Our new site should be launching soon. With any luck, this weekend. (Fingers crossed)
It’s been a long, arduous journey, starting more than a year ago with an all-hands company retreat where we followed a lot of the principles we’ve learned over the years about usability and hammered out a vision of what the new site should be and how it should work.
After time spent building, tweaking, building some more, tweaking some more, it’s just about done. I’m looking forward to seeing it live.
When I was out in San Diego a few weeks ago working on a conference for one our large financial clients Ben and I snuck out for a couple hours and filmed a small promo for a non-profit organization called Classics 4 Kids.
Classics 4 Kids is dedicated to using music education as a catalyst to improve academic achievement through professional orchestra concerts and integrated arts curriculum.
I was truly inspired and touched by the time we wrapped up the last interview—music is so close to my heart.
Corey designed this shirt for a client campaign. I got my hands on one and it’s become one of my favorites. Powerful image to match the powerful message. Design at its best.
Hang around certain JAG members long enough and you’ll encounter a zealous enthusiasm for a certain band from the UK. The obsession of this musical group by said JAG team members knows few limits, which makes for some good-natured ribbing for a guy like me. Oh, I like the band-named-after-a-bug-but-spelled-wrong’s music plenty, and there’s no denying the profound impact they had on music and culture. It’s just that my teammates enthusiastic nature (perhaps fueled by my non-conformist streak) poses too good of a target not to embrace my comparative ignorance of the band formally known as the Quarrymen. By the way, is it Quarrymen or Quarry Men? I’m sure they’ll know.
What drives this post though was this link I came across, and how one graphic designer’s obsession with the band from Liverpool seems the perfect match for his infographic skills. Do these actually make any of this information more accessible or understandable? I’m not sure, though when done well infographics can be true works of design masterpieces. I am amazed both with skill and creativity that goes into something like this, and the enormous time it must have taken to figure all this out. I just hope the dude got paid by the hour.
For more on who’s behind this, check out ChartingTheBeatles.com, see their Flickr Pool (yes JAG Team members, you can contribute to this as well), and read the post about what they’re up to here.
Now, if they could just create a set of these based on Jack White, Beck or Miles Davis, I’d be a happy camper.
This is a great short video on creativity, and refusing to “define” people.
This is a pretty cool video about the way The Impossible Project makes polaroid film. If you’ve been reading the blog we’re big fans of polaroid pictures. A big problem with shooting polaroids, is finding film. Thankfully, a group of volunteers have taken over one of the closed down polaroid film factories, and are making polaroid film again. They’re called The Impossible Project because of the predictions of their critics. Anyway, this is a cool look into the product that comes in each box!
My band The Swags rocked Gulfport Mississippi over the weekend at a very fine and tasty restaurant called Bacchus. Lot’s of laughs, lots of dancing, lots of sweating, lots of drinks, and lots of tunes. It’s just another way for me to be creative—and what can I say—I dig it.
BTW: Best part of this video is the dancing butt shot—love.
Read more about the campaign at gotdiscussion.org
So what do you do when a campaign offends more than 50% of its market? Do you pull all ads and pretend it never happened? Do you ignore all the criticism and stand by your guns? Or do you embrace your failure and use that as a launching point for further discussion. Well, that is exactly what Milk did on the current campaign: “Everything I do is wrong.”
Milk decided to try and use the always uncomfortable topic of PMS and build a campaign around it from a male’s point of view. Let’s just say that a large part of the US was not very happy with the results. Milk was flooded with criticism and decided to pull the ads and website. But they didn’t stop there. Rather than hide, they created a website called gotdiscussion.org to start the conversation. Featuring some of the most fierce comments against Milk, the site balanced their negative press, in fact, making it kind of fun.
What a great lesson: Don’t run from your failures. Embrace them.
