Now with less grammatical mistakes
I’ve just fallen in love with Erin Kissane at Incisive.nu for doing, on a much more regular basis, that which I never really had time to do over at Grammar Nazi.
I especially love her coining of the word English-ish, which so economically describes most of what we read in business and marketing communications. It sounds like English but it’s just kind of not.
I’m also impressed by her correct use of em dashes. You see, people? It’s so easy to do…
So after writing yesterday about QR codes, I went to the letter box (I almost typed litter box then but had backspaced before I realised how apt it sounded) and got the junk mail. Among the specials on minced beef, cordless drills and label makers, there was a Tel$tra flyer, spruiking their (or should I say “their”) very own Telstra Mobile Code innovation. I watched the short video on their qrious site today. And the implication is quite clear that this is a Tel$tra product; at least, it’s not expressly mentioned that it’s a generic, free tool that anyone can use. It’s also implied that you would need a 3G phone to use the system, which is not quite correct. If you want to link to a web page, then yes, you’d need a web-capable handset, but the SMS feature should work on non-3G phones. Of course, T$ra are linking it to their own data services, trying to get us all hooked on phone internet (which I kind of already am, but not because they claim to have invented it, I’m not even one of their customers. Suffice to say, I don’t use any web content on my phone that was supplied by my carrier: it’s kind of lame and/or too expensive)
But in addition to the link I posted yesterday to get the QR reader, I’ve been looking at QR generators today and this is the best one I’ve found so far. Reason being, it can create a vCard that can be saved straight to your phone’s contacts. At least, it can save it straight to my phone’s contact list. You may have other results. I use a SE K800i, btw.
The one bug I’ve noticed is that (on my phone) it gets the email address and phone number mixed up. My work around is to mix them up also, but again, not having tested it on other phones, this may turn out not to be the best one. I can’t see how it would be the phone’s fault though, it would have to be the software, surely. [...thinking music...] yeah, the software for sure.
If anyone gives it a go on a different phone, let me know how you get on.
I discovered the very useful QR codes the other day. They’re a bit like barcodes, indeed they’re a type of bar code, only not so bar-like as actual bar codes, which seem to be composed solely of bars. These are two-dimensional bar codes, whereas barcode barcodes are only one-dimensional (when you think about it).
The useful thing about them, as far as I’m concerned, is that there are readers available that you can run from your mobile phone. I never saw one of these for the one-dimensional barcodes. It would have been useful. But now these two-dimensional barcodes have a reader that works with your phone’s camera, so that, to me at least, is useful.
I guess also, they’re of limited functionality. But they’re still in the early adopter phase, in this country at least, so I’m prepared to think of them as very cool, until they’re ubiquitous, at which point they’ll become banal and old.
If you want to know what this says and have a popular brand of phone camera, there’s a reader here.
If nothing else, it’s fun for an hour, and would make for a cool avatar if you hate putting pictures of yourself in avatars.
Just got this link from a friend. A treat for Flight of the Conchords fans.
Looks like someone did what Woody Allen couldn’t get right.
For the discerning among you who know that raster images aren’t Bob Marley posters:
VectorMagic | The Online Tool for Precision Bitmap to Vector Conversion
It’s quite good. And it’s free. Gotta love the internet.
Firstly, I’ve lifted the title for this post from a post on The Bleat. Just wanted to get that out there. It’s one of those examples where someone else has already summed up how you feel about something and no matter how hard you try you just couldn’t really improve on it.
The reason for the title is that it’s been an increasing phenomenon of late in my workplace for the upper echelons of management to be poking their little noses in to our little patch of publication-producing proficiency.
We recently rolled out a new iteration of our corporate brand. Our designer worked hard on it, doing research on paper stocks, ink types and other kinds of things graphic designers do research on. And godammit, graphic designers know what they’re doing.
Now, I have a bit of a clue. I could probably do the work of a Mac Operator. I’m a little better than pretty good with Photoshop and I’m technically good with InDesign and OK with Illustrator. I’m not a graphic designer but I appreciate what they do. And working in publications, I have a pretty good grasp of the printing process: water, oil, absorption, bleeding, trapping, binding, blah blah blah… But I know enough to know that I don’t know everything.
So why is it some people think they do? During the course of this project, we’ve been told by the bigwigs upstairs to make the logo bigger, move it a little to the right, make the font size bigger, make the margins higher and/or wider and recently we were told that people could now choose their own stock when printing business cards (even though this will mean calibrating the colour density for each type of stock used… the printers are spewing).
For some of the above, we’ve been able to avoid by explaining the rationale behind the designs and showing them comps with the grid superimposed so the balance of the whole thing makes sense. For others, we’ve just had to do as we’re told and our managers have gracefully bent down to kiss the right people in the right places. Now I don’t believe in being too precious about your work but only when criticism is informed and constructive. I don’t like it though when I’m told how to do my job by someone that doesn’t do anything resembling my job. And it’s not a good message for upper management to tell their employees that they don’t trust what they hired you to do.
The good to come of all this is that the designer here has sent me some ripping links that help us to laugh through the whole situation.
Of course, you’ve probably already seen Ban Comic Sans.
Enforcing this, we now have The Graphic Avenger.
Under Consideration, a graphic design advocacy/promotion group give us a catchy little number, Make the Logo Bigger.
And from Agency Fusion, the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time: Make My Logo Bigger Cream.
Watch the video. It is gold. Enjoy.
I just found out from Bruce’s blog that Stephen Fry has started a blog.
At first, I was a bit dubious. I’d never really come across any actual famous people’s blogs before and I wasn’t convinced it was him until I scrolled down and saw that he’d posted a picture of himself and placed his signature at the end of the first post.
What had me unsure was the fact that he hadn’t filled out the “about” section yet, and that he felt it necessary to point out the difference between uninterested and disinterested. I woudn’t have picked him as the type who would need to show off how smart he is. It seemed a little patronising.
I can’t wait to see if Hugh leaves a comment.
I guess it’s an important part of advertising, and perhaps life in general, to be the best at something. Product A may be the best because it removes more dirt from dirty clothes than product B (assuming we’re talking washing powder). But what if product C does a job that’s 95% as good as A and you can only tell the difference under the microscope?
Sure, running the 100 m in 9.77 seconds is really impressive but where do you need to be in less than ten seconds that you couldn’t be in 15 or even 20. Getting back from the toilet before the ads finish just isn’t that important. It’s the same with driving. If you’re travelling 100 km, you can get there in an hour if you do the speed limit. But if you do 110 km/h, you get there just over five minutes earlier, and given that you usually fart around for at least that long at the petrol station choosing what kind of chips to buy for the drive, is it worth the $190 speeding fine?
Universities produce league tables that rank the top howevermany unis in the country/world… whatever. The uni that comes in at #1 lauds itself as being the best and the one that comes in at #200 somehow gains notoriety as being “the worst”. But they’re still all universities. You can still go and learn stuff and get a good job at the end of it. And you need to meet minimum standards to become a university, so while the difference between #1 and #200 is possibly remarkable, the difference between #1 and say #20, or the difference between #100 and #200 is probably miniscule, or superficial and not really worth worrying about. The guy that comes last in the 100 m final and runs a 10.07 is still a fucking fast runner.
I’ve been thinking about this today because this morning I had to park the car in a one-hour spot but didn’t have money to feed the meter for the full hour. I put in 50 cents to give me a few minutes while I went to get change. I needed $2 for the full hour. So I thought I’d buy a coffee and there was a café right in front of where I parked. I went in, looked at their menu and they wanted $3.20 for a long black.
Now I can go down the road from where I work and get an espresso long black for $2. It’s a decent cup of coffee. If it was caterer’s blend, instant powdered coffee, I’d pay maybe 20 cents (and even then, only if I had a pocket-full of 5-cent pieces I was looking to get rid of). I’d pay maybe $1 for a cup of good, freeze-dried instant coffee, just to cover the cost of the person heating the water and washing the spoon afterwards. But once you’re buying coffee from a real coffee machine, that’s the benchmark, the minimum standard. It’s all coffee. It’s better than drinking rubbish. Sure, some is slightly better than others, and if there’s value added (ie. if I’m drinking it in an aesthetically pleasing café, not a greasy spoon diner with lino floors) I’m fine with paying more because then I’m not just buying coffee, I’m paying for an experience.
But $3.20 for a takeaway? Sorry, it just can’t be that good that I’m going to pay that for a fancy cardboard cup with a lid (and let’s not even go into how much cheaper it should be when there’s no milk involved).
I walked down the road a bit and bought a pretty decent long black for $2.50 AND got to park my car.
Now I don’t like to plagiarise but I did draw up this little graphical representation of the experience, inspired by indexed.
I’ve had Pepys’ Diary on RSS feed for a while now. I’d often tried to access this text in book form, I once tried to start reading it on the date the diary starts to keep in sync with it, but could never really discipline myself to read it every day. So I think a blog is the perfect way to present the text, especially as it just pops into my reader every morning. It’s much the same as reading anyone else’s blog, only he talks a bit funny, wot?
Because it’s now in a blog medium though, I keep wanting to post comments, mostly to warn him about the medical preparations he has prepared for him. Right now (so to speak), he’s taking turpentine!
That Dr. Burnett… he’s a friggin quack.
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Kingdom of Fear by Hunter S. Thompson
