Social Media Abides

Well our old pal myspace seems to be finally accepting the dominance of facebook and has introduced Facebook Connect across the site. The service is called 'Mashup with facebook' (ironic as myspace is a bit of a mashup these days).

Not only can you now use myspace to publish updates to twitter and facebook (in a kind of teetdeck fashion) you can also opt to share information between the two services to allow myspace to create a customised page with your favourite music, TV shows, movies, celebrities etc, and also suggests related content you might like. You can expect to see that wee 'like' button spreading like a rash over myspace any minute now. This fits in with the new direction that myspace have taken, moving the emphasis from the 'friends' aspect it pioneered to a "social entertainment destination" sharing videos, music and games. To be fair the only people i know who still use it are people in bands and the more hardcore of music fans.

Whether this is going to lure users back to the ghost town of social networking past is doubtful. Some have speculated that the owners (News Corp) are getting ready to sell off the service. Would facebook be prepared to move in and buy the carcass? It would certainly create quite a monopoly in the social networking world.

Speaking of monopoly... (ahem, sorry)

In other news, I had always suspected that the 'Big Lebowski' holds the answers to all of life's problems and it's starting to ring true. Here's some advice from the flowtown.com blog on how to handle your social media, taking insights from the DUDE:

Social Media Insights from the Big Lebowski

Without a hostage there is no ransom.

Wizard Smoke

This is a short skate video from SALAZAR in Vancouver. Having been around for a while i'm really suprised no one has turned this into an ad yet. If you get bored by the skateboard stunts then skip to around 5.40 for the water jumps. Great simple idea and really well executed.

Featuring: Bradley Sheppard, Alien, Nate Lacoste, Chris Connolly, Nate Roline, Stacy Gabriel, Mike Klinkhamer, and Rob Rickaby

Directed By Liam Mitchell
Shot By Nathan Drillot and Liam Mitchell

10x10

Okay, so in the past i have been guilty of not paying quite enough attention to the news. Time to remedy that, homepage set to bbc news and let's keep an eye on this

'Ten by ten' is described as an 'interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time'.

How it works: "Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period. In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input."

The system gives you a snapshot of what is going on in the world and can be viewed by the hour, day, month or year.

Posterise

Over the time of my masters course (which i've just completed thank you very much) i've managed to hobble together a few posters using my limited knowledge of the old photoshop. So here they are.

Moving clockwise:

The first poster was for a piece of coursework where we had to pick an organisation to perform a design audit on. I chose the much loved (and hated) Glasgow Subway. Although it often seems to be in the dark ages it was interesting to see the effort that had gone into re-branding and pushing the service forward on a limited budget. As part of my recommendations I had chosen to push the work they had already done with the 'S' subway logo and orange colouring. I made a series of posters and an animation (if i work out how to upload an animated powerpoint i'll put it up here) centred around using that logo in the core messages. Unfortunately the move was perhaps so obvious that SPT produced a pamphlet using pretty much exactly the design below before i handed it in... still think mine looks better... humph.

The second poster was for the Caledonian Creates exhibition put on at our University. We were given an open brief and i wanted to portray the most important elements that I felt I had gained from the Masters programme and what i felt was the essence of the course, the coming together of strategy and creativity.

Poster number three was not uni related but a request from a flatmate who was producing a play for an independent theatre company named 'Flatrate'. The show was a success which i put entirely down to the poster and not its raunchy content. Unfortunately i was not present when these 'explicit polaroids' were being taken in my house. Damn.

The final poster was part of a project myself and a classmate did in conjunction with the university and Springburn Academy. Essentially it was an after school crafts project for first years where the pupils made these paper mache masks (we started off with a theme but the kids had other ideas). We produced a series of posters featuring each of the pupil's masks with a hijacked version of our Caledonian creates logo. We wanted to encourage the pupils by demonstrating that their efforts could contribute to a creative project and that art and design was a career path they should consider if they enjoy it.

What the f**k is my social media strategy?

Save your self some time and effort with this website that will generate social media strategies and jargon at the click of your mouse.




Blatantly ripped off from the people who do the fucking excellent whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com



Indecision is a thing of the past. Who says swearing isn't big or clever?

Thinkin oot his box

Here's an interesting video brought to you from the Creators Project about a German inventor/artist by the name of Julius Von Bismark. In addition to having a truly excellent beard / hair cut combo he's coming out with some really original ideas like his out of body experience camera and his much sought after 'Image Fulgurator', seen below.





And sorry agencies but it appears he's not up for selling you his ideas. How selfish. Check out the video underneath. You can turn on the subtitles in the 'CC' box in the player if they aren't showing up... or go and learn how to speak German.

When good bananas go bad

I've always liked that Chiquita logo, as with my beloved Tunnocks packaging i would have said don't ever mess with it. But i must admit this campaign is pretty good. They're taking the most recognisable element of the brand and putting a clever twist on it that is definetely going to grab peoples attention when they're at el supermercado. And as a skateboarder you don't have to convince me about the joys of sticker collecting. Everybody loves a good sticker.

And of course the campaign doesn't stop with the stickers. For all your digital banana related needs you can pop over to eatachiquita.com and go bananas with games, viral videos, animations and even make your own sticker (which you can buy on a t shirt).

They've also jumped on the skateboard bandwagon. (oh no they di-uhnt) So i'll wrestle with my 'only buying from skater run companies' conscience for a while to see if this guy will be going up on the kitchen wall... it would work well with the hideous yellow paint job i've inherited.

You can read a full interview with the designer over at design:related for his insights into this particular brand development.

One more thing before you go tho... It's all well and good coming up with this sort of stuff to make a brand a bit more exciting BUT when you have problems with your company image with regard to ethics and human rights violations you might want to sort that out first otherwise there is always going to be people telling you where to stick your bananas.

Here's the Banana Sessions to play out this post. A jolly good wee band fae the Burry Toon.