Sell More Ads, Don

The Gothamist says data provided to them by Trulia determined Don Draper couldn’t afford his Manhattan apartment in 2015:

  • With Don’s title as Creative Director and Junior Partner it is estimated that he made around $45,000 in the 1960s
  • In 2015, that has a buying power of $355,297
  • Median home values in New York in the ’60s were $75,000, which is pretty good if he was making $45k a year
  • Today, a Creative Director in New York City makes an average of $154,838+ a year [ed. note: Don was also a founding partner]
  • Today, places in Don and Megan’s Park Ave. apartment are going for a cool $16.5 Million

There are lots of fun nit-pickers in the comments too.

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Finance

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We Can’t Be Trusted

Elon Musk: cars you can drive will eventually be outlawed:

Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk believes that cars you can control will eventually be outlawed in favor of ones that are controlled by robots. The simple explanation: Musk believes computers will do a much better job than us to the point where, statistically, humans would be a liability on roadways.

“I don’t think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because that’s sort of like a narrow form of AI,” Musk told NVidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at the technology company’s annual developers conference today. “It would be like an elevator. They used to have elevator operators, and then we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just automatically come to the floor that you’re at … the car is going to be just like that.” So what happens when we get there? Musk said that the obvious move is to outlaw driving cars. “It’s too dangerous,” Musk said. “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”

Bryan and I have talked about this more than once on the Weekly Exhaust podcast.

We humans are fucking idiots, driven by emotion and occasionally use our higher brains to achieve amazing things in areas like science, literature, and healthcare.

I’ll tell you a few things a self-driving car won’t do:

  • text his friend while driving
  • drive after drinking 7 Coronas
  • drive angry after a blowout fight with her boyfriend

I look forward to the day manual cars are leisure vehicles we enjoy on the weekends and not something we have to endure on the highway 2 hours a day to go to and from work.

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Vehicle

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Machining Porn

If you’re into manufacturing and machining porn, Greg Koenig has some details descriptions of the processes behind making the Apple Watch:

Apple is the world’s foremost manufacturer of goods. At one time, this statement had to be caged and qualified with modifiers such as “consumer goods” or “electronic goods,” but last quarter, Apple shipped a Boeing 787’s weight worth of iPhones every 24 hours. When we add the rest of the product line to the mix, it becomes clear that Apple’s supply chain is one of the largest scale production organizations in the world.

While Boeing is happy to provide tours of their Everett, WA facility, Apple continues to operate with Willy Wonka levels of secrecy. In the manufacturing world, we hear rumors of entire German CNC mill factories being built to supply Apple exclusively, or even occasionally hear that one of our supplier’s process experts has been “disappeared” to move to Cupertino or Shenzhen. While we all are massively impressed with the scale of Apple’s operations, there is constant intrigue as to exactly how they pull it all off with the level of fit, finish and precision obvious to anyone who has examined their hardware.

It’s attention like this which gives Apple the ability to charge a premium for their products.

Again, something I don’t thing Samsung as a company can do (or cares about).

Categories:

Process

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rise from a liquid media

News flash, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and 3-D print objects:

The technology, called CLIP — for Continuous Liquid Interface Production — manipulates light and oxygen to fuse objects in liquid media, creating the first 3-D printing process that uses tunable photochemistry instead of the layer-by-layer approach that has defined the technology for decades. It works by projecting beams of light through an oxygen-permeable window into a liquid resin. Working in tandem, light and oxygen control the solidification of the resin, creating commercially viable objects that can have feature sizes below 20 microns, or less than one-quarter of the width of a piece of paper.

“By rethinking the whole approach to 3-D printing, and the chemistry and physics behind the process, we have developed a new technology that can create parts radically faster than traditional technologies by essentially ‘growing’ them in a pool of liquid,” said DeSimone, who was scheduled to reveal the technology at a TED talk on March 16 in the opening session of the conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. Here’s the video:

via DrewBot

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Innovation

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without adding complexity

Kevin C. Tofel on the nut Apple has to crack with their Watch:

The Apple Watch offers most – but not all – of the features I have with my Sony and arguably, has a more elegant interface. Apple’s big advantage here is complete control of both the hardware and software experience; particularly with how well the watch integrates with a connected iPhone. At its core, however, it does most of the same things your phone already can do; just like an Android Wear watch or a Pebble. The watch brings a convenience factor though. Presumably, you can spend less time on your phone because certain glanceable information is available on your wrist.

There’s one commonality with all of these devices however and has to do with the challenge of bringing simplicity and value to the wrist without adding complexity. If an activity takes too long to do on a watch, for example, or requires too much engagement, you’re likely better off just pulling out your phone for a better, faster interaction.

I’m really interested to see how Apple Watch changes the dynamic between me and my iPhone.

Categories:

Human Experience

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“Cordarounds’ horizontal wales mesh evenly, lowering the average wearer’s crotch heat index (CHI) reading by up to 22%.”

Interesting look behind-the-scenes at Chris Lindland’s company, Betabrand:

When San Francisco saw yet another influx of tech workers a few years ago, Betabrand was in a position to capture a new audience – an audience that lived on the internet, enjoyed its wacky bent, and was seeking a kind of practicality and comfort that wasn’t being addressed by other clothing companies. This was around the same time that Facebook, Zynga, LinkedIn, and Yelp were gaining tons of attention for their huge IPOs. In the spirit of maximizing press potential, Lindland created the Executive Hoodie, a hooded sweatshirt made out of pinstriped blazer material, an official sport coat of Silicon Valley, and launched it concurrent with Facebook’s IPO in 2012. Its tongue was both firmly in its cheek and sticking out at the rest of the tech world. Subsequently the company started to specialize in what it calls West Coast Workwear: Bike to Work Pants, to ease a cycling commute with a “slightly higher back rise that is optimal for crack-coverage”; Dress Pants Sweat Pants; Sons of Britches, pants for the “amateur stuntman lifestyle”; and a Ping Pong Polo shirt, for the type of people who have a ping-pong table near their workstation because they don’t want to seem so stuffy that they go to an office, or so square that they have to put on big-boy dress-up clothes.

Betabrand is filling a void in the current fashion and retail landscapes. It’s a great position to be in.

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Clothing

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If consumers don’t see your brand as premium, then it’s not.

Over at Forbes, Ewan Spence on the pricing of the Samsung S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge:

Pricing details around Samsung’s Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge are starting to come out, with an expected street price in the UK of £550 for the SIM-free Galaxy S6 (and £650 for the Galaxy S6 Edge). While these prices are unconfirmed, they are higher than the entry-level competition of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

Arguably the price difference could come down to Samsung running with 32 GB of storage compared to the 16 GB Apple has fitted to the iPhones, but I do like the idea of Samsung exploiting a higher price than Apple. If the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge handsets turn out to be more expensive than the Apple iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, then Samsung will have some powerful arguments available to help sell the device.

Spence “likes the idea of Samsung exploiting a higher price than Apple.”

That’s cute.

Wait, Spence has more brilliance in his brain to share:

Now the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge have the advantage Samsung should push hard on the specifications battle. That will be helped by Apple essentially ducking the numbers fight, so Samsung should be able to play hard on the fact that the S6 is a more powerful phone with more features.

And the easiest way to say that a phone is ‘better’ than another phone is to be more expensive.

Is that the easiest way to say ‘better’? Just make it more expensive? Maybe Toyota should try that with their Corolla. Just add $10K to the price tag.

Premium pricing only works if your brand is perceived at premium and this perception is controlled by people who buy your products, not the company making them.

I don’t think this will prove a winning strategy for Samsung, but since they’re clearly in the game to copy everything Apple does, fuck it. Go for it, Samsung.

Categories:

Business

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 /  /  / 

Just Do It

Dan Weiden (of Weiden & Kennedy) on the genesis of Nike’s slogan:

“I was recalling a man in Portland,” Wieden told Dezeen, remembering how in 1988 he was struggling to come up with a line that would tie together a number of different TV commercials the fledgling agency had created for the sportswear brand.

“He grew up in Portland, and ran around doing criminal acts in the country, and was in Utah where he murdered a man and a woman, and was sent to jail and put before a firing squad.”

Wieden continued: “They asked him if he had any final thoughts and he said: ‘Let’s do it’. I didn’t like ‘Let’s do it’ so I just changed it to ‘Just do it’.”

I know innovation is all about recontextualization, but man.

Categories:

Branding

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The Post-Smartphone Era

Apple has posted their Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) for Apple Watch:

Personal. Because Apple Watch is designed to be worn, its UI is attuned to the wearer’s presence. A raise of the wrist shows the time and new alerts. Digital Touch–particularly its Heartbeat and Sketch features–enables new types of personal communication. An accelerometer and a heart rate sensor provide personalized information about the wearer’s activity from day to day. No other Apple device has ever been so connected to the wearer. Be mindful of this connection as you design apps for Apple Watch.

Just as the iPad marked the beginning of the “Post-PC Era”, the Apple Watch is marking the beginning of the “Post-Smartphone” or “Smartphone+1” Era.

The smartphone might still be the star of the mobile computing show, but it now has to share the stage with the tablet and the watch. Wearing a watch that’s tethered to your phone changes the relationship of how you interact with both of these devices.

Digital designers, UI designers, UX designers, web designers–I don’t give a fuck what you call yourselves–you best familiarize yourselves with the Apple Watch HIG.

It doesn’t matter if you hate the Apple Watch, or love the Apple Watch or never plan to wear one. Not making an effort to understand wearables will put you at a severe disadvantage as a designer.

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Human Experience

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It All Comes Back to Content

Netflix Ups the Stakes With Big ‘Beasts of No Nation’ Deal (via ParisLemon):

“As Netflix gets bigger, it will be harder to economically outbid them for any title,” says media analyst Mark S. Mahaney, with RBC Capital Markets. “They have the largest indie audience. They have the largest arthouse audience. They have the largest teenage werewolf audience. That puts them at a real advantage.”

Achieving top-dog status is costly. Tony Wible, an analyst with Janney Montgomery Scott, estimates that Netflix will spend $5 billion in programming next year, more than anyone save ESPN. It also eclipses the $4.5 billion that rivals Amazon, HBO, Starz and Showtime are estimated to have shelled out in combined spending in 2014.

The question you have to ask yourself: Are you a creator of content or a creator of tools that distribute and connect and if you’re a creator how are you going to distribute your content?

Categories:

Entertainment

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Apple Consistency

The other day BGR posted this animated GIF of Apple’s website from the late ’90s (based on my digging on archive.org, I’d say 1998):

This is what they said (my emphasis):

Apple has come a long way since the dark days of the mid-’90s, when it very nearly went bankrupt. And if you want to see just how far Apple has come, then you need look no further than this awesome GIF posted on OpenUniversity.edu that has preserved Apple’s website exactly as it looked in 1997. As you’ll see below, the company’s main page has undergone a pretty drastic overhaul in the past 18 years, and it’s all been for the better. Yes, screen resolution has changed. Yes, browsers have gotten better.

Yes, Apple’s productions have evolved.

But has their website “undergone a drastic overhaul”? Not from what I see. I see a website structure that’s pretty consistent with today’s Apple.com in 2015:

Ok, there’s 4 modules under the main carousel, not three. So sorry.

Categories:

Art Direction

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