my friend jason makes absinthe flavored lollipops, because this is what 20-somethings in san francisco do:
no hallucinations, but chase it with a few vodka tonics, and they can guarantee you’ll be LIT!
rad!
today’s awesome ad award goes to:
…AOL news? yeah. apparently. way to make an ad that speaks to a demographic that’s been writing you off for a minute.
thanks (ariel)
look at this cool new thing!
get your post-apocalyptic designer dream on…
Illuminated is a new animated series being created by some of the people behind GNN (Guerrilla News Network), Phong.com (Eminem’s “Mosh”), Pod Collective, Broken Saints, and ConceptArt.org.
and while you’re looking at that you may also want to look at this: how to share illuminated
and this: how to buy illuminated
it’s refreshing to see the strategy match the caliber of the product.
“cake or death?” and other user experience design options to consider
after mentioning him in the previous post, i ended up going on what can only be described as an eddie izzard bender.
a self-identified “male lesbian,” and “action transvestite” (you know… “running, jumping, climbing trees… putting on makeup while you’re up there”: action transvestite), izzard is also fluent enough in english and french to do standup in both. so clearly the man understands a thing or two about the intricacies of hybridity and cross-cultural communication–phenomena that likewise are pretty fascinating for me.
i first saw dress to kill in 2002, and what forever earned my respect for izzard’s genius is when, during the encore, he actually performs a bit in french and manages to get everyone in the audience–and me watching–laughing hysterically. i don’t know french. neither does most of the rest of the english-speaking, san francisco audience where the show was recorded. yet in a feat of linguistic alchemy he somehow is able to completely pull it off. we’re watching him in a different language, and we totally get it. it’s such a bewildering display of how little a language barrier might actually matter in the process of understanding people who are unlike us that it feels like you’ve just witnessed a magician perform rather than a comic.
so somewhere in the course of the haze induced by binge consumption of every glorious, sexie, eddie izzard clip on youtube last weekend, i stumbled onto his website. i’m not entirely sure i remember how i got there, but i do remember flashes of what happened after. (note: this will be way funnier if you’ve actually seen eddie’s shows. since i had just watched several years of them before i arrived at the site, it was completely hilarious to me.)
when i went to sign up for eddie’s email list, i was faced with the following options:
Send me news and info about Eddie via Email
Only send me gig & appearance emails for my chosen country
Cake OR Death
when was the last time you were asked THAT before joining a mailing list?
and furthermore, what’s a nav. section called 
gonna lead you to?
click on it and an audio clip of izzard’s voice admits, “well, it was the pressy-makey-doey-things page…but that didn’t really fit it.”
maybe you might want to pressy-makey-doey up on eddie’s sexie fridge…
…where you drag words eddie utters during his show onto the jam smear on the fridge and then play them back to hear him say customized nonsense. (“jamtart arthur squeezy fishburger murderers catapult” is a good one).
but let’s back up for a second. maybe you’ve never seen eddie’s standup. maybe you came here because you’ve seen eddie in a movie, or on his TV show, the riches, and you’re trying to find out more about that. then you want the 
page. and when you click on it, eddie’s relentless, adlibbing audio which follows you around–as in real life so on the internet–announces in a tone of sophistication, “this is the acting page. it is a very serious page.” it, in fact, does look very serious. with a vogue-y black and white glamour shot of izzard. but when you look in the corner there’s a little purple beehive just below eddie’s face with bees buzzing all around it. drag your cursor over to it to find out what the hell that’s all about, and your mouse gets covered in bees!
you may have seen glorious. you may not. you may think that’s hilarious. you may not. but either way, at least there’s something different going on here. something unexpected. and it’s not some kind of slick design-gasm. it’s not trying to wow you with unprecedented feats of programming. no. the site actually comes off as a pretty uncomplicated bit of online real estate, but with these absurd little pressy makey doey game-y bits. and it’s great!
i think the most important question for anyone creating a website to answer has to be “what do you want the website to do?” and at the basic level this question is pretty easy to answer. sure you want it to provide information, to sell something, to connect people, to encourage participation, whatever. all that’s well and good, but as soon as it gets beyond the level of “what do you want it to do beyond simply function,” the vision for what’s possible becomes kind of polarized and discordant.
on one side of this mania there’s:
make more features!
make it slicker!
make it cleaner!
make it cooler!
make it bigger…
and on the other side is something my friend jesse shannon calls the “myspacification of websites,” where content management systems are churning out the online equivalent of cookie-cutter suburban tract homes. sure it might be super intuitive and user-friendly, and you might know where your neighbor’s bathroom is located when you come to visit without anyone ever having to tell you, but….isn’t there anything else to an online experience beyond features or navigability? beyond flash or content management?
how about “i want the website to entertain people.” or “i want it to make people laugh.” creating a FUN experience is just as valid as an easily-navigable, informative one, but between the designer, the developer, the information architect, and everyone else…. whose job is it to make sure a site is FUN?
i once got asked if the “this is not a trend” in masthead image on this site is supposed to be a reference to magritte’s “this is not a pipe.”
and while we may not all be looking for subliminal surrealist messages in our online experience, i think we are definitely looking for that kind of element of surprise, for unexpected juxtapositions, and even for non sequiturs sometimes, the same qualities that made the surrealist movement’s artistic expression so different from what had come before it. check out whateverlife.com on that note. the whole thing was originally created by a teenage girl who taught herself all the necessary design skills. not surprisingly, since there was no formal training which could instill upon her what a website SHOULD look or operate like, it looks completely different from any typical site.
perhaps it’s because we’ve always thought of the online experience as “browsing” that all we’ve been doing so far has just been making different versions of that one experience. maybe it’s time to re-imagine the whole thing. to integrate fun into its very functioning (as opposed to relying solely on the content), to reclaim it from its current humorless condition–and i mean, beyond just with LOLcats or cute hipster tech geek colloquialisms in dialogue boxes and error messages. if you’re looking at whateverlife and thinking, oh, so does this signify the next stage of a website experience?
instead think: maybe it just seemed like it would be fun.
quantum marketing
i’ll admit right now that this is not what i ought to be writing about.
i’ve been travelling for more of the past month than i’ve been at home, and just coming up with things to write about that i had no time to follow through on. so now that i’ve finally gotten to shower in my own shower, and sleep in my own bed, and the chance to unwind, there’s really so much else that i’d like to write about other than this.
like…. i’d like to give the ad age article, “Dove Viral Draws Heat From Critics” the “STOP SAYING THE WORD VIRAL!” award.
while i’m at it, i’d like to write about how “cool-hunting” ought to be stopped too. and not the thing where brands support emerging artists and underground communities to develop relevant, authentic consumer relationships, but that whole ridiculous concept that “cool” can exist out of context, like some kind creme to be skimmed off the top of one homogenized, pasteurized mass culture.
i’d like to write a post each for like a dozen different sound-bytes that come out of alex bogusky’s mouth during the course of these interviews: 1 + 2 (it’s like a full semester of jedi grad school in the course of an hour.) i’d like to thank john drake for turning me on the existence of these videos–thanks john!
i’d like to write alex bogusky an email asking if it’s by choice or by chance that he doesn’t have a wikipedia entry to hyperlink his name to. (altho i could maybe think of a couple of other questions i’d like to ask too.)
instead what i’m writing about now is NONE of that. i’m writing about the funniest thing i saw yesterday, which happens to have been on a party flyer:
“$15 at the door. 30 in costume. leave the playa in nevada.”
since apparel is one of the easiest mediums through which to fulfil burningman’s “radical self expression” tenet, it’s been a big deal among parties in the burningman scene to encourage attendees to dress up. for years party flyers have advertised that if you were down with costumery you’d get a discount, and if you arrived in “street clothes” you’d have to pay an exacerbated fee at the door. “playa” by the way, is the term used to refer to the dried up lake-bed in the nevada desert on which burningman is held.
the initial idea in encouraging “playa-wear,” i suppose, was about developing a certain immersive atmosphere at the events. it’s kind of like if you’re into society for creative anachronism type stuff, where you recreate medieval battles on the weekend or whatever, then it kind of kills the whole point if people don’t show up wearing period garb, wandering onto the battlefield in track suits or something. the (re)creation of that other time and place is what everyone is there for, and it only works if everyone participates in the process.
of course burningman, like any other subculture, has its own dress codes and aesthetic mores, and after a while what all those flyers were actually saying was that the admission was $15 higher if you weren’t wearing the UNIFORM rather than if you weren’t wearing a “costume.” to people that didn’t get the memo about what the burningman uniform is supposed to consist of, or for whom costumery is not really their mode of expression, the insistent empahsis on it is incredibly alienating, and to people that aren’t interested in uniforms in general (or this one in particular), it’s pretty frustrating.
the joke on this flyer is that it’s turned the whole thing around, and even come up with a brilliantly catchy slogan for the resistance.
which, of course, reminds me of something alex bogusky talked about in that interview….
(oh, if you’d watched those videos you’d know there’s no way i could just spend a whole post not talking about anything he says in there.)
so at one point he talks about this mini cooper campaign that cpb did for the car’s US launch. they bought a bunch of billboards announcing, “the suv backlash officially starts now.”
except that this was 2002, this was pre-inconvenient truth, and there WAS no SUV backlash. they needed it in order to have a way to market a small car for being exactly what it was, a small car, so they created it!
and the crazy part is that then it became real!
whether it was sheer luck, or intense prescience, or some kind of more formal consumer insight investigation, that the message worked–and by “worked” i mean, that it really DID herald the start of the SUV backlash in addition to making mini coopers sell–is because there was indeed an anti gass-guzzler movement brewing. before al gore pushed “green” over the tipping point, however, even a relatively small message like this could speak for an audience that was ready for the backlash to start.
in the interview alex mentions that advertising, and, hey, lets be real, ad agencies, have the capacity to influence pop culture through brands. or…. wait, is it brands have the capacity to influence pop culture through advertising? or is it through ad agencies? well, whichever way it is, the bottom line is that the most powerful influence comes from the capacity to articulate something that is already brewing below the surface. it’s like how quantum particles can be affected through simply being observed, so pop culture movements can be influenced by being given expression…..
wow:
“quantum marketing.” (there’s a concept).
perhaps that flyer for the party on friday will herald the start of the costume-mandate backlash? i’ve been repeating “leave the playa in nevada” to everyone since i saw it. the wait for a clever slogan officially ends now (thanks, mike).