spotted owl

Design Part II: Bacon Edition

Not sure what this means, but bacon is absolutely everywhere now & has been for awhile. There's even an entire Toxel post about designs inspired by bacon.

There's also the recurring Baconnaise cameo on The Daily Show, the ever-popular bacon mints (not good) and the new bacon business cards. Oh, and sales of actual bacon are up too - it's now a 2 billion dollar business. Remember the Baconator? Wendy's sold 68 million in the first eight months. A quick search on vegetarianism shows signs of a slow-down. Very interesting. Wonder how Obama's healthcare plan is coming along...

Design ♥

Some of my favorite stuff from my new favorite design blog. Hooray Toxel ~

 

Other good ones to check out: design*sponge & noisydecentgraphics.

Barbarian Three

The slow trickle of sxswi blog posts are still coming - even though it's all starting to feel like ages ago.

But like I said, certain things have stuck with me and our agency visit from Rick Webb is one of them. Rick's a founding partner at The Barbarian Group, one of the most talked about shops over the last few years - really, ever since the launch of the chicken (now over 5 years ago, time flies). A few of my recent favorites: the CNN headlines t-shirts & the Unicef Tap Project collaboration.

Anyhow, one of our producers knows Rick and asked him to come in and talk to us about... interactive stuff. And he said yes. So we had a room full of creatives & designers that asked questions, aired frustrations and just talked. Rick listened, offered suggestions, even complimented the agency & offered Scottish rock recommendations.

Here are some highlights for me:

1) Try everything
Someone made the comment that it's impossible to keep up with all of the latest social media/ technology, not to mention predict what's going to be the next big thing. True. So Rick just signs up for everything - meebo, friendfeed, etc. It only takes 15 minutes and then he knows what's out there and has already played around with it in case it does take off. Oh, and he takes every call from vendors too (in case any of you are reading).

2) Accept unpredictability
Just like you can't predict what technology will take off, you don't know if a piece of creative is going to take hold virally. Even if it's really amazing and definitely should. Everyone talks about TBG successes, but there a handful of things that didn't take off before. And after. Yes, still.

3) Fail faster
Okay that's from W+K, but we talked about failure and what to make of it. Things that don't take off aren't failures, they help you get to the things that do take off faster. Fear of failure can be stifling in offline work, but absolutely debilitating online. Things just move too quickly for that, better to have a culture of experimentation/innovation. Especially given said unpredictability.

There were other things - like the google-esque 20% thing they do, which is cool - but those were my three. Thanks to Rick, thanks to Peter and feel free to check out Primal Scream.

Singletasking Please

This image does a great job of summing up the insane amount of stimulus we all have and how hard it is to actually get things done. I originally came across it on Ed's blog months ago and it really stuck with me.

Then last month at sxswi, it came up again. I was standing in line for a nonprofit social media thing at Stubbs next to this girl with really cool boots - Janette, from Kansas City, author of this awesome eco-fashion blog. Anyhow, the nonprofit thing filled up, we decided to grab lunch, and she brought up this post and how hard it is to focus lately. This tells me that 1) a lot of people read Ed's blog, and 2) we see ourselves in this whiteboard. Two strangers, one random photo, complete recognition of life overload.

Ffffound

This was found by Bud Caddell at ffffound via funeralface.

Still catching up on all of my RSS feeds, finding some good stuff along the way.

Sydney Coffee Morning

Been back from vacation for about a week, though just now re-emerging from general work/life catch-up mode. Been meaning to share a travel highlight:

I know it's hard to tell, but this is a latte with ice cream in it. Apparently it's pretty common over in Australia and in other parts of the world. Not a crappy frappucino or coolatta or anything like that. Real ice cream. For breakfast. Thanks to Tim for encouraging this order.

So, every Friday morning a good portion of Sydney's creative folk get together at Single Origin, a charming indoor/outdoor coffeehouse in Surry Hills. Gavin Heaton, aka @servantofchaos, is one of the original members of the gathering, one that's been going on for years now.

Sydney coffee mornings put all other coffee mornings to shame. First off, they meet every Friday (vs. our typical once/month). Second, loads of people come. Third, they get food not just drinks and sometimes ice cream. Great conversation too, as you can imagine from the action shot below.

It was great fun to meet the Aussie crew and hear about life on the other side of the pond. Good to talk politics with Tim, new Sydney jobs with Katie, Sydney job needs with Tom (nurses & hair stylists are in high demand for those looking for a visa) and the language barrier with Jye:

cell = mobile
double espresso = short black
cappuccino = flat white
appetizer = entree
quay = pronounced key (bus driver corrected me on that one)

An enormous thank you to Gavin for setting up a Thursday coffee morning in addition to the regular Friday one. The morning flew by and there were a bunch of people that I didn't get to talk to that I would've liked to (including hologram @juliancole), but I guess that just means I have to go back.

And I hope it goes without saying that you all can count on a personal Austin tour guide should you ever make it over this way. Again, thanks for a fantastic start to the trip.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

About to head to the airport for a two week vacation. Will be meeting some interesting people, taking lots of pictures and maybe even sleeping in a little - be back to the blog next month, hopefully with some good stories to tell.

SXSW Music Edition

I've been in Austin over two and a half years now and this is the first time I bought a wristband for SXSW. Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking by not taking advantage of this in years past - it's fantasticly fun. Over 2,000 bands and people from all over the world descend upon Austin for 5 days of non-stop live music across the city.

Here are some highlights:
Top 6 bands for me:
1) White Lies
2) Delta Spirit (pic below)
3) Blind Pilot
4) The Decemberists
5) The Avett Brothers
6) The Thermals

So, those were my favorite bands - ones that I've bought music from and can't wait to listen to more. These next six were my top favorite shows, ones that were insanely fun and sounded great, even though a few were pretty far from my typical music taste.

Top 6 Performances:
1) King Khan & The Shrines
2) Dananananakyrod
3) The Decemberists
4) White Lies
5) We Were Promised Jetpacks
6) Say Hi (pic below)

One of the holdover themes from music to interactive was the whole wisdom of crowds thing. My neighbor and I were talking about how you can spend hours upon hours researching or you can just listen for buzz, look for lines and pay attention to the crowd.

Curious to hear other people's favorites - please share!

SXSW Interactive Lovefest

As a SXi first-timer, I wasn't really sure what to expect. I knew I'd meet great authors (thank you Andy Hunter for hooking me up w/dual day stage introduction gig) and I thought I'd like some talks. Now, two days later, I'm still feeling the after-glow of five days of awesomeness. This picture from the bottom floor of the convention center sums up my sx experience:

Overall, it was a fantastic revival of creative energy for me. Wonder, play, possibility. Not all of the sessions were great (in fact, many were pretty awful), but as I was telling a friend, the whole was more than the sum of its parts here.

The collective energy of the people, the panels, the parties - it sustained me when 4 hours of sleep did not. Even the crap talks had the benefit of the shadow conference, which David Bryant from Strawberry Frog explains:

"The Interactive conference is effectively two conferences - the real life one where people talk. And the meta-conference where people are... talking about the people talking. This takes place in tweets, blogs, posts, emails, IM and just about everything else. My friend Alan Wolk pointed out that this second conference hosted in the twittersphere is actually the more interesting."

I plan to write about Behance, the brain panel, Bruce Sterling and Rick Webb among others. But for now (as day 2 of music closes in), I just want to bottle the energy from SXi and save it for quick hits later. It was a great time - thanks to all of you who made it that way.

More Popular Than Porn

What The F**K is Social Media?

View more presentations from Marta Kagan.

I love this presentation. In typical random web fashion, I came across it tonight on Andy Hunter's blog who pulled it from Lee Maicon's blog who got it from Tom from MotiveQuest who seems to have stumbled upon it on slideshare as posted by Marta Kagan.

The other amazing thing - this deck is 8 months old. An eon in online-time, this means that between when this was posted and now, 32 million people have joined facebook in the U.S. alone (160 worldwide). Twitter has really taken off since then and there are buckets of new platforms now that didn't even exist 8 months ago. Just keeping up with this stuff is completely exhausting, but it's also kind of insane in a good way. Endless possibilities.