I Heart Logos: A design competition judged by the design community
The advertising and design industry is well represented by self-congratulatory competitions.
I’m not pointing a finger, mind you. I love winning an award as much as the next creative.
Trouble is, most of these competitions are judged by a small panel of judges. So the fate of your hard-earned, fought-for and cussed-about work usually ends up at the whim of a few talented yet still opinionated people.
Fortunately, there’s an alternative.
If you’re a designer, especially one who specializes in logos, there’s a competition that’s not judged by a few fellow designers, but by the entire design community made up of talented people all over the world.
It’s called I Heart Logos.
And for a designer, it’s like The People’s Choice awards. Winning means you not only get featured in the I Heart Logos award book, you get bragging rights that designers like you, they really like you.
Below are a few pages from the latest award book, numero deuce. Eligibility for the third competition is in effect, and the deadline for entry is September 15.
Your mobile site: How to get started
If you haven’t made your website optimized for mobile users, you’re potentially making current and potential customers mad.
Think about it.
When was the last time you tried to pull up a website on your smartphone and:
- It took forever to load
- It loaded within a few seconds, but the type was so small you couldn’t even begin to read it
- It loaded and you could sort of read the type, but the page was so jam-packed with information you didn’t know where to begin
In any of these situations, you were most likely frustrated that you couldn’t get the information you wanted, and frustrated that the company had made life harder than it should be.
The result: It damaged the company’s brand, even if only a little. But little things add up.
Obviously, every interaction someone has with the brand is a chance for the brand to help enhance that relationship or damage it. If you’re not giving people a good mobile experience with your website, you’re damaging your brand.
Make it easy on people and they’ll appreciate you. They’ll think you’ve got your sh*t together. And they’ll be more likely to buy from you.
If you’re convinced a mobile version of your website is what you need to do but don’t know how to get started, Google can help.
They’ve created a site called GO MO that offers great background and statistics — in layman’s terms — and gives some pointers on how to get started.
So head over to http://www.howtogomo.com. You can use your laptop or your smartphone, since it’s optimized for mobile. Naturally.
RELATED: According to a new study, advertisers are spending way too much on print and not nearly enough on mobile, despite the fact that mobile is where people are spending tons of time. More details here.
We can pick our teachers and we can pick our friends and we can pick the books we read and the music we listen to and the movies we see, etcetera. You are a mashup of what you let into your life.
User experience and engagement are the new art and copy.
Are art director/copywriter teams dead?
I don’t think so.
The art director/copywriter team can come up with compelling messages and brand stories in the digital age just as before. But I do think that the team, and the agency it works for, has to be open to additional team members — UX specialists, social media experts, creative technologists, etc. — to make the story be all it can be, to expand it and make it resonate with the right people in new ways.
In the book Digital Advertising: Past, Present & Future, Danielle Fiandaca and Patrick Burgoyne ask this same question, and through interviews and their own perspectives, ultimately come to a similar conclusion. But how they get there and the points they make are well worth your time. The book is filled with great insights and even some humor, including an “interview” with Bill Bernbach, asking about his take on the digital revolution.
If you’re looking for a smart book about what the hell is happening out here in adland, this is one to have on your shelf or inside your iPad.
BONUS VIDEO: For more discussion about this question, watch these interviews with different agency creatives.
“Stunning Compilation of the 200 Best YouTube Videos in 2011” via Simply Viral.
About :29 in you’ll see a short clip from a fun video my agency did for a client, HTH Pool Care, which makes pool chemicals. You can see the entire HTH Pool Care video here.
It was a fun video to shoot, but like all projects with a small budget, it wasn’t easy. We had no time (or money) to rehearse the day before the shoot. So we had to spend the first half of the shoot day just figuring out what the kids could pull off with choreography. Luckily we were able to get enough good takes to make it work. And it ended up with about 1.5 million views across YouTube, Bing Video and other sites, and even got shown on The Discovery Channel.
You can say the right thing about a product and nobody will listen. You’ve got to say it in such a way that people will feel it in their gut. If they don’t feel it, nothing will happen.
A video profile of Scott Schuman, a.k.a. The Sartorialist
His beautiful blog features photos he’s taken of stylish people on the streets of New York, Paris, London and other cities around the the world.
There’s also another nice profile of him over at The Brander.
And he has an excellent book with a collection of his street style photos, called The Sartorialist.
