Pocket Revolutionary

(via Phil Cooke)

I tested out the new bing.com “decision engine” with a good ol’ fashioned vanity search for “Jeremy Greenawalt”. You cannot imagine my horror to see that the #8 result is this site with the words “Animated Logo designed and created by: Jeremy Greenawalt”. I will go on the record right now to any future clients and say “It’s not me”. I’m sure he’s a nice person. I feel bad knowing that my site is at the top of the list of “Jeremy Greenawalt” responses in Google and he would probably find this post in his own vanity search, but I must disavow this logo right now. I’m not sure I can legally send a cease and desist order over his name as a “designer of spinning logos”, but my lawyers are working on it right now and I will keep you apprised.

What do you do when you’re brain has been turned to steak tartare by debugging and you’re feeling punchy? You abuse Illustrator into creating a special “3 am” logo for an internal app. In this case, the app is our internal backend for FishCart built using CakePHP which I have, of course, named FishCake. I show this only to publicly state my profound appreciation of graphic designers– e.g. the folks who would never make a logo this ugly no matter how sleep-deprived they may be.

Looking for an alternative pen (I love you, G-2, but I just want to know my options), I ran across the website for Tul pens. Their handwriting analysis toy (I don’t know what else to call it) was actually pretty imaginative and kept me on the site, made me send my wife to the site, and made me want to post it here. For a pen that’s inexpensive and sold only at OfficeMax, I thought it was surprisingly creative, and I might just check out their pens now. The lesson is that sometimes your “hook” for viewers can be engaging and only tangentially related to your core business to pique somebody’s interest. Of course, this also goes horribly wrong or just lame on a lot of well-known corporate websites with bizarre or completely random advertising, but for a relatively unknown or small company it can be very effective and you’re not risking very much if it does go wrong. I didn’t know who Tul was before, and if their website was just “good” then I would quickly forget who they were. If I didn’t like the handwriting analysis, then I might go somewhere else or I might skip to the catalog. Either way, the only way to keep my attention was to risk it on a Flash toy.

[via tul.com]

It looks like the folks at Happy Cog really did a great job with the new WordPress 2.5 design. I’ve just started to play with it, but so far I’m just happy that the templates are in the “design” area where I expect them to be. In my ever-so-humble opinion, I think great design is just putting everything where people expect them to be. I mean, I could probably go into a Windows vs. Apple rant on that, but I won’t (though, seriously, that’s part of what makes Apple awesome). I’m not trying to say it’s that easy to make things intuitive, either. I am just happy that Jeffery Zeldman and Happy Cog manage to make it look that easy, and I can’t wait to dive into this some more.