Posts tagged “graphics”

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • [from Dan_Soltzberg] 35 Movies in 2 Minutes [Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog] – [I'll admit I wasn't able to name all of the films referenced in this delightful piece of animation, but whether you recognize the films or not, this is a beautiful example of visual communication using a very simple graphic approach.]
  • [from steve_portigal] Scion presents Ed Emberley & Friends – [We had these books around the house as kids and they gave me a sense of UI design meets art before I knew anything about either topic. Nice to see the work has resonance so many years later] Ed Emberley's legendary drawing books inspired a generation of kids to become artists. In this show, Ed Emberley displays his original 1970's mockups alongside five grown-up artists who were influenced by him. Curated by Caleb Neelon, the artists include Raul Gonzalez, Seonna Hong, Matt Leines, Christopher Kline and Saelee Oh. For "Ed Emberley & Friends," each artist will create a six-foot-by-six-foot wood panel that is a mash-up of their own style and that of Ed Emberley's instructional drawing books. The tribute paintings will be exhibited alongside examples of each artist's individual work. After the show, each of the large painted panels will be donated for long-term display in children's hospitals around the United States.
  • [from steve_portigal] wanted: cultural change agencies [Influxinsights] – [Ed Cotton is perceptive as usual. My quibble – there's an opportunity for this type of agency but I don't know there's a market for it. Isn't selling services that don't look like other types of services you've bought before is its own challenge. Meanwhile most consultants I talk to, from insights, to brand, to interactive, to improv training, are all selling "culture change" as a second order effect. IDEO has productized it, of course. So maybe we're already selling this, just not in the way Ed sees it could happen] There's a market for a new type of agency- a cultural change agency. It's a new type of company that helps you work out who you are and doesn't walk away, it stays with you; it helps, it motivates, it inspires and it brings the moving parts of the organization together. Think of this new entity as a entirely new type of agency; one that inspires companies to change and get the best out of themselves by working from the inside out.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Listening to customer feedback? Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes (Thx, @susandra) – In '77, 3M decided to test-market. It failed to ignite interest. “When we did the follow-up research, there just weren’t a lot of people saying this was a product they wanted.”
    "We knew the test markets failed, but we just kept saying, ‘Maybe it was us. Maybe we did something wrong. Because it couldn’t be the product—the product was great.”
    To see for themselves how people responded to Post-it Notes, 2 execs cold-called offices, giving away samples and showing people how to use 'em. The responses were more enthusiastic. “Those things really were like cocaine. You got them into somebody’s hands, and they couldn’t help but play around with them.”
    1 more test was in order. They got newspapers to run stories about it. They festooned stationery stores with banner displays and point-of-purchase materials. 1000s of samples were sent to office managers, purchasing agents, lawyers, etc. People demonstrated it to potential customers. It was a huge success, and 3M decided to launch Post-Its.
  • Listening to customer feedback? Peter Arnell Explains Failed Tropicana Package Design – Big outcry over the Tropicana packaging design (which this suggests was NOT tested but that's hard to believe) led to a return to the previous packaging.
  • Listening to customer feedback? Malcolm Gladwell on the Aeron chair – The Aeron chair was originally despised and deemed ugly. It didn’t catch on for 2 years, and then it quickly became the most popular chair. Everyone came to love it. Gladwell concludes that people find responses about some topics extremely difficult to articulate. While they may think they dislike something (like the Aeron chair), in their hearts they may actually like it. There is a disconnect that causes people to express dislike in their heads while they actually like it in their hearts (and vice versa).
  • Listening to customer feedback? Hate Facebook's new look? You'll like it soon enough. – Slate advances the point that people react to change negatively but eventually get used to the change and make it work.
  • Listening to customer feedback? Problems With NBC’s ‘Parks & Recreation’ – When do you listen to negative feedback and when do you follow your vision? I think there's an important middle-ground that is often ignored: understanding what lies beneath that feedback and choosing carefully if and how to respond to it, or how to create supporting activities that help get over the barriers that the rejection points to

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • Pathways: Mondo Blendo computer art movement (from 1991 Compute! magazine) – You may not have heard of it, but it's all around you – on TV, in advertisements, in the movies. It's blendo, a.k.a. "genre-bending," "digital postmodernism," or "synergistic art," and it may well be the first important – or foolish – aesthetic idea to come out of computer graphics.

    What is blendo? Michael Gosney, publisher/editor of Verbum, the Journal of Personal Computer Aesthetics, calls it "the parallel convergence of art forms" combining "anything and everything – type, bitmap paintings, vector graphics, scanned images, animation, 3-D…." School of Visual Arts academic Timothy Binkley describes computer art as the creation of "a prodigious menagerie of things" brought into being "merely by waving a magic wand." It's a fair characterization of the blendo approach. You take whatever elements are relevant (or irrelevant) to your purpose and put them into your picture.

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