SaatchiSL at night
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Most people have a thinking cap. We’ve got a wonton.
That moment of victory. What a nail-biting finish last night!
Happy 14th Birthday @Google!
Fast Company published these as social media rules. I’d wager that they can be applied to any form of communication.
There’s apparently some pretty cool looking street art in Battaramulla.
Has anyone seen this yet?
You often find this kinda optical illusion art on sites like StumbleUpon, BuzzFeed, etc. but we’ve never seen anything like this before in Sri Lanka. Looks really good. We’ll be checking it out soon. Let us know if you already have.
Today, Google Maps unveils a new Street View feature: underwater panoramic views of six special sea spots. The idea is to create a virtual map of the oceans, documenting the state of fragile ecosystems as they change over time, and sharing a vivid experience of part of our world that few humans get to see up close and in person, in real life.
The ocean collection on Google Street View is now available atmaps.google.com/ocean, and includes coral reefs and the creatures who live in them, in Australia, the Philippines and Hawaii.
The panoramic images were collected by Google’s partner, The Catlin Seaview Survey (Google+). I spoke with Richard Vevers, Project Director at Catlin, and asked why the organization chose to partner with Google on this project.
“The biggest problem with the ocean is that it’s out of sight and out of mind for most of us,” said Vevers. “99% of people have never gone for a dive and never will. One of the biggest issues around conservation is engaging people with the ocean, and this is a powerful way to accomplish that. It is a scientific project to create a baseline for observing how the oceans are changing, but it also creates awareness of why that matters.”
Jenifer Austin Foulkes, Manager with Google’s Oceans Program, says the mission is to make Google maps as comprehensive as possible by extending their reach underwater.
“There’s a great quote about conservation from ocean researcher Sylvia Earle—’With knowing comes caring, and with caring, there’s hope.”
The images were collected over a period of six months by small teams of divers with three cameras on each underwater vehicle, capturing images every four seconds, which are then stitched together into 360º panoramas. There’s more at the Catlin Survey website about the specific cameras used—the SVII camera, described as the world’s first tablet-operated underwater camera. They’re using the Samsung Galaxy tablet to operate the SVIIs.
“I’ve been diving for a long time and this is the first project in which we’ve used underwater scooters with cameras mounted on the scooters,” the Catlin Survey’s Vevers tells Boing Boing. “It was an amazing way to engage with marine life, they really loved interacting with us. We encountered big manta rays looking at their reflections in our windows, sea turtles, and all kinds of curious creatures.”
“The whole system was developed to make it simple to gather data, over three to four-day expeditions.”
Sites mapped which will be available today include the Great Barrier Reef, 2 sites in Hawaii, and one in the Philippines. More locations will follow, said Vevers. “This is to give people a taste of what’s to come. People tend to think of the ocean as monolithic, but these are all very different environments. Even within the Great Barrier Reef, each site is very different.”
“We chose areas we believe people will be interested in, so we can really engage people in in the content, and get them to engage with and care about our oceans.”
More below about the project, from a joint press release:
The first Catlin Seaview Survey expedition on the Great Barrier Reef set off on 16th September 2012.The survey on the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea runs until the end of December and will visit 20 separate coral reefs along the 2,300km reef on an unprecedented scale and depth range – including sections of the reef that have never previously been seen or studied before. It will then continue on to selected global locations in 2013 including Hawaii, the Philippines and Bermuda.
There are two science components to the Catlin Seaview Survey: a Shallow Reef Survey and a Deep Reef Survey:
· Shallow Reef Survey: The Shallow Reef Survey will involve scientists using state-of-theart digital technology to capture approximately 50,000 360-degree panoramic images of the reef that can be linked to create a virtual dive experience. Each image will be geo-located, with automated technologies for rapidly assessing the amount of coral cover and other life forms from locations at 20 separate coral reefs along the entire length of the Great Barrier Reef. This will provide a broad scale baseline for understanding change on coral reefs.
· Deep Reef Survey: Using diving robots and other innovative instrument packages, the Catlin Seaview Survey Team will begin to explore deep water reef systems that are very rarely visited by humans, yet may hold some of the secrets of whether or not coral reefs could survive rapid climate change. Using a combination of HD cameras, deep-diving robots and survey equipment, the deep-water component will provide a comprehensive study of the health composition and biodiversity of the deep-water reefs on the Great Barrier Reef. It will also experimentally assess their susceptibility to increased temperatures and ocean acidification, which are byproducts of a changing climate. It’s entirely probable new species will be discovered in these deeper waters.
To view the Google Street View underwater panoramas, visitmaps.google.com/ocean.
Rebranding is so much more than just changing a logo; it’s a company reacting to the culture surrounding it and transforming to cater to that culture. The word “Identity” in Brand Identity should not be taken lightly, a company must literally upgrade their entire persona to stay current with the times. The tricky part is conveying the original essence of the brand, product and service. The key is making sure everyone still recognizes and accepts the company in their new skin. It’s not always successful. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna’ do what everyone thinks I’m gonna’ do and mention the inevitableGap disaster on this list. At least they had the intelligence to listen to the world’s collaborative feedback, quickly cut their losses and revert back to Plan A.
It’s painful to watch a great brand dive off into the deep end and just keep swimming. We can learn so much from what not to do by looking at other brand’s mistakes. Sit back, grab some stale popcorn and enjoy The Top 10 Worst Corporate Brand Redesigns.
While Tropicana has now reverted back to their original inspired designs, these hit shelves for a long period of time. The company was attempting to make the brand feel more “down to earth” but the result of the project was a transformation that was so far from the original that it felt like ageneric store brand as loyal customers passed it by on the shelves.
The original MasterCard icon was a classic mark with a strong foundation. It has 2 circles that play off of the negative space of each other with strips resulting in a minimal optimal icon that feels like 3 simple shapes. Rebranding is about simplifying, and this logo adds unnecessary elements that don’t translate well. It has some very poor uses of shadows, transparency and gradients. Finally, it’s completely off balance to the right making it look chaotic and unfinished.
Sierra Mist answered their already mediocre (but in it’s own right, fun) brand by updating the green color, adding a photo like forest in the background and making it blurry and hard to look at. Enough said.
When Anderson Consulting rebranded into Accenture, they spent a whopping $100 million to implement the changes. You would think there would be more heart in this logo for that type of cash. It turns out mistake number one is the fact that they let a Marketing Firm name them instead of a Brand Agency. The mark feels meaningless and random although they claim it is supposed to represent the name, which apparently means “accent into the future”. Let’s be real, it’s a greater than symbol and nothing more. Luckily, much of their marketing relies on stunning photography that has helped leverage their strengths.
NBC Universal decided it was time to refresh their iconic brand. When I look at the new logo my first thought is always the same, where is the freakin’ peacock? The peacock is a globally recognized icon and deserves more than an unstyled wordmark replacement. It’s a shame to see a company completely miss an opportunity to leverage a classic.
The latest Animal Planet logo has no significance at all. The animal and globe have been removed from the previous brand and an “A” and sideways “M” now dominates the type. The new wordmark is hard to read and is a horizontal scaling disaster.
Being one of the innovators of the Internet is hard to live up to and AOL proved it with thisRebrand fail. Throwing away their catchy yet professional logo, they now have an awkward negative space wordmark (with a period) that seems to spell “Aol.” instead of AOL. This logo has had mixed reviews, but in my opinion looking at it is worse than listening to 56K dial up sounds.
Myspace was once the leader in Social Media, but the culture surrounding the service grew and the company failed to recognize that. They waited too long to refresh instead of growing with their users as the service expanded and giving them something new. Mysapce tried to counter their loss of revenue with this new design. Off balance and awkward, the new logo has nothing iconic about it and includes a bracket instead of the word “space”. The former chief executive of Myspace even spoke out admitting that marketing should have relaunched the site as “an entirely new brand”.
In a comment piece for the CNN Money website, Mike Jones said that Myspace faced “a variety of organizational challenges” under parent company News Corp, but said it was ultimately held back by failures of marketing. – Source Don’t even get me started on how bad the website design was.
Over a 5-month period and $1 million later, this is what Pepsi Company ended up with. The whole campaign was a visual failure and received heavy negative criticism. This one may have made #8 on this list for its bad choice of design but the plot thickens. The most memorable part of the dreadful rebrand was “Breathtaking,” a 27-page document purported to be the thinking behind Arnell Group’s revamping of Pepsi-Cola’s logo. Littered as it is with marketing jargon, images of yin-yangs, mobius strips and Da Vinci’s Vitruvian man.
“Breathtaking” theorizes consumers will feel a gravitational pull elicited by the new logo, one that will lead consumers to fill its shopping carts with Pepsi. At its most extreme, the presentation compares the re-imagined Pepsi globe logo to the Earth’s magnetic fields and the sun’s radiation. “Emotive forces shape the gestalt of the brand identity,” – Source
Here is a look at a few of the bizarre images from the document:
Completely off focused research tactics and complicated, frenzied planning. Pretty sure they weren’t drinking Pepsi in 3000 BC.
“Retain the best of PepsiCo’s history and shape the next PepsiCo bottle into an icon for the brand.” Seriously?
The original Kraft logo is not an award winning design but it stood the test of time and felt like a true American icon. The new logo has thin typography in 2 different strokes and the fonts are lost. The tagline is written below it in a contrasting font. The red “swoosh” and flamboyant “firework” icon are meaningless and provide nothing to enhance the brand image. The worst part is the “firework” adds an array of completely unnecessary color to the logo. I decided to put together a palette of the entire color scheme of the Kraft logo just to see if it’s as bad as I think. The results were a bit shocking:
If the original brand holds strength under its belt and possesses a simple 2 toned color scheme then cosmetic surgery is not needed. I believe Kraft should have approached this project with simplicity in mind while paying homage to the brand’s iconic history.
On a more positive note, next time I will be talking about The Top 10 Best Corporate Rebrands, so stay tuned. What corporate brand redesigns would you add to the worst list? Let us know!
View from the press box in colombo
According to eConsultancy more than one-third of the Internet population now shops online. The importance of serving the right impression to the right person on the right device with the right message is the holy grail of digital marketing.
Forrester predicts that consumer purchases via smartphones will grow from $10 billion in 2012 to $31 billion in 2016 and smartphones will account for 3% of e-commerce in 2012 and 7% in 2016. With holiday shopping right around the corner, marketers need to have a mobile strategy that enables them to deliver the right impression on the right device.
Todays digital consumer is connected like never before, and with the number of personal devices multiplying at a rapid rate, marketers need to reach their target audience with the right impression.
Linkin Park roar into the lead / Photo by Getty Images
Red Hot Chili Peppers trail with a measly 328 million
Rock’n’ roll isn’t dead — it’s just a little slow. Sure, Lady Gaga became the first music-maker to score a billion YouTube views back in 2010, but Southern California’s enduring fusionistas Linkin Park have finally caught up, making them the first rock act to hit 10 digits, via theirLinkinParkTV channel.
They’d hit 1,006,691,614 by press time and although they’ve uploaded 72 videos since March of 2007 — starting with their CG-addled post-millennial anthem, “In the End” — more then a tenth of their YouTube haul comes from 2009’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen theme,“New Divide,” which has racked up over 131 million plays to date.
According to NME, the next two YouTube-dominating rockers can barely muster twice what LP’s nab be on that single video. The Red Hot Chili Peppers channel has 328 million (althoughRHCPtv only has 26 clips and has been consistently active since late 2009) and Green Day’shas 247 million with 34 videos uploaded since July of 2009.
Clearly it pays to be an early adopter — or web native, since Justin Bieber has surpassed Gaga with 2.8 billion total — or it least well-versed in hybridized approaches to the music business. Linkin Park’s savvy combination of hard rock, undie rap and major pop made their 2000 breakthrough Hybrid Theory the best-selling artist debut of the entire aughts.
Their June-released fifth LP Living Things debuted at N0. 1 on the Billboard 200, outselling Maroon 5’s Overexposed by a thin but potent margin of 1,000 copies. When SPIN visited Linkin Park at their studio back in April, singer Chester Bennington summed up their secret thusly: “We have a little bit of something for everyone. That’s been our little fountain of youth.”
The totally disturbing video for new single “Lost in the Echo” is at a measly 1.2 million after two weeks (ha). Why not help it out with a click?
So, in this article, we present a assortment of 30 creative logo design inspiration. We will be glad if you like it and if it have a beneficial impact on your inspiration and creativeness.
We will be glad if you like it and make comment in this article.
