I've been in Mallorca for a couple of days doing some stuff with Camper. This isn't a bad location for an offsite is it? And nice to find offsite catering featuring a real fire and waiters in white gloves. These Mallorcans know how to live.
The island is not over-endowed with wifi though. Hence spotty updates recently. Apologies for that. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, and I think I've carved out some time at the weekend to do all the School Of The Web stuff.
All this talk about buttons and simplicity reminded me of my favourite defunct brand of all time - My First Sony - a brilliant brand idea, but also a fantastic range of products. I have a number of bookmarked searches on ebay but this is the one that always cheers me up the quickest. These things are masterpieces, they're designed to be used by kids so they actually thought about how stuff should be used, they didn't just throw it all together and try to make it as small and black as possible. Many of them are genius, but my favourite is the alarm clock.
That entire big blue ring clicks round to move the alarm hand. Dead easy to use. The numbers are huge and legible. That big yellow button on top is the off thing. Easy to find. The radio tuning is simple analogue up and down. (Though it's broken, so I'm going to have to open it up some time.)
The best bit is that you can select how you'd like the alarm to sound; digital dog, digital chicken, digital train or digital er, digital thing. All of which are loud, grating and very en-wakening. Exactly what you want. (Actually they've got that same grainy, sampled, 80s crunch you get with an early Akai). Sometimes you want real buttons you can actually press. And you want them to do something silly. That makes for a great product.
Going to Kinetica (picture above is from kinetica) the other week reminded me about the Cabaret Mechanical Theatre, specifically the work of Tim Hunkin, who will be a fondly remembered hero to many (which makes it sound like he's dead, he's not). He used to do a brilliant cartoon in The Observer called The Rudiments Of Wisdom, and that's now collected here. He made a fantastically quirky series called The Secret Life Of Machines - a lot of which has made it to YouTube. The piece where he demonstrates how video tape works with sticky tape and rust is typically, quietly brilliant. (And you can see almost every thing from the series here on google video.)
But the moment that caused my biggest grin while re-discovering Hunkin was finding that he's installed loads of his arcade machines on Southwold Pier. I'm especially excited about The Quantum Tunnelling Telescope.
I'm thinking this makes Southwold Pier the perfect winter weekend day-out destination. Anyone fancy coming along?
I was a little overwhelmed this morning. In a good way. I made 20 new badges for this week and they were all gone by 11.15. A bunch of new people. Too many for the table and too many for my pathetic note-taking to cope with. What nice people though, every one of them. Trying to guess everyone's name is just going to land me in trouble. So I won't. Here are some pictures.
It was excellent to see everyone, including some regulars like Henry and the entire Staufenberger organisation (which I think is a first). And now there's two highly collectible 'coffee morning' badges that Ben will never get his hands on, and you know how he likes to collect stuff.
Also exciting - a splendid turnout at the planning meeting in Bucharest, a mooted coffee morning in Edinburgh and ongoing coffee-based activity in Portland, Kansas City and places I've probably missed. Hurrah.
It didn't really occur to me to blog about iPhone, not because I wasn't interested, because I was, but because I assumed everyone else would blog about it and what could I possibly add?
But what if everyone thought that? then it wouldn't get blogged at all.
So I wonder if there could be an event so big that no-one would write about it.
There's a similar logic in there to that Yogi Berra saying "Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded.". My only iPhone thought; what will go in that space on the bottom right? Or are they leaving it empty because of, you know, design.
I love the way blogging connects you with new people. A few weeks ago Sarah from Blag magazine emailed to say hello and introduce Blag because she'd been pointed at m'blog by Stef and Tom from Big Al's. And I'd been thinking that you've all probably heard enough planners banging on about brand polyphony and such so I thought it'd be interesting to interview some people who are building a really fascinating media property. And they kindly agreed. So here it is. I will confess to be a little intimidated interviewing professional interviewers but it seemed to go OK.
Blag is created with great passion, smarts and integrity by Sally A. Edwards and Sarah J. Edwards and you can tell they love what they do, which is probably why they're very good at it. It's a top magazine, you should try and get hold of a copy. We talked about Blag, obviously, about magazines generally (including nostalgia for great magazines of the 80s/90s like Sky, early Arena, Details and Raygun) and about how they don't mind crossing and/or blurring the line between advertising and editorial because their readers are savvy enough to know what's going on and they don't carry ordinary advertising in the magazine. (I think they're working out some of the ways brands and media owners are going to have to work together in a less interruptive world). I really enjoyed it, I suspect planners don't spend enough time talking to media creators. We should do more of it. It's a bit noisy in the background because the quietest place we could find in Covent Garden was a pub and it wasn't as quiet as we'd hoped, but I still think it's listenable.
Big thanks to Sally and Sarah for the time.
We also talked about little remembered but rather splendid 80s/90s TV programme Star Test; so I thought I'd add a little bit of that from YouTube featuring my hero, Martin Fry.
This post is by way of an apology. I'm way behind with my marking and all sorts. I owe you responses on the Maple Syrup assignment, and the last one. And I'm planning to write up some thoughts on the creative brief thing really soon. And I've not done anything about Post Of The Year, too late do you think? Just wait for Post Of The Month for January?
I have no excuses except for laziness, feckless time-wasting, being slightly over-whelmed by the response and the need to make a living. It's harder to get this stuff done when you're working for yourself rather than slacking off under the corporate yoke. I will get everything done just a bit after as soon as possible. Sorry.
In the meantime, respect to ilike for pointing out the Library Card Generator used above which is a thing of wonder and beauty.
Sledge are looking for a freelance planner. Details are over there on the left, in the distributed village notices.
The Long View is always a captivating programme but I particularly like this weeks - comparing the media scares surrounding video games now and those combining that disreputable purveyor of sex and alternate worlds; the novel in the 18th century, specifically Samuel Richardson's Pamela. It also points out the evils of the sofa, of which I'd not previously been aware.