Jason Nunes

I wish this were a real product, I’d buy one tomorrow…

A fabulous headphone design by designer Ji Woong.

Found on Yanko.

Mint.com is already one of my all time favorite web applications. It’s so useful. But little did I know that Mint was the provider of great content too… Go figure.

There’s all kinds of useful information on their blog. Like this latest post chock full of info graphics that visually compare the United States and China on all kinds of metrics, like our economies, geographies, military, and people.

Here’s some examples:

Michael Roller came up with a great info graphic to explain who he sees as the essential members of a great design team. Insightful thinking.

And then goes on to describe the members in detail. (The Reader’s Digest version is posted below)

The Evangelist

A design team without a visionary leader is like a church without a preacher. The Evangelist focuses on design at the highest level, developing strategies and processes that push the limits of design and business as a whole. Contextual thinking helps him understand how design fits into a larger business plan.

The Conductor

To complement the Evangelist, every design team needs a leader who directs the finishing touches on each project. The Conductor’s analytical mind helps her to ensure that no detail goes unconsidered. Like directing an orchestra, she brings together all the little details into harmony, making sure everything has been figured out and nothing taken for granted.

The Dreamer

When analytical minds struggle with paradoxical design constraints, the Dreamer cuts through it all to offer a surprisingly fresh attitude. He avoids the technical boundaries of a project in favor of contextual experimentation.

The Surgeon

Whether it comes down to aesthetic or ergonomic excellence, so many great pieces of design rely on details. A great design team relies on the Surgeon – an analytical thinker who cuts up and dissects design problems to find the best solutions.

The Jack of All Trades (Master of None?)

Every team has designers with diverse skill sets, but the Jack of All Trades might be the most talented person in your office because he can truly do everything. He leads a range of projects, solves tricky problems, and dreams up big ideas.

A very clever advertisement. For Advertisers. Advertising… um… advertising.

I buy 90% of what this guy says. And I like the fact that IFC/Sundance are doing this clever call to action to their advertisers to think differently… and pay a whole lot more money for a 30 second spot than they would on another network. But I wonder if the message resonates. Or if it’s just a clever way to try to sell old media to planners that are bruised and confused about new media.

Really, it’s not the # of impressions/eyeballs, it’s the quality of impression. It’s A) the demographic-specialness of person you advertise to, and B) how willing that person is to pass your message on.

OK, I could buy this. But the problem with old media is that there’s no way to track this. Other than surveys, and focus groups. You have to trust that what your representative audience member tells you is correct.

The power of new media (the web) up until now has been the ability to tell exactly how many people have actually seen your ad. Something TV, radio, and magazines aren’t able to do.

But now we are entering an age when it’s not just important to know how many people are seeing your ad, but how effective it is. How engaged your audience is with your ad.

Right now there isn’t a standard way of tracking engagement, and it’s still fairly subjective. Is it the amount of time someone spends with your interactive ad? Is it a click? Is it a click that leads to a purchase? Is it a request for more information about your product? Is it an eventual purchase within a certain amount of time after seeing your ad? Or is it all of this, weighted and presented in a way that anyone can understand?

I vote for the later. And I don’t think anyone’s cracked that nut yet.

BUT, this is all data that is recordable, and traceable on the web, not on old media. Yet. Until we can embed RFID chips in every magazine that gets sold, and broadcast TV and radio signals become 2-way, allowing for the gathering of data… kinda like the internet.

I also don’t think brand managers and planners are ready to give up their addiction to metrics. Especially after a decade of juicy numbers that are so easy to plug into spreadsheets that can be used to justify decisions.

Score one for old media.

So does that mean that this ad campaign is going to fall flat?

The other side of the coin is that brands are much more comfortable placing advertising on content they know and understand. That they can watch ahead of time and vet. That isn’t potentially going to snap back and bit them like a snake in the hand, or user generated content might. Sure, they see the power of the internet, but that doesn’t make them comfortable advertising on YouTube, or MySpace, or Facebook… unless someone can guarantee the quality of the content (not gonna happen) or unless it’s much much cheaper than traditional advertising… and sometimes not even then.

That’s why Hulu is doing better than YouTube, even though it got 88 million views to YouTube’s 4.2 billion in 2008.

Score one for traditional media.

Ultimately I’m starting to feel like this old media/new media fight is like the mind body split. And that we may be on the verge of seeing that that split is really just an illusion. That our Cartesean view of the media world is wrong. That old and new are so intertwined (intertwingled) that you can’t view one without the other. At all.

Our industry craves the security of old media content. Just as it longs for the metrics that are available through new methods of distribution.

Eventually this convergence thing that was such a buzzword 10 years ago is going to actually come to pass, and we’re going to stop this silly argument. We’ll watch TV on the web, and the web on TV, and everyone will know exactly what we watched, where, and if we clicked or not, and even if we eventually bought the product we were advertised.

But until then… well, it’s gonna be Godzilla vs. Mecha-Godzilla. Safe content vs. metrics. Influencers vs. impressions. And it’ll be about as much fun as watching 2 sweaty dudes in rubber suits flop around against each other.

What do you guys think?

I think the fascinating thing about the story of the success of the audition of Britain’s got Talent contestant Susan Boyle is that it’s an example of content “going viral” in both old and new media in concert. Basically a feedback loop created between the two. When it was aired it was viewed by 10 million people. And then YouTube quickly added an additional 30 million to that mix, which was picked up by TV news here in the states (and abroad) which added uncounted more views (definitely in the 10s of millions) which then drove people back to YouTube. It’s the perfect storm in terms of viral content.

And poor YouTube doesn’t make any advertising money off of it.

No wonder Hulu is kicking their butt.

In a related note, I wanted to embed the video here in the post, but YouTube has taken down the ability to embed “by request”… I wonder if that’s the request of Britain’s got Talent (which would be pretty stupid since they are getting REAMS of free publicity on this one, all thanks to YouTube) or the request of YouTube executives who are watching their hosting costs being driven through the roof right now…

Bicycle Built for Two Thousand from Aaron on Vimeo.

From Mashable:

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is a “crowd sourcing” service that harnesses the power of an on-demand human workforce. It’s been used in a very interesting way by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, who’ve employed the voices of around 2000 people to create a version of the song Daisy Bell (yes, that’s the song sung by HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey).

I love the individual voices in there. I guess it’s just like Soylent Green says… the ghost in the machine is PEOPLE!

Ok, yeah, it’s 4 years gone since Thundercut started modifying walk/don’t walk signs, but I still think this stuff is super cool.

From NY Mag:

Who is altering the WALK signs of downtown New York? A young couple from Brooklyn who go by the name Thundercut. One’s a graphic designer, the other makes legit signs by day. Their nocturnal work requires a steady hand with the X-Acto blade and sturdy shoulders to sit on. One half of Thundercut recalls the inspiration for the project: “One day I noticed a crosswalk sign which had broken off and was hanging at eye level. I started thinking about the really generic, masculine ‘walker,’ and thought it would be funny if at least one of these clunky pictos was wearing a skirt.”

How many times have you sat in a conference room and tried to drive a white board session with a mouse? Or subconsciously found your fingers miming CTRL or CMD Z to undo something… in the real world?

Here’s a neat little experiment that I found on Make that’s a first step in applying graphical user interfaces to the real world.

A very interesting concept. Sherrod Faulks has created a process visualization tool for pointing out the perspective/questions specific project roles have during the agile design/build process.

Agile projects can have additional complexity because customers are often unfamiliar with how an iterative process works, and because agile is so different from standard, more established waterfall methods.

Seems like this could be a good way to do some education during the course of a project. Even though it throws a little extra work into the mix.

What do you think?