Chevy’s previous, highly-publicized foray into consumer-generated marketing? Well, this time they’ve reigned it in a bit, with what appears to be better success. Instead of allowing users to shout their distaste for planet-smothering SUVs, Chevy has asked the nation to vote on their favorite SMALL car.

vote4chevrolet.com links to a portion of the site featuring vehicles from the NY 2007 auto show, and highlights three distinct concepts for the bowtie’s foray into the micro class - the Groove, the Trax and the Beat (the Groove enjoys a strong lead at 54%). Each are slightly different flavors of current Chevy design patters, and each has it’s own character. So far, as reported on boston.com, over 890,000 folks have voiced their opinion about which car they could see themselves parallel parking on Newbury St. with ease one busy Saturday.

A survey as consumer participation isn’t revolutionary. But Chevrolet showing such support and interest in the small-car realm is, and consumers are responding in kind. Sometimes simpler really is better, and the sweet spot of consumer participation in a brand can take many forms and still be successful. But is it too “little”, too late, with Toyota having finally eclipsed GM as the world’s largest selling auto manufacturer?