Maurice Saatchi, executive director of M&C Saatchi has had a revelation on saving advertising (He doesn’t say that in the article but someone is going to have to show companies ‘the way’ and why not Saatchi). Why is advertising dying? Oh this stupid thing we have called technology. Yeah, technology is making things difficult for the Saachi brains. His solution? See below:

What I am describing here is a new business model for marketing, appropriate to the digital age. In this model, companies compete for global ownership of one word in the public mind.

Woah.

For example, the word “search” is now owned by Google. For 20 years, “favourite” was owned by British Airways. Sony used to own “innovation”, but that word has probably now been taken by Apple. Royal Bank of Scotland, in its US marketing, will soon own “action”. The same applies to political parties or countries – Britain’s Labour party won three elections with the word “new”. America’s one-word equity is “freedom”.

More woah. Innovation has ‘probably’ been taken by Apple? I never knew Sony had it? It must be great to be at the top of the company and can afford to just make shit up.
Oh and Maurice has made a really nasty, bloated Flash site for his new paradigm. Ooof that is nasty! Why not carry over the simplicity of one word equity and make a simple, clear site?
Truly Amazing. Great rhetoric there, mister Saachi guy.

From the set, 8.15 – 8.16.2007

Dreamhost down again
Yesterday all tubes were full
Please don’t bust my balls

from the set, 8.7 – 8.15.2007

I went to Seth Godin‘s blog this morning. I liked what I read so I decided to add his RSS feed to my NewsFire application. When I clicked on the RSS feed icon in Firefox I got this:

I don’t care which type of RSS feed I get. Good design is not only visual, but technical as well. Design involves removing unnecessary complexity.
Don’t show me 3 options when 1 is sufficient.
XML is XML. Just give me a feed.

…but what exactly?
Hmm, I don’t know. Just a little something I’m working on.

We may have iPhones, but we still end up walking on foot when we get a big thunderstorm.
I need my subway!

Microsoft doesn’t always produce crap. Entourage is actually a pretty good email application and I’ve been using it for years now.
But I’ve decided to revisit Mail.app and it’s also a great e-mail application, but one of the reasons I’ve never used it was because I could never figure out how to tell the application to use my IMAP folders (on Dreamhost) for specific functions like using my IMAP “Trash” as the real Trash, etc.
Thanks to my buddy dalematic, I’ve found the solution:

note: this problem was previously solved using this method.

Let me clarify. Through word of mouth someone found me and asked for help on their website. I visited their existing site and it’s horrendous. It’s just plain 1997-old-stale-HTML nasty. My gut said, delete this email now and move on.
Then I decided not to do this. I wrote a quick, blunt email back to this person on where their site is failing. Just quick bullet points. It was harsh, but it was meant as constructive criticism and I told them that.
They heard me, and wanted to talk on the phone. We talked, I told them how I work, what you get for when you hire me – the whole process.
The bottom line is, if you’re a designer, you want success stories in your portfolio. Nothing says success more than taking lead and turning it into gold. This isn’t always easy. I let my clients know that I demand quality on both sides my projects. I will listen to them if they listen to me. Clients need to understand how to heed to design – and I’m not talking about fonts or grids. I’m talking about why I did certain things. How what I’ve done to their site will impact their business.
So next time a poorly designed site comes your way… consider it. If the client is on board with your vision, make some gold.

Hey, after almost 5 months, Nokia MOSH is finally live to the public (we initially had the Alpha version open to a small group of testers). You can upload your own content, or collect other peoples’ and have it immediately available for your phone via the mobile version of the site (you don’t need a Nokia phone).
This site is the result of a lot of hard work by both Nokia and Schematic New York. For as much art direction and design I did, it wouldn’t be worth anything if it weren’t for all the hard backend and client-side development from my Nokia team at Schematic. We also had great project management (thanks Eoin).
Big ups to Ian, Vinny, Wes, Maggie, Emily, Andrew, Jason, Brian, Eoin, David, JP, Del, Chris, Ben, Kevin, Karolina, Pablo and everyone else who contributed!

Shots from this weekend – About Town 8.5.2007.