http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/agency-year-akqa-137015

1. Don’t take advice/rules lists too seriously, they’re all made up of people’s personal experiences and aren’t law.
2. Empathy will make you a better designer, especially when you’re not designing for yourself.
3. Develop your own list, based on real life experience, not what other people have told you.

The first problem I keep having with these lists is that many of them are so definite, as if the author’s experience fits the reader’s perfectly. It may be a pet peeve, but there are no absolutes, and passing down an individual experience as an absolute isn’t helpful, it’s constricting the world view of the person who takes it as gospel.

The second problem, is that by sharing their life experiences as rules or advice, the list becomes about ego. Granted, most blogs are about the author’s ego to start with, but when these lists are shared, they become the Fox news of blog posts – quick snippets taken out of context that are easy to pass around and share without putting any critical thought into them.

What I’ve found is that everyone needs to develop their own list, and that means taking other people’s experiences and your own, and factoring in context. We all owe it to ourselves to think through the rules we follow, and to keep that list of rules changing for our whole lives.

Why aren’t agencies putting all their work on YouTube by default? Every spot we make should be automatically uploaded and properly keyword written. There is no excuse for running a spot on television that can’t be found online, especially when that online component is free.

Missy ended up finding it here.

Now instead imagine that your friend is saying they really like this couch, you should take a look at it. The message is identical, but the format is different, and the likelihood of you paying attention – and at the very least looking at the couch – has increased substantially.

The next issue with traditional advertising is that media is expensive. Paying for advertising is a major expense, and when it’s not working particularly well it is difficult to justify. If you can get people to willingly talk about your brand, and not only look for themselves but pass it along to a friend, your investment in advertising has a much greater return.

Ikea has taken a great step forward with this new Facebook campaign. They are creating a page for a store manager and having him post photos of Ikea showrooms. The first person to tag an item in the photo with their name gets that item for free.

This in itself is small potatoes, a minor giveaway that any small store could run for themselves. The great part of this campaign is the wildfire-like spread. When a user tags the item in the photo, that tag shows up in their feed. They’ve willingly said to everyone they follow, “I like this table from Ikea.” Their friends are now more likely to click through and look at that table and potentially tag something themselves, showing the items they like best to all THEIR friends.

Ikea’s media expense is likely $0. This is a normal Facebook page, not a purchased fan page. They aren’t advertising this campaign, as far as I know, so it’s an organic spread. Even the cost off creating the campaign is likely reduced, as the production costs would be lower.

I’d really like to see the numbers from this exercise. I’m not sure how this would be measurable in sales dollars, but the awareness would likely be huge. Kudos to Forsman and Bodenfors for an interesting and unique approach to spreading their client’s word.

Take a look at where they were most recently:

This is a standard, tech-style kind of logo you would find on an internet company’s wall. It says their name, ostensibly tells you they are “moving forward” with that arrow pointing the way, which without going on a side tangent, is a fairly hackish way to guide a viewer. It’s bubbly and blue, and just bleeds how INTERNET AOL is. Aol. could have kept going with this for some time and been just fine.

They didn’t keep going though, they started thinking about their brand perception and how they’re being seen by the world. They’ve gone from an All Caps AOL to a sentence case Aol. Note that period after Aol. As an aside, I’m actually struggling to include these periods in this post without throwing off the whole flow, and I’ll stop using it from here on out. So Aol period is now a slightly friendlier name, as far as you can go without actually having an actual word as a name. The period actually serves a purpose, separating the name from the category, Aol.Sports, AOL.News and so on.

Friendly typography sounds like a load of crap, but it actually works. It allows users to connect with a company that seems to be the equivalent of a buddy you can have a beer with. Now they’re embracing how users think of them already going from a harsh acronym, to hide the days of America Online to what is almost a word in itself. Eh-oh-ell.

Now the interesting part to me is how they are using that typography. They’ve created a flexible logo that changes according to the context. They can now add this logo to almost anything, owning the imagery. Football scores? Stamp “Aol.” on Terrell Owens. Weather reports? Stamp “Aol.” on imagery of the actual weather.

This is a not just a flexible logo now, it signifies a flexible brand that can expand well past America Online and start touching on their world of properties. With this brand backed up by solid changes to the company, they can attempt to shake the perception of an out of touch dotcom age company catering to grandparents, and start engaging customers on the level they are capable of, potentially as a challenger to Yahoo!’s services. They’ve got the awkward punctuation down.

My problem with the logo and brand as it is, they’ve taken this great flexible idea and piled it on a bunch of shit imagery they seem to have grabbed from a stock catalog. This was their opportunity to grab some compelling imagery related to each section of Aol and integrated it into their communications. Now I realize this was all sample imagery and they haven’t rolled it out across the board yet, so when this comes to their site I hope they do something a little more aggressive with it.

I’ve added in my own quick little paste up of what I think it will look like, but I suspect they will probably launch a completely revamped web presence soon though, something that uses this brand system a little more effectively than we see now.

Overall, great idea, horrible implementation AS WE SEE IT. I have high hopes for this moving forward.

This is an example of a great idea that has been poorly implemented. If Expedia were to say “We don’t believe you should have to pay for insurance, so we won’t charge you if the trip falls apart” then that is a solid promise. Saying “We don’t think you should pay until December, but after that you’re on your own” is just disingenuous.

I kid, I kid. This is horrible. Bad istockphoto.

I had a teacher in school once, a photography teacher, who said “never ever let someone have your work for free.” He was adamant about this. If you let someone have your work for free once, you’ve set that value in their mind.

I know there is the argument that these are pieces you wouldn’t get paid for anyway, and the people who buy these wouldn’t have paid full price for a logo anyway, but I’m not sure I buy that. Will your full price paying clients lose respect for your work if they know you are selling a log for $5 that you would have charged them thousands for?

And what are the ethical implications of selling work that was paid for and developed for someone else but rejected on the path to the final work? Is that rejected logo yours, or that client’s?

The whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Or maybe that’s just the $5 Starbucks I just had.

These are my shelves in the kitchen, neat, clean, full of nice expensive and vintage dishes. My wife, with her impeccable eye for design, finds the nicest things for our house.

Making coffee this morning, with design on my mind as I geared up for a Sunday of working, I automatically went into a cupboard full of dry goods and pulled out an old mug a former client gave me. It’s a Saturn Aura mug that starts out black, but when hot liquid is in the mug, it reveals an image of the car and the logo.

So I have several choices, a few of which are shown here, but I don’t go for any of the pretty, expensive coffee cups, I go for my free old mug that is so ugly it’s kept with cereal and bourbon and spices. I’ve got to think there is something to this. I do it every time I make coffee at home, going for my comfy cup rather than the beautiful, and at hand cups.

This obviously ties back to why users will complain when a company changes it’s interface, even for the better. They’ve had something that is THEIRS taken away. It was theirs and it was comfortable. Those coffee cups are just as good, and look better than mine, but until I throw out that old mug I’ll keep digging for it.

I suppose this is an argument against maintaining legacy interfaces, but mostly it’s just something I noticed.

First off, it’s my job to make sure users have a smooth flow through online experiences.

Second, I come to rely on expected behavior, just like anyone else, and when that fails, it makes me angry.

Third is when someone breaks the user experience just so they can make some money off me.

Rogers Cable in Toronto made a change awhile ago – about a year ago I think – where when you type in an invalid address to your browser, or type in a common term which normally is redirected to Google by Firefox, they hijack your browser and present a page of search results by Yahoo! as well as several ads.

What I expect is to see an error message so I immediately know I made a mistake. This is like dialing the wrong number and having your phone company answer to tell you about these people you might be interested in calling, and by the way, did you know you can save on long distance?

I’ve been long frustrated by this, but I just now found a fix.

In your router, I’m using an Apple Airport Extreme, change your DNS Server and Domain Name.

It’s under your airport utility, click on the appropriate airport, then click on “Internet.”

DNS Server: 64.71.255.202
Domain Name: altdns.rnc.net.cable.rogers.com

Hope this helps someone out there.