03-09-09
typorganism is an interesting site by Gicheol Lee I found looking for typography based illustrations on the net. Gicheol believes that type is some kind of organism. He proves this in his site with a series of communication experiments exploring computational interaction design, which understands typo as some kind of entity that lives in the net which responds to user interactions, evolves with time and is in a way, alive.
I include one of the most interesting examples I have found: the ASCII-0Matic image generator which transforms an image into a ASCII text based image which you can then generate in html.
11-25-08
I’m never really interested in banners unless they really catch my eye, like the ones that the guys from glue london make. My eyes have some kind of filtering for “those dark areas” on websites, and sometimes I don’t even see surf related banners shown on google mail.
Same think happened with facebook, i never clicked or had a look at any banner. Even though they are always asking me if I have a girlfriend or not, or if I want to meet such a beautiful girl like the one on the picture. Who cares.
Today I saw a banner asking if I wanted to meet a russian girl on-line. Well, this I find a bit offensive, not for me but for the russian girls, so I clicked on the “thumbs down” button. To my surprise, I got a drop down menu asking me why didn’t I like this ad: irrelevant, offensive, pornographic… That’s pretty interesting, you can choose the kind of advertising you want to see. If you click on thumbs up you can also choose from several options like interesting, relevant to me…
facebook advertising
I know I’m not discovering the wheel, and probably almost everyone knows about this, but to me it’s a really big step into what advertising could be like in the future. Are we interested in advertising that is relevant to us? What do you like spending your free time on? Will we click on this kind of advertising? Is it going to solve information overload?
In the end, I also think that this is a bit scary. I bet the guys at facebook are gathering a lot of relevant information about us, which they can use to deliver the right communication to their users, but, what else are they doing with database?
11-10-08
Yesterday I was really surprised to see that Christmas is being prepared in Berlin already. Today it’s not even mid November and lots of department stores are putting up their decoration. Christmas has never had much meaning to me since I was a kid, but today it has lost its meaning completely.
May be, if it was kept as just some special days in December, it would still move something inside of me; but at this moment its just another example of information overload. I will see it for almost 2 months and when those special dates come, I will just be bored of it.
I think this is a very important to take this into account in communication. Communication is meant to sell. But today we receive such an information overload that if a product, such I would call Christmas, is communicated excessively it will just go unseen.
Examples of this would be banners in web sites, magazines packed with advertising, tv shows with longer commercial periods than the actual program itself… I rather spend my time reading Wikipedia, and I guess I’m not the only one.
I would like welcome this Christmas with Kristoffer Ragnstam’s Cheapest Santa in Town.
Merry yearly freak show!
