widgets, and the reality of ads online

widgets are the next territorial battle. how many widgets will we have time for? well, not widgets, but what's behind them.
widgets will be bit like radio frequencies. but we can keep them on our laptops, or under a widgets icon.
widgets will be the front-pages of our lives in some ways, to the stuff we like to check on often. like our favorite magazines used to be. or favorite radio and tv shows and sports channels and what not.

difference is that back when the printed paper magazine came out once a week, or bi-weekly, (well, still does, although living in singapore there were never such a thing as a magazine other than 8days, which one can live without, here in the states we have thousands) and the tv show appeared 9pm on thursdays or whatever, we may become more fickle, because we know we can catch it all whenever we want to, and thereby we may not catch it all. I"m not talking tivo, i'm talking tv and radio content over the web.

Me? I buy the paper version of New York Post, 25 cents, a rag, for a quick and easy read on the train into Manhattan. Most interesting shit is the NY political and mafia gossip. It keeps me in a new york state of mind, if you like. and tells me how the Mets or the Yankees did the night before.

New York Times, is a quality paper i've stopped buying. i read it for free online.
Same with all ad press. All free online. same with wired, american photography, etc. etc.
and actually, I bloody never click on any advertising on those sites.

the fact is that the web might be the biggest enemy of advertising. It doesn't work on the web. people ignore it. it's too intrusive even in its most benign form. to succeed you have to entice people to engage with your brand. And catching them when they're not up to something else, such as reading what's on the site, or watching the movie on web tv. and here's the hook. you can't catch them when not up to something else. The "surfer" is not inactive.

only if it is something you really need is it worthwhile to stop by for it. or if it seems really, really fun.
but not if you have to interrupt something else.

Interruption is dead I'm afraid. To stay for a moment on a pretty or clever print ad didn't feel like interruption. It didn't feel like a side track. To click on a banner is side tracking.
so it's easier to ignore even if it seems interesting. And it's totally annoying f it also tries to get your attention by blinking or something.

the reality is that you may be interested in a new loan, or a new car, or flowers for you boyfriend.
Either you do in fact know where the bank is, where the car dealer and flower shop are, or you go and search for it online. you don't need ads for that. not nowadays. well, you might click on ads when searching. that's the yellow pages, or the small page ads as we know them.

You may buy and read a fashion mag or car mag because you like fashion and cars. thereby the ads are fun too.
Same of course with sites on topic. difference is that on tv it was linear. you go and pee. in mags you flip the page as quickly as it appeared. on the net you have to make the choice. You won't. Because it's not organic. it's a discourse. Not as easy as simply lingering on a print ad, or not going to the loo during a tv show.

I think b2b is where online ads can really work. people need to know about the products out there, therefore b2b advertising online will work done right.

other than that, it's e-commerce, which may not always be the place people shop, but at least a shop window, if you see what I mean. You check out what Kenneth Cole might have this week, then you go to the store.
If you like it you might buy in the store, or you might go back home and order online, to save perhaps a few bucks, or because they didn't have the color or the size in the store. Stores and their sites live in a symbiosis.
however, you wont get that feeling of a nice shopping bag. some people like "catalogue shopping, some don't. and to some extent, it depends on where you live.

and what about vodka or soft-drinks? well, games, drink tips, humor?, some stuff worth going back to. but how.
outdoor is going to drive this.
and free or cheap tv channels on the web where ads are sparsely populated. however, you're not going to stop watching your film in order to click to a site url on the spot that appears in the middle of it to make it free.
Toys? this is where they've figured it out. Webkinz is a big deal. And it's all got to do with the internet.
By the way, when did you see an ad for Webkinz? They don't advertise. It's all in-store and word of mouth, not even web advertising.

i think advertising has to get real about it's effects.
We're about to experience a rude awakening.
If the truth comes out.
Everybody is totally naive about it today.

design for the screen

in the beginning it looked like shit. but was kind of hip because it was new.
so however inept the designer was,a s long as it was on the we bit was cool.
soon some tried to do this shit offline.
and where's online typography and design going now?
well,for a while there was this weird debate about web and screen typography.
kind of like what used to work in print wouldn't work on the screen.
It was true for a bit. the screen resolution was so crude that only the boldest ugliest crap would work anyway.
Thankfully we're back to some basics here.

Good typography is making a come back on the screen.

Old easy to read fonts such as Century Schoolbook just reads beautifully on screen.

Wired looks okay, easy to read, old fashioned type, if youy like. Looks totally modern though.
There are plenty of others going in that direction.

So young designers need to learn history again. I always maintained you need NOT start with knowing your history. I stress
it's better to start doing your own shit for a bit. Out of passion and interest. If the flame is with you after a while you will get curious, wanting to know more, and soon enough you start to get interested in the lineage. The heritage.

In time, we all need to understand and know our and Bodoni, Caslon, Baskerville, Plantin, Morris fuller Benton, Tschichold, Robert Black, Neville Brody, Fred Woodward, and many others, in no particular order, all brilliant designers and most of them type cutters. Ranging from the 16th century to almost modern times (like 20 years ago.)

Is there anything really that different from the old print days?
Well, not really. Not as far as legiblilty goes. No not with modern screens. Other than we might be more used to read more various typefaces as we've been exposed to a significantly greater variety of type than generations before us, which gives the typographer more freedom. What used to be hard to read 20 years ago, is now easier to read. We're trained.
That, however, doesn't give us less responsibility. I'd hate tosee type fall back into the gutter.
Type needs to be beautifully and carefully set and handled to look and read well. Whether it's a brutal no nonsense Railroad Gothic, the ubiquitous Helvetica or a fine Didot.

It is, still, all about good design.
Combined with interesting and intriguing ideas.

However, there's a little thing that is somewhat different on the screen compared to print; a touch that was never used that much in print, and still isn't. The shaded stuff. The graded stuff. The shadowed stuff.
It simply looks cheesy on fiber, but somewhat more modern and dimensional on the screen. Done right, carefully, not overly obvious, it works, like in the example form Apple above.

Well. As usual I was about to say, and said,, Apple gets it right. The design in the pix above, a slice of their site, could have been a page out of a brochure. Besides the careful grading.
It's a fresh and modern feeling web page.

If only all those great old media typographers and designers could embrace their screen, things would start to look fine.
Most sites look like crap.
We need the old media guys and gals to make this great.
tjey may not LIKE the fragmentation of stuff, but it doesn;t mean they don't get it if thew want. it doesn't mean they can't make it loom fantastic.Think if it this way.
You create a great game. Lot's of cool levels. Action, Stuff.
But if you can't get the carachters to look right you still don;'t have a good game.

Bring old schol and new school together. don't shy away form each other.
Old school agencies are too desperate hirting chief new technology officers , when they shoukd instead hir great ecnicians and have them work toegeth with great designers and evetybosy in between.
the chief new technology officer is coming forn the wronf end of the specrrum big fcking mistke if you ask mne. but the big old staid agencies are despreate, so they become dumb. Really dumb.
Goodby might be aqn old estsblished creative shop, but hey, ther are still creativeso they got it.
the Ogilvies of the world didn't. Even if their Toronto office manage to win some wrb accoladesfor the dove viral, for a campign thaqt was in facdt invented old school, by a german team, and then brought out by the london agency, adn of course consequently hi-jacked as the the great achievemnt of the Ny office. I doubt my old boss knew anything about this campaign before it beocme a success story.
I'm sure an honest Steve Hayden, of 1984 Apple fame, would agree, but he won;t because he's now big biz as well. (Love you man, nevertheless.)
Hey, the only guy not afraid to cuss and curse and gripe is George Parker of www.adscam.typepad.com fame
Either he's comfortably economically independent, although I doubt it as he lives in bloody Idaho, or he thinks he will die soon

Howanyfurtherwaymore.

The embarrassing fact is that if you randomly pick 100 sites and 100 magazines, the magazines would win hands down on most very aspect of design and content. Including photography, typography, legibility, navigation, and not least, as said content. (Yes, I know, wired has more or less, more really, of the same content online as offline, but still, their printed magazine works better, besides the fact that they can do some video online as well. But who the fuck needs video if it isn't terrifically great? As my friend George Tannenbaum (www.adaged.blogspot.com) says, nontent is not content.

I'd encourage the old guard to employ their skills to the computer screen.
There's no mystery about it.
Just bloody do it. And hey, all clients out there, don't think it's such a mystery, and don't think you need to be 12 years old to get it.

I guess an old pro like Lee Clow has something of a finger or more in this example of Apple's simple brilliance.
And most everything Apple does.

What happens when newspapers die and got to the www?

Almost from the beginning of the www there was talk about a different kind of writing necessary for the internet.
Shorter, more snippety, simpler.
Combined with the need to understand navigation of a site rather than page turning, and the techniques for that.
Links and all.

Is it true that writing for news reporting thereby had to change?
For insightful articles?
For information and white papers?

First, writing has changed over time. Even long before we got the world wide web.
It hasn't necessarily become shorter. Probably longer with techniques that made writing and publishing easier and quicker.

Now. If you look at some online papers and magazines today you find the exact same articles online as in the print version.
Is that because the writers of these publications don't know the rules?
Or is it because they ignore the rules?
Or is it perhaps that the rule book written by the early internet folks simply doesn't apply?

I believe in the latter.

There's always been a place for the short snippets. The outlines.
The sketches.
Alongside the long stories. The deep insights. The fact filled informative journal.
This will remain true whether we continue to read our words on printed paper or on a screen.

Amazon's Kindle, the electronic book, proves that the experience doesn't have to be all that different from printed paper.
With more sophisticated technology, screens less tiring for the eye, better resolution screens, and a better understanding of typography among the designers designing for the screen, the gap is shrinking as far as the reading experience is concerned.

Besides, the argument that people don't have time to read for as long on the screen as they would when reading a book or a newspaper is flawed.
It's got little to do with technology at this stage and more to do with choice.

Modern people in modern societies spend an awful lot of time reading stuff on the screen, working on the screen, and doing just about everything from a screen. Small or big.

Now add reading books and newspapers.

With thanks to John Kuczala and New York Times for the illustration.

It's not only the 30 second spot that's dead

In my world the whole TV thing is dead.
The only time i deliberately turn on the TV nowadays is when I stay in hotels.
It seems less lonely with the images flickering in the background and the sound on.
I don't necessarily watch anything.

I get all the news I need from New York Times' and CNN's online versions.
And the newspaper on the train in the mornings.

I watch the movies and odd programs I want to watch when I want to.
Tivo takes care of that.

So, yes i do watch TV sometimes, but not the way I used to, which was whenever I had time or felt lazy.
Or when I wanted to catch a certain program I didn't want to miss.

With the option to watch everything whenever there is not the same urgency as before either and more often I simply never get around to watch what I had in mind to watch.

The computer takes care of most of my information and entertainment needs nowadays.

TV commercials?. Nothing can be more annoying. I can live without them. As a consumer.
That's from me, who makes a living in advertising.
Although, that said, its mostly web-based nowadays.

Before the TV was the modern campfire.
A bunch of friends with a case of beer and a match to watch.
Or more recently, American Idol with my younger kids.
And even they are annoyed by the commercial breaks.
So all in all, we use the TV as something gather around once or twice a week.
Very targeted.

The Internet certainly changed my behavior.
My kids never got into the daily TV routine anyway.
To them 30 second TV spots are simply something to ignore or poke fun at.
Advertising will never again be as simple as it was for a while.
People, whether young kids or older adults, don't go to the web to watch commercials.
Advert sing has to become much more embedded.
Without destroying the experience.

I borrowed the image from getty images.
http://legacycreative.gettyimages.com

Yahoo's lost it.

I've been trying to get to my inbox for like half an hour by now.
Up pops all sort of messages about temporary this and that.
This is just one of them.
This isn't just today.
It's been going on for weeks.
What's happening with Yahoo?
Is someone trying to make Yahoo work like crap?
Chasing away customers, driving down further the value of the company?
Or has Yahoo simply lost it?
Lost people who keep the servers running properly?
Or lost the ability to plan and build for the traffic they surely must be anticipating.
Is Yahoo falling apart?
Despite the pain in the butt to get all friends and business colleagues etc. use a new email address I'm very tempted to skip my Yahoo accounts and go with my gmail.
I'll give it a week max.
I'm getting very tired of this.
By the way, even while in, mails don't always open. which means I'll have to go back and refresh and try again.
Is somebody else out there experiencing the same problems?
It's not my computer, I have the same problems no matter what terminal I use,
i have four different computers at home, sure, that the same modem, but yahoo works as lousily at work.
I've tested it at friends too. Same crap performance.
Yahoo might be loosing it. I'm sorry for that. Been a longtime fan.
However, if Microsoft gets their hands on Yahoo, I might dump them anyway. I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft right now.

Internet addiction

In my last post I wondered what sort of super powers one would need in order to keep up with the latest everything on the web and its technology.
I warned against employees who seem to spend their entire days "learning" about what's out there instead of doing the work they'd been tasked with.
Yahoo today has an article on web addiction.
A disease I'm sure is more common than one might think.
In a way it's a bit like not being able to close a book when it's getting really interesting.
Problem is that the www doesn't have a last page.

check out http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/null/87251

when do they work?

I started working on websites and web-banners earlier than most of my generation.

More than ten years ago.

I could barely use a computer.

Despite the fact that I had worked on the Apple account for years.

An art director and designer by training my tools were not Quark orIllustrator.

I worked the old fashioned way. 

The studio had made the transition, and I felt as comfortable working with artists using computers as I was working with artists using sharp knives.

Well, more comfortable actually, as it had become so magically easy to see versions of most everything.

Suddenly  you didn't need a CLEAR idea of what you wanted, you could get away with a VAGUE idea.

Which isn't neccesarily as bad as it may sound. Ideas can grow bigger that way.

It's just that your committment to the end-result can wait the further down the process.

Over time agencies changed and soon every art director, and for that matter creative director, was supposed to do his or her own art, directly on the computer.

So I learnt Quark (for print work), Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign came along, Dreamweaver, and even Flash.

And that was just the beginning.

With the worldwide web exploding there were millions of things to keep track of.

Suddenly the target was moving so quickly that it started to take up my entire life.

And even though I spent most every moment awake trying to keep up and learning more there seemed to be hordes of people knowing a millions time more and discovering every new thing before I'd discovered them on my own.

The Web.2.0, and all the social sites.

Cool sites. New tools.

New versions.

New.

Some people kept sending me like 20 mails a day with new stuff I just had to check out,

Stuff to do. The latest tech.

At the time I was managing a group of over 50 creative people in interactive, and traditional DM. At Ogilvy One. Not a bad shop mind you.

But.

I started to wonder how the heck some of the guys reporting to me could find time to do any work at all?

As they apparently managed to keep abreast of all things new and report to everyone about it.

Either they're alien, or they've decided it's better to know the latest than to try and invent it.

That it was better to be able to talk about all the latest stuff rather than doing any of it.

Don't hire someone who spends his day researching the web, writing blogs, and shooting off e-mails to the left and right all day long.

Not if you're not a tech magazine where this type of work might have a place.

I was always a keen reader of magazines. I enjoy the way the best of them are designed. The photography.  The illustrations. The writing.

The good thing about magazine design is that one doesn't have to bother with technical stuff.

Just concentrate on the quality of the design and imagery, and the stories.

Basically the same with film. You have an idea, you talk it over with people who are technical experts and it all happens.  There's even a director basically taking over your job and you just tag along and some credit for it. 

From my point of view, as an art director and creative director, the old media was about ideas and production values.

This all fell part online.

Ideas were reduced to some simplistic animations.

Sure, eventually Flash came along and with it some magically talented artists and now you can roll over a home-page and stuff stretches and bounces. But how much fun is that after a while?

It must connect with an idea. And fair enough it does. In some cases.

www.rga.com has done some fabulous stuff for www.nikeid.com.

Connecting wonderfully with the audience. It's useful. Therefor it enhances the value of the brand. Content worth taking part of and interacting with.

Wieden + Kennedy's site www.wk.com is totally cool looking.

But it is a bit of a mess nevertheless.

I visited the page to try and locate some interactive work. 

You need patience and time.

It's only fun once.

But at least it looks fabulous. Which I'm personally a sucker for.

I'm also certain that the great looks of many a magazine are what made and still make them attractive.

That, however, can't be said of the same magazine's websites.

Wired, for example, is a nicely put together paper magazine.

Their site is functional and fairly nice, but a far cry from the quality of the paper version, despite the same content. And a similar look and feel.

The same can be said for basically every magazine out there.

The other problem with sites vs. paper magazines is that we're still not where we should be with sites.

The whole idea with a screen is that we can play stuff that moves.

Now with broadband there's no excuse really.

Still, only a fraction of content is moving.

The perfect magazine site would be more like a TV channel.

But cooler.

With aplenty of 3 minutes, and 5 minutes, and longer "tv" programs.

A smorgasboard of video content, mixed with still versions for those so inclined.

The little advisory bits you find in magazines such as Esquire on stuff like the three best tie knots wouldn't be illustrated by an illustration or a photo, but rather be a little movie. etc.

The seasons ten best suits would be a parade of guys actually moving, showing of the clothes as they would look in real. 

This of course, could prove to be really costly. 

Which will require a totally new production model in order to keep the cost factor low enough to be affordable.

Well, now I'm getting carried away. I will get back to these things soon.

I just want to end with my notion that perhaps those who seem to now just about everything about what's out there do nothing, and those who do, concentrate on one or a few aspects and simply don't have time to keep up with it all. to be ahead of the curve to shouldn't try to keep up with it, you should be the curve.

I mean, how long can your http://del.ici.us/ get before you have to spend you entire life with it?