Are business cards a thing of the past? As I was throwing away 50 or so old business cards, I realized I never look at them. If I want to contact someone, I email them. If I need to call them, I run a quick search in my email client and get their phone number. I haven’t touched my fancy-pants rolodex in years and honestly it’s probably the next thing to go from the top of my desk. How long before business cards are gone completely? When will they join 8-tracks, vinyl, CD’s, zip drives, phone books and newspapers for that long ride off into the sunset of irrelevancy? What will take their place?
Here’s a few contenders that are taking the problem on in one way or another (no affiliation):
I happened to be flipping through an old yearbook the other night and noticed something … BAD layout. For those of us still in school, it has started up again. And although we’re months away from the handout of yearbooks, the process of brainstorming yearbook layout design ideas has begun. It’s not so much the actual picture pages, but the pages in between where the structure falls apart. In most yearbooks, the layout and design are done by the students themselves and I know when I was in high school I didn’t have the best ideas about yearbook layout.
Neither did I, but that didn’t matter when I found this site, I BELIEVE IN ADV. Be careful, there’s about 200 pages here, and just spent my entire lunch going through the first 100 or so. There’s some great Ads here, so if you’re interested in marketing or design its worth a look. Even if you don’t have the time.
The latest Nordstrom Anniversary Sale Catalog has a model in a wheelchair on page 34. (In the next panel, she is inexplicably standing in order to show off her bedazzled-mom-jeans clad behind, but no matter.) This is a big deal, because they’re not making a big deal about it. It isn’t part of some exploitative reality TV publicity stunt and this isn’t a special catalog. It’s just there. Much like wheel-chair bound people in real life. Imagine that!
Yesterday, a video was making the rounds called Why every guy should buy their girlfriend Wii Fit. It definitely struck a chord with me (A 27-year-old male, aka the intended audience) as it featured a girl gyrating around and bending over repeatedly in her underwear, courtesy of actually playing Nintendo’s Wii Fit. (Video is mildly NSFW.)
Why every guy should buy their girlfriend Wii Fit was originally submitted to YouTube by a user named tinsleyadvertising and the two people featured in the video appear to be Tinsley Full Service Advertising employees Giovanny Gutierrez, Director of Interactive Media, and Lauren Bernat, Account Executive. At least it sure looks like it, after doing a quick search for “Giovanny Guiterrez” at Flickr…
Now, one of two things is going on here:
Nintendo has paid Tinsley Full Service Advertising for a viral marketing campaign that was worth every penny.
They should have.
In 4 days this video has been viewed almost half-million times by people who use YouTube, Reddit, and/or Digg. Not necessarily all first-adopters at this point, but definitely a tech-savvy crowd. Most definitely made up of people that would buy or own a Nintendo Wii. This was a very nice piece of viral marketing.
Or so I thought until I read the YouTube comment that was submitted with the video: “This is why I love Wii Fit. ‘Nuff said. PS This is a personal video I made… I just work at Tinsley Advertising (not related to Nintendo whatsoever). However I’d love to do work for them :)” This led to an argument about Giovanny’s agenda with my co-worker, Geoff. Maybe, they weren’t paid by Nintendo, maybe they were, maybe they want to be.
Either way, they’ve surely got Nintendo’s attention now. Nice, er, move, Giovanny.
UPDATED 05/30/08: The L.A. Times picked up on the story yesterday afternoon. They contacted Giovanny, who said that it was not a paid viral and that his girlfriend…
“She was FURIOUS,” wrote Gutierrez, who said she “called me on the phone screaming her head off and then hung up on me.”
“But now [she] finds herself actually laughing about it and enjoying her 15 minutes of fame.
DANGER
DO NOT TOUCH
Not only will this kill you, it will hurt the whole time you are dying.
Don’t tell my boss, but occasionally, even I run across a message so clear and so profound that applying standard graphic design principles to the presentation would do little to make it any clearer.
This post is pretty popular and we’ve got a few of these hanging around the office now. So, if you’d like your own hilariously scary warning sign, just download one of these ready-to-print versions we’ve made for your convenience:
These warning signs come with a warning: Voltage Creative is not responsible for your use of these signs. If any sort of boy-who-cried-wolf situation arises because of them: well, we told you so. Use these caution signs with extreme caution. In fact we recommend that you don’t use them at all, lest through their use you die painfully because you’ve made yourself immune to signage about dying painfully.
Design doesn’t get much more modern, and the works don’t get much more classic than this gorgeous new edition of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Nicole Peterson, a recent graphic design graduate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, designed these book covers for Dante’s Divine Comedy.
“I wanted to create a set of covers that didn’t use images from the [Hieronymus] Bosch Hell painting, or any images of Dante and Virgil that are normally found on covers for the Divine Comedy, I was inspired by Dante’s use of mathematics and architecture in describing Hell, Heaven and Purgatory [and] employed simple geometric shapes and color to represent these places, while still keeping the design simple and allowing the reader to use their imagination when reading these vivid poems.”
Bravo, Nicole, they are truly inspired. Here’s a link to Nicole’s Flickr Page, and make sure you click through on those thumbnails at the top to get a look at the higher-res versions, they’ve got some serious impact.
“It’s the hat.”
A power play of optical and emotional manipulation. This print ad for Hut Weber Hats by Serviceplan is a perfect example of the Gestalt Principles of closure and proximity nicely applied.
