Think Small, Act Big
We know many, way too many graphic designers who refer to their apartments as “suites,” talk girlfriends into enunciating secretarial voicemail messages, and generally try to act much bigger than they are. It’s even tougher when you’re in Sheffield, otherwise known as the Arkansas of the United Kingdom.
Now Apple has crowned Matt Pyke, Mr. Universal Everything of Sheffield, UK as the king of these bathrobe entrepreneurs, and damned if we don’t like this guy’s style. He’s got the super low-fi courier font. He’s got the old school Swiss style with the neat little grids. You navigate his porfolio with “past activity,” “recent activity” and “latest activity” buttons. Smart, simple, but not quite pretentious. That’s how we like our design.
http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/universaleverything/” rel=”external” title=”Apple Shows Some Love”>Apple Shows Some Love
Silence is Golden
Urbanites have long used sunglasses for much more than merely protecting their eyesight, but to heighten concentration on the day’s various missions by warding off undesired eye contact with random passersby. But what to do when you’re trying to work at your local coffeehouse and find yourself getting caught up in the pointless conversation at the next table, or what’s worse, getting roped into nodding along to an endless monolog by a self-taught philosopher or New Age creep?
Answer: Ear plugs! They’re better than headphones because any fool knows you can’t truly concentrate while listening to music. With the coffeehouse table gradually emerging as today’s new office, we’re seeing more and more of these foam filters budding from the lobes of can’t-be-bothered workaholics.
We also dare to predict that the ear plug is the beginning of a larger filtering trend, wherein information-addled consumers will seek peace, quiet, and precious concentration by willfully choosing to shut out the world around them. As wi-fi become free and ubiquitous in urban centers, we expect to see some coffeeshops evolve into distraction-proof mental retreats where cell phones are checked at the door and all online content bounces off an invisible, impenetrable shell. With distractions relentlessly assaulting us at home and at work, these sealed brain vaults will be able to charge a pretty penny for the right to sit down and actually get something done.
Cash Is The New Plaid
We thought money was so pretty that it would never get old. Boy were we wrong. We’re seeing those swirly hairline engravers’ marks everywhere now, from auto ads to t-shirts to album covers. They have the old-fashioned dignity of the heraldic seals that were so popular six months back, combined with the natural eye-attracting magnetism of cold hard cash.
Now that the greenback has gone all technicolor and holographic, everything, it seems, wants to look like the good old greenback.
Are You Part Of the Email Problem? Or Part of the Solution?
Are You Part Of the Email Problem? Or Part of the Solution?
If we get another droning missive from some former college buddy vaguely asking us for some foggy form of assistance or advice then seriously, we are going to lose it.
How long has email been around for now? 10 or 15 years, right? When are people going to finally learn to use it properly and quit sending us these long harangues, too incoherent to ever penetrate our brains which are already so overloaded with tasklists and messages flying back and forth at the speed of light?
Thank goodness for Matt May’s “Email, An Author’s Guide,” filled with all the common sense idiot rules of email that no one ever seems to learn. Rules like…
-Be short. We are busy!
-Make your requests clear.
-Give a deadline.
Brilliant! This August, when we head to the Jersey shore for a month of watching the least trendy people on earth while sipping piña coladas, we’ll be turning on our autoreply and sending everyone to this link.
(And kudos to Lifehacker for this sweet tip!)
Politics and Animation Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Broken Glass
Many of the creative elements in “Over the Hedge,” which opened last Friday, are standard cartoon fare. You’ve got your talking animals, your idiot humans, and your clockwork morality play so simple that it could be sketched out on the back of a cereal box. The story begins in the forest when RJ the clever raccoon notices that a giant hedge has
sprung up at the edge of the wild animal kingdom. Some of the animal are scared, but RJ explains this is actually a good thing. Hedges mean suburban subdivisions, subdivisions mean human homes, and human homes mean food. Ten minutes in he’s sounding less and less like a raccoon and more and more like a spokesanimal for Toll Brothers.
What? Are we to believe these animals were starving in the forest? That they won’t be run over, or poisoned, or worse by the forces of humanity rolling out the toxic green lawn carpets out over their homes?
RJ is like a Frenchman collaborating with his Nazi occupiers. He was probably invented by some bored screenwriters to insert some witty, cynical social commentary into this backpack and pencil box franchise vehicle, but still. That’s no excuse for telling our kids that subdivisions make animals happy.
After the Afterparty Comes the Russian Steam Bath
You can only meet your friends for drinks at so many dive bars before the urge to somehow detox overtakes you and you succumb to the Russian bathhouse fad. Known to native Russian speakers as the “banya,” Russian baths combine hot pools, ice-cold pools, dry heat, wet heat, layabout mobsters, and stern bath attendants whapping the poison out of your skin with bristly birch branches. All for $30 to $50 a visit, about a third of the price of a trip to the spa. A longtime favorite of Manhattan fiends like John Belushi looking to break a sweat while sitting on their asses, the baths are quickly acquiring a newer, more cosmopolitan and clean-living clientele.
We don’t think the banya will replace the drunken Thursday night reunions of “friends” you saw two weeks ago and whose name you can’t quite remember, but we do see more of the nightclubbing and drinking classes catching on to the scam that is retail liquor and moving a slice of their social sphere to more wholesome, daylit, banya-like environments.
Sneakers Are So 2006
Sneakers are toast. Over. Done for. They’ve been too cool for too long. Now the party is over. The running shell game of “limited” editions and premium colorways will keep the sneaker con running for another couple of years, tops. Come 2008, you’ll still see sneakers here and there, on the feet of old ladies and actual athletes. But the days of grown men dressing as though work were gym class are quickly coming to an end. Instead, he’ll want work shoes that mean business: loafers, wing tips, and big black leather boots. His stoner roommate will switch to Birkenstocks or flip-flops, both of which offer superior performance for those long afternoons on the couch.
First to go will be the wretched quasi-sneakers, those brown leather Prada and Diesel turds that look like half shoe, half slipper. Next will be the “classics,” your Ponys, your Reeboks, your Adidas, your Le Coq Sportifs. Finally, the mighty Air Force one will go down. (Not Nike, though. They own Cole Hahn, after all.)
Evidence? We suppose you’d probably like some. First off, the ghetto always hears the news first. They know the sneaker apocalypse is coming. That’s why they switched to Timbs. Second, we ask you to remember the baseball card fad of the 80s. As soon as something gets its own magazine, trouble is on the horizon. When people start talking about their purchases as “investments,” you know it’s a bubble. And when manufacturers have to start issuing special limited editions to maintain consumer interest, the end is nigh. Give it a few months and your neighborhood hipster’s Air Force One collection will be gathering dust in his closet alongside his special rookie holograms and his Donruss Diamond Kings.
Will Gringos Spring For Mexi-Style Shock Media?
Mexico has long held a monopoly on true crime magazines. Filled with mugshots, cleavage, and gory crime scene photographs, they regularly outsell celebrity glossies and supermarket tabs, that is, when they can make it past the censors. Alarma!, Mexico’s top true crime pub, has a circulation of 15 million. That’s about seven times as much as the Wall Street Journal.
Now, at long last, it looks like we’ll be getting our own true crime mag, Shock, set to launch on May 30. Selling for a mere $1.99, Shock will have gory shots from bloody dolphin hunts and an interview with the guy who pries open the buttocks of Chinese military recruits to make sure they’ve been living clean and straight.
We don’t think Shock will lower pop culture standards of decency, which disappeared years ago. We’re actually kind of excited to see pictures we want to see rather than the same dozen smiling faces. And $1.99? These units are priced to sell.
http://www.jossip.com/gossip/shock-magazine/” rel=”external” title=”Shock: The Rundown”>Shock: The Rundown
Follow the Leader. Follow the Finger
So Butterfinger’s got this new viral marketing website called Follow the Finger. They’ve got lots of videos, videos an old man rapping outside of a retirement home, videos of guys in animal costumes fighting in the front yard, even a video of an Indian guy in a polyester suit explaining the whole Finger campaign in pseudo-ironic corporate-ese.
You know, the kind of CollegeHumor.com crap that’s good for two laughs and half a million hits on YouTube. Looming above it all is giant orange billboard reading “Are You Creative?” Yes. No. Sort of.
After much discussion, we can’t decide whether to hate on this campaign for its blatant, unmitigated cynicism, or praise the apparently bottomless well of invention from which this crap sprung. All we know is that it is of the moment (or was that the moment that just ended?), and that someone at Nestle HQ is trying very, very hard.
Where There’s a Wii, There’s a … Wha? The Great Nintendo Name Debate
How important are names? Certainly important enough to keep the Dukakises of the world from ever reaching the White House. And, in the case of Nintendo’s new Revolution system, a bad, vague name could spell doom for what otherwise looks to be product with blockbuster potential.
Let’s back up a bit. At this week’s E3 gaming industry trade show, Nintendo revealed that its long-awaited next generation system, a console expected to go toe-to-toe with the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 2, would be named not the Revolution, but the “Wii.” You read that right. Three letters. W-i-i. Huh?
Since then, gamer blogs have been talking not about the system’s slick, wireless controllers nor its suite of nostalgic Mario and Zelda titles, but how damn dumb the name is. Wii. Is it an acronym? A hieroglyphic symbol? You almost need an instruction manual to pronounce the damn thing, let alone figure out what it means. Nintendo officials have been kicking around all kinds of semi-apologetic explanations: Wii sounds like “we.” It sounds like “yes” in French. The “ii” suggests two wireless controllers. Whatever.
We’d like to suggest a simpler explanation: Judging by the Wii website, which completely rips Apple’s design shtick, we think Nintendo was aiming for the simplicity of iPod, iChat, iLife, etc. Some “Revolution.” We suggest Nintendo’s VP of Nomenclature is ripe for the guillotine.
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