Do you usually choose the fast lane?

Posted by Anne on June 21, 2010

If so, this might be of great fun & interest to you.

Most of you should know about the Fun Theory, initiated by Volkswagen. The company brings some new fun to it these days with the launching of VW Polo GTI.

The marketing campaign, run exclusively on the Facebook official page, is comprised of a platform with the following motto: “Fast Lane – Driven by Fun”.

The Fast Lane Facebook page can bring you to the action faster, if you’re in a hurry and below you can see how the people in Berlin were driven by fun:

For the little Japanese in all of us

Posted by Anne on June 10, 2010

I can only guess that Eric Fischer thought of this when he designed the following maps. The red dots show the most popular photo spots among tourists. The blue ones are the popular photo spots for locals. The yellow ones are undetermined.

The author used the GPS information of images on Flickr, combined with the home city of the user taking a certain photo.

Now sit back and make your holiday itinerary, the summer vacation is so close.

London

Moscow

New York

For the full gallery at high resolution and city hints (79 cities), go here.

Is this a golden spoon or what?

Posted by Anne on

Our dear Sturmdrang Institute deals, among other nice stuff, with research. Here’s what they lately discovered, on one of the daily breakfast sessions.

Exactly. A golden spoon.

And look what we found at Danone France:

So, we’re really curious now. What do you think the silver/golden spoon stand for in dairy targeting?

And which one’s more flattering to you?:-)

First, there was the touch

Posted by Anne on May 11, 2010

David Griner with his article on The Social Path and Google with its recently new keyboard toy started some thinking and debates around the office related to the future usage of classical keyboards versus touchscreens. Do you think that the next generation will ever use a keyboard again?

source: Gizmodo

We’re already resignated to the thought that our children and grandchildren will never use the Chinese Fountain Pens we had and will never get stained with blue ink while practicing neat writing. The future sounds like this: you touch the screen with your finger and the word is there.

The present already offers us plenty of this innovative writing: smart phones and smart displays, controllers for video games and all sorts of smart tricks used by platforms like Google, which are able to predict the words you want to type, so that you can quit writing the full sentence and resume to pressing  “enter”. There is also Swype, the finger-tracing text programm and the list is open to daily releases.

That should make it easier for us to accept that this is the future; maybe also the present, as 2 year olds are able to use an iPhone before being able to read or to write.

We’ve got our own classical pro&con list, which we leave open for your opinions.

For the pro we can track down the following: touchscreens are smaller and slimmer, so you save up space. They can easily be improved, with a software update. They offer the option to switch the language automatically and they can perform translations on the content. And then there are the smarter touchscreens, like the iPhone, which can predict the letters you want to type and make it easier and faster to select those ones.

For the con we would start with the lack of a touch feedback: when pressing a button, you have the physical evidence of your action and you wait for an answer, whereas when dealing with a touchscreen, you can have a delay in answer and may find yourself in the situation of not knowing what to do – wait or type the same leter 10 times until you get a confusing display? Another con point would be that you cannot use a touchscreen without looking. You may be able to type on a physical keyboard just by feeling the letters and watch the screen or something else at the same time; but touchscreens require your full attention.

Some experts give an insight on the world of touchscreens here.

And while they do this, we can think of what to do with all the free space we save by using touchscreens: maybe store some books and oldfashioned diaries? Nostalgia has to be fed somehow.

Going from 8 to 0 on May Day

Posted by Anne on April 30, 2010

It all starts back in 1886 in the U.S. when several hundred thousand workers won the right to work only 8 h/day for the same pay check.

Nowadays, for the 1st of May we work 0 h/day. Sometimes, if it’s on a Tuesday, we don’t work on Monday either.

So it took about 130 years to go from 8 to 0, how long do you think it will take to go from 1 day to 1 week?

Transparency at its best

Posted by Anne on April 28, 2010

Here’s below what you get when you combine a clear brief with a brilliant simple idea and loads + loads of work.

Never seen a more transparent ad, have you?

New calendar in town

Posted by Anne on April 8, 2010

Teasing you with some oven-fresh preview of the new calendar.

It’s with something that everybody has or at least should have. Will let you guess what it’s all about, i will only say they come in most different shapes, colors and attitudes.

Starting tomorrow – available all around the country. Distributed through friends of Friends.

Essential know how for designers

Posted by Roxana on December 15, 2009

As a designer you probably know about Design Reviver.

And if you don’t, then you should read this full of tutorials and inspirational blog for web designers. Here is a good start: know more useful and precise stuff about how important is style, project management, type, creative thinking, layout, photography, social media and others as such in “10 Essential Skills Every Graphic Designer Should Have”.