On Being Proactive

No, I'm not talking about that acne blasting crap on the infomercial.
I came across A Brand For London which has been set up by Moving Brands.
Very cool idea... It's an excellent insight into the building of a brand and it rather cleverly gives Moving Brands a bit of authority, maybe even a degree of ownership over the redesign.
It's a pretty sharp way to get the inside track.


It's also a useful tool for anyone without an understanding of the design process to see the work that goes into creating a brand that represents an entire city, especially London.
It's much easier to elucidate the value of design to people, when they can see the work that's gone into it. This would avoid the public backlash that is generally associated any time a major, justifiably expensive branding exercise takes place (See: City Of Melbourne rebrand/London 2012 ID), which often stems from a lack of understanding of how a brand has been developed and the rationale behind it.

Anyway, I'm meant to be doing work related things, but was quite impressed by this.

Oh, by the wya... Frigging weekend, people!

Beyond coincidence

With the AGDA For Love or Money event coming up next week, I've spent the last month or so doing a bit of a push to a bunch of online media people to see if we can get word of the event spread around. I even got to set up a blog for it, which is cool...

It's been pretty successful... Managed to score some posts on some cool blogs and sites, as well as a bunch of Twitter retweets and mentions, which is handy. Seems like the various social platforms work well for promoting these kinds of events...

Anyways, I'm sure that's boring for everyone.

The point is, frigging check this out:
It's a screenshot of part of an interview I did for The Vine
Note the last of my responses in the bottom of this picture.
Then look at the Bankwest ad on the right....

What are the chances? Seriously though, what are they?

What are the chances that 1) Some idiot makes a reference in an interview to a pet rock that grows grass for hair and 2) The website this interview sits on then randomly generates an ad which contains a pet rock that grows grass for hair whilst aforementioned idiot is viewing it?

Effing slim, I say.

And that, good people, is all it takes to blow my feeble mind.

Go to bed Jeremy

Have been finding myself up late a lot recently...

Busy organising online things and other stuff for the AGDA student council's First Five Out event (Come check it out, 3rd September, it's going to be awesome), which is good fun.
Also sorting out some freelance stuff which is about to ramp up very shortly.
Plus, I've got neglected school stuff to get on with, sport to play, dinner to prepare... So on and so forth.
Can't say this is a complaint though. I'm at my best when I'm busy. Although I am very much looking forward to sleeping in on Saturday. Hells yes.

And here's some quick, Twitteresque reviews to give this post some kind of purpose:

District 9 - Brilliant. Avoids the stereotypes of the genres it treads and is thoughtful, open-ended and intelligent all at once. Plus it has a fighting robot, which I'm a sucker for.

Coraline 3d -Awesome. I heard Tim Burton designed the characters... It looks like it. With Neil Gaiman writing, the story is very clever too. And dark. Dark like a shadow's beard. Definitely worth checking out.

People who suddenly stop in the middle of the footpath for no apparent reason - Terrible. I hate you. No stars.

Panama Dining Room - Fantastic food, great service, relaxed but classy atmosphere and desserts that I'd walk the Arctic Tundra to get to. Oh and the arched windows look out over the city skyline, which is pretty ace.

Mountain Goat Brewery - Awesome warehouse setting, tasty pizzas, relaxed crowd and good beer. My pick of their beers last Friday was their stout which had been filtered through fresh hops flowers and coffee beans.

And with that, I'm calling it a night.

Nano-trending Episode 2: The Weirdening

Ok, following on from the last post, I just had a run through the search history on my shiny Mac at home and my nano-trending results were even more bizarre. So odd and disjointed, in fact, that I think the government may have me listed on some kind of blacklist document managed by the Centre for the Identification of Undoubtedly Crazy People.

So, my searches in the last while have included the following:

binary star system
caring for aloe vera
covering iron whilst waxing snowboard
down syndrome tiger
explosions in the sky
fictional order of monks
giant vagina northcote
hedgehog map
iditarod
kid strangles dove
london graffiti attacks
midget tupac
office turn into inflatable people
wallabies crop circle
we were promised jetpacks

Ok, so I just write a couple of decent sized paragraphs attempting to justify the schizoid nature of my searches but decided that you've probably already made your assumptions. And yes, you were correct: All these searches took place on that crazy night we took loads of acid and ate heaps of shrooms, remember dude?
Totally.
Let's just say I'm inquisitive and never speak of this again.

Anyone else care to share what's nano-trending in their world at the moment?

Pro challenge: Write a (coherent) short story containing all these terms.


Footnote: Really want to do this on a public computer.

I call this one 'nano-trending'

As is the fashion these days.. Everyone is into 'trending'...
Basically, those identifying 'trends' are people who gather data on what other people are talking, tweeting, blogging, singing, whinging or ranting about and then draw conclusions from these such as the following:

'This season's colour will be Fuschia'
'Tangello sales will rise by 48%'
'China. Democracy. Next financial year.'


So, i thought I'd do a little 'trending' on myself. I thought it may allow me to predict what I'll be up to in a couple of month's time.

Using the search bar in my browser, I entered each letter of the alphabet, which brought up my search terms since whenever the last time I cleared my cache was.

The results were startling. And perhaps slightly unnerving.

So, without further ado, here's what's trending in Jeremy's world at the moment:

Ayn Rand
Aint nothin gonna break my stride
Bags of Zing
Collective noun horses
Captain Planet shoes
dOGME 95
dead mum carrying father's baby
Frogskins
Flourish of trumpets
Ghengis Khan
Horatio Caine's blazer
Hand-rendered vignettes
Plastic made from seaweed
Rollercoaster kills child


I'm as confused as you are...
And that's just from my work computer. I'll try it out at home and see what else comes up.

In the meantime, I think it's fair to presume that tomorrow, Ace of Base will play a county fair where, after a flourish of trumpets, a rollercoaster kills a child when Genghis Khan's Frogskins are found to be made from seaweed.