Before you go in circles trying to get those spirals just right…
go take a look at Logo Design by Pixellogo� – All Logo Designs.
I’m not proposing that you should spend $50 or whatever to buy a stock logo.
What I hope you’ll see is that all a logo needs is to be GOOD ENOUGH (I know, I’m the guy who says good enough is a curse). Why is it okay to have a non-wonderful logo? Because the logo is just a placeholder. It gains value AFTER it hits the world, because people associate things with it.
Imagine a classroom in 1912 with kids named Elvis, Ronald, Margaret, Donald and Madonna in it. You wouldn’t know who to make fun of first. It seems as though the abstract quality of a name or a logo (both blank slates) is not as important as what you do with it.
This advice doesn’t hold for non-abstract names or images, naturally. But those are worth less, in my humble opinion.
All that said, the logo for my secret summer project is truly awesome. Thanks, Aaron, for the inspired work. (I’ll post the logo in early August, prolonging the tension as long as possible.)
July 15, 2005
Barry Schwartz pointed out to me today that I shouldn’t talk about side effects.
Marketers who are inauthentic and shortsighted hide the side effects of their products from purchasers. This fraudulent behavior inevitably comes back to haunt.
But Barry points out that these aren’t side effects. There’s only effects. When you make something or sell somthing, it affects the world around it. Some of those effects are things you want. The others, the negative ones, are unintended, but they are still real.
These bad effects are just as important as the good ones. And smart marketers are honest about them.
July 14, 2005
That’s how long it took after the invention of basketball for someone to realize that they should cut a hole in the bottom of the peach baskets.
Before that, you had to stop the game and get a ladder and get the ball out of the basket.
I wonder how long it will take for faucets in the UK to be able to generate warm (not cold or hot) water?
Any sinks where you work?
Before a book gets published by a mainstream publisher, your editor will send it to a copyeditor. His job is to go through the manuscript and highlight errors in grammar, consistency and spelling.
I’ve worked with quite a few copyeditors in my time, and it’s interesting to note how often they seem to get very angry.
Let’s say you’ve written a 300 page book on packaged goods, and 32 times in the manuscript you’ve spelled "Procter & Gamble" as "Proctor and Gamble." The computer-friendly thing to do is leave a note at the front that says, "please do a global search and replace and fix it". Instead, copyeditor convention requires that each one be marked.
The first few marks are normal. But then, after five or six or seven corrections, the ink gets a little darker. It’s almost as though the copyeditor is saying, "I’ve already corrected this SIX TIMES. WHY AREN’T YOU LISTENING??!" By the end of the manuscript, the copyeditor’s monologue has gone on so long, the anger has turned into rage.
With that in mind, I show you two pictures.
Here’s the sign on a pub in Oxford. I imagine that at first there was a little sign that said, "no cards." But a few people tried to pay with cards anyway, so the sign got bigger. And then one or two people tried to pay with cards anyway. Eventually, it must have led to this.
Do you really think that yelling at his prospects is helping his business?
It’s not my fault that the 5,000 people before me asked if they could use a credit card. Don’t yell at me. Yell at them. Of course, they’re not here!
Has the number of people asking to use a credit card gone down since the owner added AT ALL?
If your goal is to attract and acquire new customers, yelling appears to be a silly strategy.
Compare this to a sign at the beautiful Museum of Natural History just down the street.
I work really hard at my powerpoints, but there’s a new champ.
I just saw Ze Frank (Link: ze’s page) at TED. He pointed to New FAA National Wildlife/Bird Strike Database ON-LINE. Make sure you check out the Badger listings.
If you ever get a chance, find him. Beautiful.
July 13, 2005
So, the #1 cause of death among teenagers in the developed world is the car.
You can get hit by a car, but you're more likely to die driving a car or being a passenger in a car driven by a friend. Many boomers have teenagers or are about to. And boomers, as we know, intend to live forever, expect to have their families live forever, and are often happy to pay to ensure that this actually happens.
So, here's what we need: A car for teenagers.
It is, after all, a matter of life and death.
A car for teenagers is very different than a car for everyone else. The biggest reason is that a car for teenagers is rarely purchased by a teenager, so a third party (probably the parent) has a lot of leverage over what the car actually does.
So, what does a parent want?
Low powered
Cheap
Great gas mileage (more cheap)
And a teenager?
Funky looking
Allows easy attachment/customization of side panels
Not embarrassing!
Requires breathalyzer test to start
Easy to set, hard to hack speed limiter
Constant GPS reporting via wimax or cellphone, allowing the owner of the car to see where it is
Location lock out, making it easy for the owner to set the range of the vehicle or the roads traveled
[bonus added later: locks out texting or cell phone calling when the car is moving]
All this technology is easy to sync by computer or phone
Lots of airbags
ID card key making it easy to charge the driver per use, treat different drivers differently, including usage time.
Obviously, this goes against everything that the US-Marlboro-Man-wild-west-transport-equals-freedom-equals-macho-equals-personal-responsibility meme that is at the heart of the US car market. So what? There are already plenty of cars that fit right into that mental model. Like a 1964.5 Mustang with original pony interior. Fine! If a 17 year old wants to buy one of those, she can.
But it's easy to imagine, isn't it, that boomers would buy 50,000 of these $20,000 cars every year? That's a billion dollars a year! So why don't we have one yet? I think it's because the worldview of Detroit and the rest of the car industry is very much about incremental improvement of technology combined with surface styling innovation, not about reinventing what people might discover that they very much want.
So, if you know someone in the car business, tell them I'm ready to order one in 2011. In purple.
Steven Levitt spoke at TED today. He told the story of the car seats, and it’s worth a quick rehash.
Turns out that car seats for kids over 2 are no more effective than seat belts. The data is unequivocal on this. (see a quick clip at Freakonomics)
So if it’s so clear, and if it means that Americans are wasting $300 million a year on car seats, what’s going on?
Why is it that in New York State it’s a crime to put a six year old in the backseat of your car with just a seatbelt? A crime!
Why is it that when I passed a motorist strapping his four year old into the back of his BMW in London yesterday, I almost stopped and yelled at him? Or at least gently pointed out the safety problem?
It goes to stories. It feels like you’re doing something smart and thoughtful and caring for your child. The effort gives the parent peace of mind and joy. The government gets to pass a law that seems cheap and caring. Everyone conspires to do the wasteful thing because of the story it allows us to tell ourselves.
July 12, 2005
About twenty years ago, I met a guy named Byron Preiss. I was 24 and just starting out at Spinnaker Software and he was the supremely talented, very smart packager that my boss had just purchased several million dollars worth of software from.
Turns out that Byron was only seven years older than me.
We worked closely together for two years, arguing nearly every day about the products we ended up creating together. We worked with Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury and artists and writers and programmers. In 1985, it was a very new deal to be a packager of content, to work with brands and carve out new rights, to imagine new forms of media. Byron was doing all of those things.
One day, Byron said to me, "You should go out on your own. I’ll help you. I’ll introduce you to people." Byron not only demonstrated to me that the new media enabled the individual to make stuff, but he gave me permission to try.
Byron Preiss, 52, Digital Publishing Pioneer, Dies – New York Times.
From the ninth of July, a review of a weird conceptual restaurant called Chair,
"There are plenty of decent 30 pound a head restaurants in London. The trouble is that most of them charge 60 pounds a head to eat there. … When you leave a restaurant chatting mostly about how nobody could be bothered… you’re going to have to need a pretty good reason to eat there again.
What do you you suppose that could be? That you found yourself hungry in Notting Hill and didn’t have the energy to walk 20 yards to any of the dozens of other restaurants in the vicinity?
There may be nothing particularly disastrous about Chair, but you wonder what the point of it is."
July 10, 2005
Apparently, the folks who run one of the big airports in Europe became famous because of a clever idea they installed in the airport men’s room (click on picture for details… this is a family friendly blog).
Apparently, the tiny silk screened image dramatically increases the quality of aim and thus the cleanliness of the bathroom.
What amazed me is that I saw this very same urinal in three or four different restaurants and public places over just three days in Amsterdam.
What is it that makes this sort of innovation feel safe?
