We're looking for stopping power...

This is so good.



Anyone with experience in the agency world will relate to this. Brilliant!

McMarketing 2.0

You likely know David Armano's exemplary blog 'Logic + Emotion', which is most definitely a go-to site for business and user interface design and all things 2.0.

The cowboy-hatted one grates my nerves a little sometimes, mainly due to his inability to take off his cowboy hat. I know, however, that the mark of a successful brand is often the nausea due to over-exposure I feel when I think of that hat, so go David.

In any case, the graphic above is a reminder that we need to be thoughtful and insightful in generating marketing programs in the digital space, and not just throw some buzzwords in a happy meal bag.

Running the Numbers...

Chris Jordan is a Seattle-based lawyer-cum-photographer whose latest series is definitely worth checking out.

Translating real data about consumption of objects and resources into oversized, beautiful photographs really conveys the massive quantity of waste we produce, without feeling pushy or pedantic. The messaging is simple, but the impact is strong.

Check em!


Toothpicks :: Depicts 8 million toothpicks, equal to the number of trees harvested in the US every month to make the paper for mail order catalogs.


Cell Phones :: Depicts 426,000 cell phones, equal to the number of cell phones retired in the US every day.


Prison Uniforms. :: Depicts 2.3 million folded prison uniforms, equal to the number of Americans incarcerated in 2005.

All in all a great exhibit. Check the touring schedule on his site.

Index Card Magic!

Jessica Hagy is a writer out of Columbus, Ohio, who basically blew my mind with her amazing Venn diagramed social critiques, which she does daily on her indexed blog.

I think it's probably better to let the images speak for themselves, so with no further ado...









This last one is of such epic mind-bending proportions that I pretty much started a "Marry Me Jessica Hagy" campaign the moment I read it.

Canada is the new Estonia...

So you know how people are always saying that beef is the new chicken, white bras are the new tank tops and yeast infections are the new irritable bowel syndrome?

Yup, it's an annoying little phrasing that is so overused it's pretty much meaningless, but which we're all guilty of using once or twice.

You've got to love Leisure Art's contribution to The Diagram magazine, where they mapped every occurance of the phrase in various sources over the course of 2005. The resulting diagram is funny, nostalgic, and a good illustration of how an idiom reaches critical mass and becomes meaningless (see 'bling' circa 2003).


Check the full diagram here

My personal favourites? Space travel is the new HIV; cheese is the new morphine; and thug shooting is the new lovemaking.

Clearly.

Jonathan Harris - no, the other one.

Yeah no, you mean the actor from Lost in Space? With the really rubbery skin, right? Yeah, the one with the same birthday as me. No, that's not who I'm talking about.

I'm talking about the other Jonathan Harris, groundbreaking media artist. I've seen projects of his so many times, but never looked into their origin. Bad, bad Beckstar.

You could say his work tries to document and experiment with human experience using the internet. You could call him the world's best data artist. Or you could just check out his stuff:


10x10 uses Reuters, BBC and the NYTimes to create an unregulated snapshot into images and words that are making headlines. As Harris explains:

With no human editors and no regulation, 10x10 is open and free, raw and fresh, and consequently a unique way of following world events. In 10x10, we respond instinctively to patterns in the grid, visual indicators of relevance. When we see a frequently repeated image, we know it’s important. When we see a picture of a movie star next to a picture of dead bodies, we understand the extremes that exist in our world. Scanning a grid of pictures can be more intuitive than reading headlines, for it lets the news come to life, and everything feels a bit less distant, a bit closer to heart, and maybe, if we're lucky, gives us pause to think.

We feel fine is an engine that basically harvests text and image from blog entries containing phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". Representing each as a tiny coloured ball, the site is a buzzing, living map of authentic human emotion.


More We feel fine. This is from an anorexic girl's blog.


More We feel fine.


WordCount is an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked and scaled in order of commonness and arranged side by side as a very long sentence (quoted from Harris' site). Star is number 1549, and the 666th most commonly used English word is Easy. A neat interface.


Some of his great information map work.


More of his great information map work.

I love that these moving and though-provoking works of art come from something completely mundane - collecting and representing sets of data. If I was half the interactive artist he is... I would be ready to retire.