Category: Branding and Marketing
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“Not Unpleasant” is Not Enough
An article in the New York Times the other day discusses a study that suggests that there are differences between men and women in how pleasant or unpleasant they find certain normal everyday activities. Apparently, for example, men find spending time with their parents far more pleasant then women do, while men disproportionally dislike home…
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There is No Strategy!
Designers of interactive products and services are having more and more influence on how businesses work, providing guidance that goes go far beyond layouts, flows, grids, colors, and movement — ideas that are fundamentally more that just look and feel. We are helping businesses understand and solve broader challenges, helping them define their core feature…
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TimesSelect is Dead. Times Op-Ed Columnists Become Relevant Again.
The New York Times is ending their TimesSelect “service” as of tomorrow, September 19th. Despite my deep resentment of the whole TimesSelect idea in the first place, I applaud the Times’ decision to end it and to finally align themselves with the way the web’s culture of thought actually works. During the 2004 election cycle,…
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The Big IDEA (Conference 2007)
I want to go to the IDEA Conference, which starts in two weeks here in New York. Conferences generally come in two categories. Conferences to meet people who do exactly what you do, and where you learn about how to do what you do better. Conferences to meet people you can do business with, and…
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My Aging Fleet
I’m pretty well-known among my friends and peers to be a gadget geek. But over the last 5 years or so, my gadget-acquisition pace has crawled to a near standstill. Most of the electronic hardware gadgets I’ve been using lately are actually pretty ancient: Mobile Phone: 2002 iPod (3G): 2003 Canon PowerShot Digital Camera: 2003…
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Designing the Bottle: Opening the Wine, Unboxing the Brand
In a recent interview, Michael Beirut noted that wine labels are one of the purest branding experiences: All wine bottles contain the same basic product (wine), so if you don’t know anything about a particular bottle of wine the graphic design of the label and the shape of the bottle are quite often the only…