Top 10 cheap marketing ploys to increase sales
Top 10 cheap marketing ploys to increase sales of comic books, but as noted in the comments, a sufficiently generalized version of this list would work in many instances.
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Entries for September 2005
AIGA conference prep
In preparation for the AIGA design conference[1], I’m looking over the session descriptions and speaker list. The theme for this year is “Design”, which seems a little broad but somehow appropriate given how much design has been taken up by the press (especially the business and tech press) recently as something Important and the design profession may be in need of a little wagon circling to figure out how to effectively explain design to someone who is all fired up about incorporating it into their business process because they read a blurb in Fast Company about Jonathan Ive and the iPod.
My knowledge of and involvement with the AIGA up to this point has been fairly minimal, which either makes me the ideal person (fresh eyes!) or a horrible choice (head up ass!) to cover their design conference. I’m particularly interested in learning how they’ve incorporated the fast-changing disciplines of Web and digital design into the mix. When I was working in Minneapolis as a Web designer in the late 90s, my company got me an AIGA membership, but I never used it because although they were trying to be more relevant to those of us working on the Web, my perception is that the AIGA was still largely a graphic design organization and I was finding more of what I was looking for on Web design sites like A List Apart. Now that the Web design profession has matured (and Web design practitioners along with it), it seems to fit better with where the AIGA is going (and vice versa). After all, design is design, no matter what word you stick in front of it.
So, back to the speakers list, I’m looking forward to hearing from Michael Bierut, Lella and Massimo Vignelli, Steven Heller, Matthew Carter, John Maeda, Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett from Adaptive Path, Ze Frank, Stefan Sagmeister, Steff Geissbuhler, Caterina Fake, and Milton Glaser (but no Malcolm Gladwell or Errol Morris, both of whom I swear were on earlier speaker lists), some of whom you may recognize from past mentions on kottke.org. They’ve also added some sessions in response to Hurricane Katrina on design, safety, risk, and disaster management, which is an excellent use of the opportunity of having a bunch of designers in the same place.
If you want to follow along with the complete conference coverage here on kottke.org, here’s the AIGA 2005 page. As I mentioned previously, I’ll be opening up comments on most posts (incl. this one), but will be active in gardening off-topic and trolling comments.
[1] I just realized all these URLs are going to break when the next conference rolls around in two years or so, which is disappointing. Would be nice to have something like http://designconference.aiga.org/2005 that would permanently point to this year’s festivities. Bloggers like permanent links (well, this one does anyway).
Someday we’ll all tell our children about
Someday we’ll all tell our children about the epic cupcake battles of the early 00s. This one time, I got frosting all over my shirt. It was brutal. (via meg)
Among classical music composers, the “curse of
Among classical music composers, the “curse of the ninth” is a fear of ninth symphonies because many prominant composers have died after completing them. (via 92y)
How the iPod nano came to be.
How the iPod nano came to be. Lots of Jobs and Apple haters out there, but you have to admire the shooting from the hip that’s going on here…too many American companies minimize their risk so much that the possible reward dries up almost completely.
Elizabeth Kolbert (who wrote three articles for
Elizabeth Kolbert (who wrote three articles for the NYer on global warming earlier in the year) discusses global warming as a possible cause for Hurricane Katrina. Like the climate scientists on RealClimate contend, Kolbert notes that no particular storm can be caused by global warming, but that the long-term patterns don’t look good…increased greenhouse gases = warmer oceans = more destructive hurricanes. Paul Recer downplays the connection as well and cautions environmental groups who want to make political hay with scientific evidence that doesn’t support their claims.
Oddly, chef Thomas Keller (not the poker
Oddly, chef Thomas Keller (not the poker player) has never tasted “Oysters and Pearls”, one of his signature dishes. “In the ten years it’s been on his menu, he’s never once tasted it, and now is too superstitious to even think about it.”
Kevin Bacon talks about the game named
Kevin Bacon talks about the game named after him in which you try to connect him to other movie stars based on movies done together.
Frustrated with his morning personal grooming routine,
Frustrated with his morning personal grooming routine, man creates an all-in-one solution that speeds his morning along. Convergence is here, my friends.
WolframTones lets you generate and download ringtones
WolframTones lets you generate and download ringtones based on patterns created by cellular automata systems. Anything’s better than the Crazy Frog, yeah?
Here’s the front page of the new
Here’s the front page of the new Guardian. They’ve completely revamped the paper…it’s smaller and has a new font, among other changes. They changed the format to Berliner because “unambiguous research [showed] that readers increasingly find broadsheet newspapers difficult to handle in many everyday situations, including commuting to work”.
Profile of designer/illustrator/photographer Michael Elins
Profile of designer/illustrator/photographer Michael Elins and how he uses Macs to get his work done. “It’s hard for someone like me to talk about technology, because the Mac has gotten to the point where it’s a nonissue. It’s so good and so fluid, so fast and so freaking reliable that it becomes something I really take for granted.”
Story of how Kodak developed the first
Story of how Kodak developed the first digital camera in 1975 and then sat on the technology for years and years until they finally entered the market and, luckily for them, were able to grab the top stop from Sony and Canon.
We ran across the nerdiest board game
We ran across the nerdiest board game today called c-jump, the computer programming game. More info: “Skiers and snowboarders line up at the start location and race along the ski trails. Spaces on the board show statements of programming language. First player to move all skiers past the finish line is the winner.”
Update: here’s the game’s web site. “This game eliminates intimidation of many kids and their parents, bored by the mention of ‘computer programming’, often associated with visions of geeky guys glued to their computers.”
A sequel to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief
A sequel to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: A Briefer History of Time. “More Accessible. More Concise.”
The popcorn hacks post seems to have
The popcorn hacks post seems to have struck the wrong note with the humorless but elsewhere people have gotten into the spirit, contributing their own useless household hacks (I added the “personal locomotion” hack)…although the name hack (“Google Image Search exotic names to determine if they are male or female”) is actually pretty clever.
This guy is selling 1,000,000 pixels on his
This guy is selling 1,000,000 pixels on his site for $1 apiece. Minimum purchase is a 100 pixel block on which you can put a tiny banner and a link to your Web site or whatever. (via cyn-c)
The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of
The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme. If you’re a Mac nerd, you’ll love this because it’s pretty damn funny and if you’re not, you probably won’t get it.
Stephen Baker at Business Week is reporting
Stephen Baker at Business Week is reporting that Huffington Post has a backlog of 15,000 comments that need to be approved for display on the site. Crazy. (I just found BW’s Blogspotting blog today…they’ve got some interesting coverage, including whether or not Technorati is paying for ping data priority.)
Covering the AIGA Design Conference 2005
From September 15-18, I will be attending the AIGA Design Conference in Boston. As an experiment (for both the AIGA and me), I will be covering the event at their request[1] on kottke.org. I’ll be covering the conference as a blogger, but the easiest way to think about it in terms of a conference is that I’m a speaker[2]…a sort of roving speaker with the readers of kottke.org as the audience and my topic is the conference itself.
As usual, I have no solid plan as to how this is going to work exactly, but I’m looking forward to seeing how the conference goes and adapting accordingly. I’m hoping to provide a moving snapshot of the event so that readers of kottke.org can follow along fairly well without being at the conference. I’ll probably have comments open on most posts so hopefully those reading along at home and those reading along at the conference can have some dialogue, with each little world spilling over into the other a bit.
One other quick thing…if you’re going to be at the conference and plan to blog it, let me know…I’ll definitely be linking to other people’s stuff. I’m sure Design Observer and Speak Up will be covering things pretty well. I’ll also be watching Flickr and del.icio.us for links and photos…I’d suggest tagging relevent entries with aigadc2005 for easy aggregation.
More next week as the conference draws near.
[1] Disclaimer: Kottke.org’s budget for covering out-of-town conferences with costly entry fees is limited, so I’m exploring other ways of gaining access to be able to bring you some interesting content that you might not get otherwise. The AIGA is a curious organization and they’re looking at various ways of using weblogs, so they asked me to come and blog the conference as an experiment. To make it economically feasible for me to be there, they are paying me a small speaker’s honorarium and putting me up in a hotel.
In talking with the AIGA about this, they’ve made it exceedingly clear that I’m to consider myself independent and write whatever I want about the conference, which is pretty much what I intend to do. If I thought the hotel room and honorarium would be a problem w/r/t my objectivity in covering the event, I would have declined them both. The bottom line is that if money were no object (if the conference were free and took place entirely within walking distance of my apartment), I’d want to go and write about it anyway.
[2] Although I will also be appearing on a related panel about blogs, journalism, and design with Steve Heller, Michael Bierut, Armin Vit, and Jen Bekman.
Update: I’ve changed the first paragraph slightly, from “covering the conference as a blogger/journalist” to “covering the conference as a blogger”, which under the circumstances is more accurate. I am not a journalist in this instance or any other.
If you’ve got a Rubik’s, yo, this
If you’ve got a Rubik’s, yo, this will solve it. Check out the link while cubist revolves it… (thx keith)
Long interview of Jane Jacobs by James
Long interview of Jane Jacobs by James Kunstler. I think it may be time to read The Death and Life of Great American Cities again.
The existence and behavior of dark matter
The existence and behavior of dark matter is puzzling indeed, but some UK astrophysicists speculate that adding three more spacial dimensions to the universe explains the gravitational behavior of dark matter. If they exist, these extra dimensions would be about a nanometer across. A baby step toward string theory?
A list of cliches in advertising, including “
A list of cliches in advertising, including “tortilla chips are the most exciting experience any group of young people can experience”. The list is UK-centric, but still pretty good.
“One summer day in France in 1826, Joseph
“One summer day in France in 1826, Joseph Niepce took the world’s first photograph. It’s a photo of some farm buildings and the sky. It took an exposure time of 8 hours. Voila! It had to feel pretty incredible, like magic.”
Update: Lots more info about this photo here. (thx Paul)
An interview with David Greiner of Campaign
An interview with David Greiner of Campaign Monitor. Some good stuff in here about starting a small business on the Web.
The MoMA has acquired The Plum Blossoms
The MoMA has acquired The Plum Blossoms by Henri Matisse (picture), the whereabouts of which have been unknown for 30 years.
Fun little read on how a guy
Fun little read on how a guy named Michael Larsen hacked the Press Your Luck game show: “In November of 1983, he recorded every episode of Press Your Luck over the course of several weeks. He studied these videotapes, slowed them down, and froze the images to examine randomized tile sequences frame by frame. If you haven’t already guessed, Michael Larsen discovered that the Big Board on Press Your Luck was not a randomized display, but an iterative, sequential pattern which gave itself away once you knew what to look for.” (via cyn-c)
The lofty world of food reviewing gets
The lofty world of food reviewing gets some much needed profanity and street-sensibility in this article, Food Critic Tears Radish Canapes With Salmon Mousse A New Asshole (The Onion, of course).
The letter-pairs analysis application reads in some
The letter-pairs analysis application reads in some text and displays a graphical representation of distribution of letter pairs used in the text. Love the aesthetics of the information display.
Mobile usage
Quite a few folks are pointing to the results of this survey (graph here) about what features people want on their most frequently used mobile devices. The results are interesting but also probably misleading in about 1000 different ways (text messaging didn’t even make the list). But it got me thinking about how I use my most frequently used digital device, my mobile phone. In order of a combination of most usage and importance, here’s what I use my phone for:
- Clock. I don’t wear a watch, so I look at my phone all the time to check the time.
- Taking pictures + sending them to Flickr.
- Voice. I dislike talking on the phone, but when you gotta, you gotta.
- Text messaging. Texting is preferable to voice in many instances and many friends text more often than they call nowadays.
- Taking pictures. I think of this as distinct from the photo + Flickr usage above. The camera on my phone just isn’t that important to me without the ability to easily publish them to the Web.
Stuff I don’t want on my phone:
- Music. I am unconvinced of the wisdom of cramming a music player into a phone. The user experience needs to be solved first.
- Email. I still use client-side spam filtering so reading my mail on a phone would be a painful exercise. And I can send email from my phone and that’s enough…I can handle not reading my email for hours on end.
- Web browsing. I love the Web, but my preferred portable device for accessing it is my laptop. Not worth the extra expense of adding it to my service plan.
What’s your most-used portable device and what do you use it for? Feel free to comment here or link to a post on your site.
And as long as we’re on the
And as long as we’re on the subject (you didn’t think we were even on a subject, did you?), I’m a fan of how Maciej is displaying his oil paintings. For each of his newer paintings (like this one of a West Village scene), he’s documenting the progress of the work as it goes along so you can see how the painting becomes a painting.
Update: Eric writes that he uses this technique for displaying how his art progresses as well (sample).
Use the Technorati Accelerator to “search on
Use the Technorati Accelerator to “search on any URL and get the same response you would have to wait thirty seconds for on their site”. Zing!
Scientists in Singapore have developed a battery
Scientists in Singapore have developed a battery powered by urine. Urine is rich in ions and ions are what make electricity go whoosh. (thx jeff)
Advice on surviving an unplanned free fall. “
Advice on surviving an unplanned free fall. “By tilting forward and putting your hands at your side, you can modify your pitch and make progress not just vertically but horizontally as well. As you go down 15,000 feet, you can also go sideways two-thirds of that distance — that’s two miles! “
A couple of recent OS X interface
A couple of recent OS X interface ruminations: rethinking the Finder and Spotlight revisited. Some good ideas in both of these, particularly the Spotlight one (I find Spotlight disorienting at times).
Among laparoscopic surgeons, those who have played
Among laparoscopic surgeons, those who have played video games in the past are significantly faster and less error-prone in a surgical training exercise than those who have never gamed. Even better were those who are current gamers…they realized 30% gains in speed and accuracy over their non-gaming counterparts.
For my photography nerd friends who own
For my photography nerd friends who own Nikon D70 cameras, here’s the Nikon D70 focus test chart. Looking closely at some photos I shot yesterday, I may have to try this out.
Both the NY Times and New York
Both the NY Times and New York magazine have fall restaurant previews. The southwestern part of Chelsea (+ the Meatpacking) seems to be really jumping these days…lots of stuff happening on 10th Ave (i.e. my walk to Eyebeam most days): Batali, Morimoto, Cookshop, Colicchio, etc. Maybe with all the action over there, maybe the High Line park will work…
New feature in the NY Times magazine:
New feature in the NY Times magazine: comics! First up, a six-month-long strip by Chris Ware, on whom I have a non-sexual crush.
There’s a book coming out in December
There’s a book coming out in December based on PostSecret, a web site that displays postcards with secrets written on them sent in by readers. I heard something long ago about the site not actually using reader submissions, at least in the beginning before it got popular enough to get the quality of entries that they post…did anyone actually verify or debunk that rumor?
Update: PostSecret proprietor Frank Warren responds and John Nick effectively explains how the site was bootstrapped from an offline event.
Apple introduces the iPod nano, which, wow,
Apple introduces the iPod nano, which, wow, it’s like a baby iPod. So cute.
10 good reasons to eat local food. Having
10 good reasons to eat local food. Having eaten local food for the better part of the last week, I can personally attest to some of these benefits. (via afb)
Is PowerPoint responsible for the woes of
Is PowerPoint responsible for the woes of the Space Shuttle? Well, no, but it’s not helping any. “The deeper problem with the PowerPointing of America — the PowerPointing of the planet, actually — is that the program tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful, ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese.”
Physicist Stephen Hawking has been reduced to
Physicist Stephen Hawking has been reduced to blinking to control his helper computer.
Adriana: “I thought you might be interested in a post I wrote a while back about a former editor of Elle who communicated for the last year of his life via blinks”.
Popcorn hacks
If you’ve got a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s Butter microwave popcorn on hand but no microwave, there’s no need to panic. Just tear open the bag and pour the kernels into a large pot. Put over medium heat. The kernels will be in a big clump of congealed butter-like substance…break them apart with a wooden spoon as the pot heats up and the “butter” starts to melt.
When the “butter” is melted, stir the kernels around with the spoon so they don’t burn. At this point, you may want to don some protective eyewear so that when the first kernels pop, you don’t get hot butter-like liquid in your eye; I just put on my sunglasses. When the first kernels pop, cover the pot and shake it across the burner so the kernels don’t burn. Stop periodically to listen for pops and to exclaim, “I can’t believe this is actually working!” When popping stops, quickly remove from the heat, and get it out of that hot pot into a bowl. Eat. As good as microwaved.
Interview with the fellows from skinnyCorp. Half
Interview with the fellows from skinnyCorp. Half of my current wardrobe is from Threadless and I haven’t had occasion to wear my nifty Naked & Angry tie yet.
Pairing wine with fast food. How about
Pairing wine with fast food. How about a 2003 Pinot with your Kentucky Fried Chicken or a nice Cabernet to go with your Taco Bell Burrito Supreme? Need more pairings for fast food? Try here, here, or here.
Fans of Six Feet Under will want
Fans of Six Feet Under will want to get their hands (and arms) on a Narm! tshirt. Narm. Narm!
Health care in America
Sorry for the extensive quote, but this paragraph (along with the following one) in Malcolm Gladwell’s article about health care in America does a fine job in laying out why it’s failing:
The U. S. health-care system, according to “Uninsured in America,” has created a group of people who increasingly look different from others and suffer in ways that others do not. The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is unpaid medical bills. Half of the uninsured owe money to hospitals, and a third are being pursued by collection agencies. Children without health insurance are less likely to receive medical attention for serious injuries, for recurrent ear infections, or for asthma. Lung-cancer patients without insurance are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment. Heart-attack victims without health insurance are less likely to receive angioplasty. People with pneumonia who don’t have health insurance are less likely to receive X rays or consultations. The death rate in any given year for someone without health insurance is twenty-five per cent higher than for someone with insurance. Because the uninsured are sicker than the rest of us, they can’t get better jobs, and because they can’t get better jobs they can’t afford health insurance, and because they can’t afford health insurance they get even sicker. John, the manager of a bar in Idaho, tells Sered and Fernandopulle that as a result of various workplace injuries over the years he takes eight ibuprofen, waits two hours, then takes eight more—and tries to cadge as much prescription pain medication as he can from friends. “There are times when I should’ve gone to the doctor, but I couldn’t afford to go because I don’t have insurance,” he says. “Like when my back messed up, I should’ve gone. If I had insurance, I would’ve went, because I know I could get treatment, but when you can’t afford it you don’t go. Because the harder the hole you get into in terms of bills, then you’ll never get out. So you just say, ‘I can deal with the pain.’”
You can point fingers at what’s wrong or who’s responsible all day long, but the facts remain, America’s health care system sucks…well, unless you’re rich, in which case nothing really sucks. The BBC put it well earlier this week in writing about the crisis in New Orleans:
The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society - has reached a crisis point this week.
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