Design Evolves

Let your love flow for Toyota

I’ve got to admit, the new Prius commercials are beyond awesome. I enjoyed the celebrity edited chevy commercials lately, but these have an amazing ability to get the point across thats beyond cool, flashy, and hip.

The commercials capture the whimsy and play that the Prius brand has built itself on.

But what I want more.. is for Toyota to release the Petra Haden sung songs. I’ve heard they might be working on it. I’m an impatient bastard and its the one part of the marketing strategy that always fails to me. Connect the song to the brand NOW.. not later.. not after I’ve forgotten it.. not after I’ve moved on. MAKE the connection NOW.

Sure, songs are overused in this day and age.. but covers delivered in a new way.. are a brilliant way to leverage a new version positioned toward your brand without the crusty backlash of ‘ruining’ the classics.

Another great example to me is Lincoln’s “Luxury at Lightspeed” http://www.lincoln.com/extras/tvads.asp – which is a cover of Major Tom by Shiny Toy Guns.

In doing this rant I found out it was now available on iTunes, and is now gracing my library with its presence awaiting the Prius’ commercial covers.

Hypnotic

It’s been forever since I’ve written anything on here, in fact I forget with all the ideas running through my head how much fun this is. Not that it’s read by anybody, at this rate any thoughts I’ve had once for what this blog and site could be have been derailed by life.

Trying to reclaim some of that though. The first step was cleaning my desk and for the first time in years its close to being just monitors, keyboard, wireless mouse and a drawing tablet.. and maybe a scanner off to the side.

I’ve moved things around, and moved external drives to shelf nearby and I’m gonna get a little cart to store CDs and such and store the things I think I need, but really dont. I’m trying to use the psychology of this situation for myself. I figure I can’t change my habits overnight, but if I have a simple alternative that I can store crap in and wheel it around and clean it out every now and then.. my desk stays.. AWESOM!

For to long my brain has been cluttered, which has lead to a cluttered space. Slowly that is being changed. Just like this blog is about to change.

Back to its simple roots.

Imma start to get this shit tinyfied.

The internet is to big.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. Lots of things have happened, some good, some bad. Life goes on. I’ll get back into the posting mode soon enough. Putting a voice on the internet is important to me.

However, the internet is to big.

Millions of pages, billions of megabytes of bandwidth, trillions of dollars in electricity for servers. But what if.. what if all information not updated for a year, was archived and deleted. Sure it would be a huge undertaking. But the benefits in infrastructure could actually be huge.

I’m not a number cruncher, but one could argue, if Google for example under federal subsidy, archived every US domain. Then we created an Archived Status Code… similar to those that already exist.. we could actually prevent search bots and other bots from constant indexing, while still maintaining access to the content.

If the content were to then be updated later on, the status code on the server would change, flagging it for indexing, esp if an archived version existed on major search providers as part of its service.

Sure.. cached versions exist, but they dont stay long… sure the archive.org wayback machine is a great step.. but it doesnt do a great job of… archiving in my opinion.

Having a server status, means the server wouldnt have to spend time and resources dealing out requests, meaning less bandwidth, less electricity, less cost, less consumption.

Why would search providers do this? Forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t there something called the Library of Congress.. there needs to be a digital equivelant, archiving history is important. Anyone can publish something, sure, but that shouldnt change the purpose of such a task. To have a record of the past.

Back up, kinda

This blog is back up and running, kinda. I’ve decided to make some changes and am testing out a couple things.. but now its time for bed.

New things inbound, watch out.

The Rage is back..

I’ve always classified issues between browser displays as “Browser Rage” and I think it well signifies the crap that browsers spit out at no random reason. Sometimes sure, it can be user error. Often times the display engine is attempting to clarify or rather ‘guess’ at what it should ‘really do’ with your explicit.. DO THIS.. concepts.

I’m not a fan of Browser Rage, I’d rather there be some day, the ability for me to write about Browser Zen, the day that all the display engines made the same decisions and did the same thing.. but that will never happen, people wouldn’t be able to handle excitment, most designers would die from heart attacks and it would probably set us back.. but I can dream.