The Tell-Tale R

Waitsfield, VT

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:08:01 -0400

Waitsfield, VT

Hanover, NH

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 17:17:14 -0400

Hanover, NH

It’s like holding a pair of my own amputated testicles....

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:08:01 -0400

It’s like holding a pair of my own amputated testicles. Pretty soon I’ll lose the ability to properly merge or hook a preemptive left turn at green lights.

It’s hard to believe that over a decade after it hit the...

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:54:00 -0400

It’s hard to believe that over a decade after it hit the mainstream, this is the first All Your Base I’ve been involved with.

[background]

Enders State Forest, Granby, CT.

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 22:06:29 -0400

Enders State Forest, Granby, CT.

Are You Seriously Using Stock Photos?

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 19:20:00 -0400

It’s a mind-boggling notion: paying a third party for pictures of actors and models simulating what your company does. What part of that isn’t obviously idiotic? I’ve been over this before—in a world where cell phones outnumber citizens, and include cameras at a rate of 90%, there’s no excuse for not being able to take your own photos.

What’s your argument—that cell phone photos “look bad”? Maybe back in ‘06, but it’s a very different story today. In all but the most extreme conditions, blame for bad camera phone photos should be laid solely at the feet of the operator.

If you’re seriously concerned with your site’s aesthetic—and nothing says you aren’t like three Martians and a pie chart—hire a real photographer to take real pictures of yourself or your staff at work. Not only will you stand out from the other twenty firms who chose “Business Meeting with Laptop”, but you’ll make a contact in the local community who’ll do more for your reputation than the burnt offering you make at the foot of the Getty monolith.

I’ll concede there are situations where non-original photography is order—say you need famous locations or or exotic locales far from your place of work. That said, you’re almost certainly better off going the Creative Commons route with images you can see at full quality, and resize to fit your prototypes. Or you could drop fifty bucks guessing off a blurry, undersized, watermarked sample and hope for the best—it’s your call.

But I’ll return to what I began with: if you do something and you want pictures of it, there’s no better way to get them than to photograph yourself. As a potential employee, nothing says “you don’t want to work here” like a website full of people who don’t work here.

President Eisenhower speaking in Cadillac Square, Detroit, on...

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 20:44:52 -0400

President Eisenhower speaking in Cadillac Square, Detroit, on the recently-begun construction of Interstate Highways, 1954.

“…a road program that will take this Nation out of its antiquated shackles …and give us the types of highways that we need for this great mass of motor vehicles…”

(via wikimedia)

Mario Kart Bike Lane

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:07:57 -0400

Mario Kart Bike Lane

"…and before you bite my head off, I’m up to date on the protocol with the help of Cooper, and..."

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 09:03:20 -0400

““…and before you bite my head off, I’m up to date on the protocol with the help of Cooper, and we don’t have do anything but avoid criticizing them or giving advice.””

- Pete Campbell

How to Pitch PR to a Blogger Over Email

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 10:32:00 -0400

In my alternate life, I receive emails from PR and marketing firms who want me to write about their products/host their ads on a fairly regular basis. According to their email signatures, these people are professionally employed in the field but, by and large, they’re lousy at what they do.

If you’re a company or just someone with a product to sell, I’d highly recommend bypassing a PR firm entirely and just emailing bloggers yourself. It shows you’ve got at least some interest and knowledge in the market you plan to penetrate, and there’s an implicit message that you really believe in your product.

Regardless of who sends the email, though, there are a few simple steps you can take to dramatically improve the success of your efforts:

Personalize. Form letters stick out like clowns at a funeral. You might think glancing at the site, snaring the handle of a blogger, and putting blog URL into the text somewhere is yeoman’s work—it’s not. If there’s no evidence you’ve read my blog, I’m probably just going to delete your email.
Research. Top blogs on a given category won’t always be related. Do a little research and get a feel for the tone and attitude of the blogger you’re contacting. Read the “about” and “faq” sections if they exist. Google what others say about the blog. Make the tone of your message resonate with its target; If your client’s a bad fit, move on to the next blog.
Specifics. I can’t tell you how many people have contacted me with messages like “hey saw you’re site its awesome. you should check out this: [URL].” If you can’t put together 90 words about what you want me to see and why it’s worth my time, chances are, it isn’t. This goes double for messages about ads.
Incentives. Bloggers are busy. The chances of one wanting to write about something because a client paid you to promote it are virtually nil. A free sample, the promise of a high profile back-link, a cross-promotional opportunity—all of these things will help tilt the scales in your favor.
Attitude. Spamming someone about a product isn’t a favor. Phrasing your message as if you’re opening some secret industry insider window is the shortest path between my inbox and my spam filter. Keep in mind, you may not be the only person contacting the blogger about the product.
Proofread. I realize that text on the Internet is cheap. But a grammatically stable message passes a variety of idiot tests; it implies a level of education that means a PR firm made a decent investment in your skills, as well as saying that you at least took a second look at your message before hitting “send”.

On the whole, think of these emails as mini-cover letters. The idea is pretty much the same: you’re contacting someone you don’t know with something you (ostensibly) think they need. Yeah, it’s more effort, but the alternative approach is like packing a shotgun full of manure—you’ll probably miss your target, and any hits you do get are going to stink.

Collinsville, CT

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 13:39:05 -0400

Collinsville, CT

How awful is Comcast’s DNS hijack? Not nearly as awful as...

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 21:19:57 -0400

How awful is Comcast’s DNS hijack? Not nearly as awful as the misery you have to go through trying to opt out.

GPOYW - No Pictures Please Edition.

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 11:58:47 -0400

GPOYW - No Pictures Please Edition.

Hi sister.

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:58:53 -0400

Hi sister.

Last time I saw the Staten Island Ferry Terminal IRL, I was 9...

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:25:12 -0400

Last time I saw the Staten Island Ferry Terminal IRL, I was 9 and it was freshly gutted by fire.

City’s changed a bit since then.

Hmm—no wifi on the New Haven Line, and yet this photo was...

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 18:25:35 -0400

Hmm—no wifi on the New Haven Line, and yet this photo was clearly taken with Photo Booth just now. Wonder how that’s possible?

I feel like this has to be a gag. Even in Connecticut,...

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:25:00 -0400

I feel like this has to be a gag. Even in Connecticut, you’d be hard-pressed to call that an accomplishment.

GPOYW: a little downtime after a good ride earlier. Shorts tan...

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 21:09:00 -0400

GPOYW: a little downtime after a good ride earlier.

Shorts tan is getting there (looks darker due to low light—my natural skin tone is Fishbelly), though I’m less happy about the sock tan coming in.

The Tragedy of Internet Folk Art

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:50:00 -0400

No one loves the tools the Internet has delivered to the hands of the curious, at essentially no charge, more than I. If had to choose between my pricy college education and my ecclectic online skillset I’d ditch my Dartmouth cap faster than you can say “frat basement”.

But, as they say in Spiderman, with great power comes great responsibility. Consider this recent fan art poster I found for the popular AMC drama Mad Men (via):

It’s not bad work, really—certainly the Tumblr community, with >400 likes and reblogs, approves. But that typeface—ugh! Mistaking Arial (not drafted until the early 80s) for Helvetica is easy enough, and if the creator were using a PC, Helv might have been a significantly trickier font to track down.

But rounded fonts of typefaces didn’t (a “citation needed” caveat here) exist until 1979, when Volkswagon tried to bridge the gap between the stately serifs used by its Audi and the uncomplicated Futura of its eponymous brand (remember the famous “Lemon” ad from Season 1)?

All this information, like the tools and know-how used to create the poster, are readily available online—how do you think I learned them? Certainly wasn’t part of the English 33 syllabus, I can tell you that much. Simple research would have made for a much more compelling work.

Going further, a bit of attentiveness could have saved some research efforts. Mad Men’s cultural impact has been so far-reaching that its typeface use has been featured and critiqued in the New York Times—a good cue that it might be something worth paying attention to going forward.

And in fact, the first episode of this season featured not only the Sterling/Cooper/Draper/Price logo:

but also the full name of the firm written out on the office doors:

Now, I’ll agree that it’s tough to pick a typeface/typefaces precisely from this data (if you put a gun to my head, I’d say Akzidenz Grotesque), but the point isn’t that it needs to be precise—just appropriate. When the show deals directly with the Stockholm style invasion, you should feel free to play with pretty much anything from the International school—Univers, Folio, Helvetica, Akzidenz, even Futura would be fine.

I didn’t learn these things from years or even semesters of school—I learned them with 15 minutes and a little thing called Google. There’s probably minutia I’ve glossed that will raise a quibble with serious designers, but, Internet, I don’t think a quick search is too much to ask; it’s a dramatic improvement in both style and quality for a minimal time investment. The quality tools you have access to demand it.

(As an aside, is this work a reference to a contemporary movie poster that’s escaped me? I seem to recall some British caper flick (Snatch?) having similarly-constructed promotional material.)

A Three Frames-style clip from The Day After, a...

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 22:58:00 -0400

A Three Frames-style clip from The Day After, a highly-recommended TV movie on World War III from the early 80s.

It first aired during a period of extremely high tension; with the possible exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the Cold War came to going nuclear.

The film features compelling work from Jason Robards and John Lithgow, and even a hawkish President Reagan noted it “left me greatly depressed” in his diary.