How not to use flash!

In a search on the web I found this blogpost. It’s about how not to use flash. Gladly enough allot of these things are known with the designers today!

1. Screen size expands to take over your monitor
2. Intro movies…….websites are no movies!
3. Form to fill out before seeing the content. Why stay in the first place!
4. Intro movie after the form. Again!!!!!
5. Background music in general, but most of the time it’s also to loud
6. Gratuitous background animation. Giving you the creaps like oldschool animated gif’s
7. Unique navigation, which let you thing
8. Pop ups in Html

Editors

Turns out that for the last seventeen twenty-seven years, every single movie that managed to win the Oscar for best picture was also nominated for best editing.

Great products, amazing services and stories worth talking about get edited along the way. Most of the time, the editing makes them pallid, mediocre and boring. Sometimes, a great editor will push the remarkable stuff. That’s his job.

The easy thing for an editor to do is make things safe. You avoid trouble that way. Alas, it also means you avoid success.

Who’s doing your editing?

(by Seth Godin)

Ideas

I catch myself allot thinking about ideas. Sometimes this thinking is getting shape in what I think is a Great Idea! But most of the times you can easily find it back on Google. If you think you’ve got an Eureka-Idea, it’s hard to talk about it sometimes. Mostly because you only trust your best friends with your E=mc2, frightened someone sneaks away with your idea.

Seth Godin thinks about this another way:

” A guy wrote me a nice note today, asking why I so freely give away ideas. (It was nice because he thought some of the ideas were actually good ones).

I responded that ideas are easy, doing stuff is hard.

My feeling is that the more often you create and share ideas, the better you get at it. The process of manipulating and ultimately spreading ideas improves both the quality and the quantity of what you create, at least it does for me.

History is littered with inventors who had “great” ideas but kept them quiet and then poorly executed them. And history is lit up with do-ers who took ideas that were floating around in the ether and actually made something happen. In fact, just about every successful venture is based on an unoriginal idea, beautifully executed.

So, if you’ve got ideas, let them go. They’re probably holding you back from the hard work of actually executing.”

Pro Bono

Not only lawyers sometimes work on Pro Bono based project. Now you can also join thousands of top marketing, IT, HR and design professionals who are making a meaningful impact by volunteering their skills and expertise in the community.
But what’s the profit then……..doing non-profit work? That question can be simply answered with ‘becoming a better designer!’.

Google……..don’t be evil………what is really true!?

What if all information in the world would be categorised and easy to look for? What if everything that’s written about in the world, the news, all books, texts, photograph and video which be collected exists there at one place in the world, and would be available everywhere? That is exactly the aim of Google, and the company will not do long before realizing that. The search engine, by means of Google Earth, well-known by means of in which all possible information is classified on geographical location. But for example also by means of Google Books, a project where Google digitises complete libraries!!!

A few months ago I allready discussed the case which I saw yesterday in this documentary with Niek Dekker, a classmate of mine. I showed him the movie ‘Google’s Masterplan‘, in which is illustrated the conspiracy theory of Google as the Big Brother of today. After hearing Google is cooperating with governments to censure certain information I really start doubting the complete neutral posture of this ‘great company to work for’!!!

The Egg of de Soto.

Is it really true that third world problems can be solved by creating capital and is the missing law the causer of poverty. I think that pure freedom can lead to a stabel economy. This freedom does not mean there can’t be property and capitalism, but governments must give their citizens freedom of trading and a stabel law to live with. Capitalism is not an Bad thing if you use it right.

This documentary is about a man called Hernando de Soto, who is a major economist and thinks he has found the problem causing poverty in societies all over the world. He wrote the bestselling book ‘The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else’ with the main tenet that people in developing countries lack such an integrated formal property system, leading to only informal ownership of land and goods. He argues that the start of economic success of American and Japanese capitalism relied on a clear system of property rights which was created during the times of the ‘frontier’ in America and in post-WWII Japan. The lack of such an integrated system of property rights in today’s Third World Countries makes it impossible for the poor to make their now informal ownerships into capital, which de Soto claims would form the basis for entrepreneurship. Farmers in much of the developing world remain trapped in subsistence agriculture. As such, he argues that this informal ownership should be made formal, for example by giving official papers for the land they now live on.

Borsten voor je verjaardag!

Niet normaal dit! Meisjes van 19 die voor een borstvergroting gaan. Het zou verboden moeten worden. Eerst waren piercings en oorbellen iets waar je als ouder je kind voor wilde weerhouden, maar nu durft de puberende jeugd zelfs na te denken over deze cosmetische ingrepen. En dan is het enige wat je zegt als huge-money-making-chirurg: deze ingrepen zijn terug te draaien en een piercing laat voor altijd een lidteken achter………….of…………tuurlijk neem ik deze meisjes serieus, anders zou ik de arts-patient-relatie niet serieus nemen ($$$$$$$$$$)!…………..Pffffffff…………flatdrol.

The Vibe

“Have you ever been at a banquet or in a boutique or at a concert or a meeting or a company where the vibe was incredibly positive?

I think you know what I mean. A time and place where there was an overflow of positive energy. You felt surrounded by possibility, or people who believed in you, or just felt like buying (or eating, or talking) a lot.

The vibe changes everything. It’s a place you want to work, or a restaurant you want to come back to. I remember the first time I walked into Fast Company’s offices. I remember the original Legal Seafoods. And I remember, just a few weeks ago, the buzz in the lobby of the PDF conference in NY.

If vibe is so important, why does it sound flaky to worry about it? Who’s in charge of the vibe at your place? Could it be better? A lot better?

Changing the vibe isn’t always possible, but most of us rarely try. From physical layout to organization to what leaders say and do… it matters. Sometimes, it’s all that matters.”

I stole this post from the famous Seth ‘Purple Cow’ Godin. He describes an element that is hardly to define but is very important. How this vibe is created is not allways that simple but I also believe that for some concepts and companies it’s a decisive factor. Maybe the ‘Vibe’ is a woolly term but I’ve been persuaded of the fact that after exhaustive research eventually a beautiful marketing theory can be created.

Brand Activation

Brandactivation.nl (a project of brandbase.nl) is a new theory in the world of marketeers. It’s explains the way a new brand has to operate to reach the customers. Brand Activation lays the focus on the core of marketing: stimulating the buying process. There are several developments why this focus is now the most important way of advertising and for which advertisers choose Brand Activation instead of traditional campaign.

Online drawing

This is a nice drawing application for online artist. I have used this to set up my concept for my school project. It is nice to see how many people are drawing using this application, because it’s only for fun. It’s not some sort of online portfolio of your best work like Deviantart. Really unbelievable how some of these folks are drawing!!! Like this one for example……….