kungdesign’s posterous

Pantone is pleased to announce PANTONE 15-5519 Turquoise, an inviting, luminous hue, as the Color of the Year for 2010. Combining the serene qualities of blue and the invigorating aspects of green, Turquoise inspires thoughts of soothing, tropical waters and a comforting escape from the everyday troubles of the world, while at the same time restoring our sense of wellbeing.

They have set up a special web page to explain their selection. Well I am not sure it would have been my choice, it seems so 1975, but at least it is an optimistic message. For 2010 I would like to see some more green :-)

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We attended a panel discussion and lunch hosted by Monadnock Paper Mills, UPM Raflatac and Ben Franklin Press & Label Co. yesterday.

These three companies are working together and individually to provide green products and processes for wine labels.

 As designers our clients look to us to be thought leaders. We need to be current  on ideas and processes that provide green solutions. This particular discussion centered on wine labels and the wine industry, as it was in conjunction with the “Green Wine Summit” http://www.greenwinesummit.com. The idea’s and processes being presented are extendable to other industries and at the base of the discussion more than just processes that involve paper.

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With the release of Windows 7 there has much written and demonstrated about it's support for touch and multi touch screen interactivity.
Touch interfaces have really come to the forefront since the release of the iphone that utilizes it to great effect. Touch technologies are often heralded as the future of computing.

And on the surface (pun intended) this technology is very exciting and soon we will see multi touch applications that support 3D visualization and modeling. It has the potential of being a much more humanistic way of interacting with our computers

There does remain a number of hurdles to jump, ergonomics being one. In viewing several demonstrations of touch screen technology as applied to vertical screens the ergonomics are a killer. Yes its fine for your local ATM where you touch a few buttons. But trying to actually work with a touch sensitive screen is another thing, just try hold your hands up to your screen for even 30 seconds. It seems to me that we need to find a different method on interacting with the screen but still utilizing the multi touch capabilities. To incorporate the familiarity of keyboards and mice.

I came across this site http://10gui.com the work of R.Clayton Miller which I think does an admirable job of starting to solve some of these ergonomic issues. Also interesting is the way that he deals with the organization of information on the screen. This video really started me thinking.

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The American hobo developed a rich iconographic language to aid in their travels. Symbols that could warn of trouble or signal free food this pictographic language grew to a rich collection for the traveller on the go.
Some enterprising children in a neighborhood of Sacramento California have been honing their own language for years - to aid in the search for Halloween Candy. These symbols are left as chalk drawing at the bottom of driveways.(thanks to cockeyed.com)

See the galleries below for examples of their work

Here are some typical Hobo Icons followed by Halloween symbols

                                                                               

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As a follow-up to my posting on Coke-Cola's Freestyle soft-drink fountain
http://bit.ly/gVdma

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It was announced on November 9th that there is now a partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter.
When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well. And when you tweet, you can
send that message to your LinkedIn connection as well, from any service or tool.

http://blog.linkedin.com/2009/11/09/allen-blue-twitter-and-linkedin-go-together-like-peanut-butter-and-chocolate/trackback/

And as I am doing with this entry I am posting to my Posterous page which is linked to my twitter which is now linked to my LinkedIn page.

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Brandweek's provocative headline "Marketing on No Money" (Oct 12 2009 issue) makes the argument that social media and web 2.5 tools are enabling companies to get their "marketing costs down to zero".

It's an interesting look at the mathematics of marketing, but equates advertising to marketing, and while that makes for great headlines, it's not just fuzzy math, it's wrong.

The article profiles Mint, a personal finance site that was just purchased by Quicken for $170 million. "Marketing on $700 a Year" leads the article in 30-point type.

If a brand manager reads no further, that's the number that sticks in the brain and that becomes the war cry: $700! Brandweek says why spend more?

The trouble is, the actual cost is closer to $1 million dollars a year: a $700 advertising spend and the true cost of creating and running an effective marketing campaign are far apart - in this case, $999,300.

What do you get for your million bucks? Buried in the article is the answer: "Salaries for marketing staff and out-of-pocket expenses like hiring an outside PR firm."

So you still have to pay for people to determine strategy, define the right mix of social media tools, write the blogs, post tweets, maintain Facebook pages and monitor the results.

In other words, the tools might be cheap but you still have to do the actual work.

Let's recap: it cost Mint $999,300 a year to create and manage a successful marketing campaign that had $700 in hard costs for off-the shelf services. And that's really different than 'no money'.

"Marketing on $1 million a Year" doesn't make a sexy headline, no matter how true it is, but still - some clients are going to expect million dollar results for $700.

So thanks for nothing Brandweek - you've armed the masses with mis-information and devalued the contribution of the bright minds that develop campaigns, create the imagery, wordsmith the blogs, program the widgets, respond to consumer emails and make the YouTube videos. Nice work.

Read the article here: http://bit.ly/ygrlH

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http://bit.ly/lsCkd

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After just hunting down a corrupted font on my computer this was particularly timely.

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