Diet Water

A friend alerted me while she was watching Titanic earlier. Channel 5 apparently. But she one of these adverts for Skinny Water.





Brilliant stuff. Water with small calories. Little tiny ones. A low calorie water is, well, a joke. As proof of this even we created a fake "Diet Water" last September. Weiden's saw it, so did Albion, VCCP and Leos. But the gist of the ad is written below.

It was a sarcastic take at all dieters for trying too hard. Unfortunately someone else tried even harder, and actually made it.

Proof here.

Outrageous Lego

Wow... this is dedication and a half!

Sour Music Video

I don't where I would start to plan this. It's really nicely done and the clever bits around 1 minute and 2min 30secs with the use of faces make it worth watching alone.



Music videos are becoming a medium that can be really creative, even on a budget. It doesn't even what the song is about, how fast it is played or frankly if the song is any good. You can polish a turd of a song into a great piece of art.

Here's a few examples I've been collecting over a while of cool music videos.






And my favourite.


I'm pretty sure you can think of a few ;)

Powerpoint

Powerpoint is celebrating its 25th birthday this month and the BBC has unearthed some rather amusing facts.

I have to admit since I've converted to Mac, Keynote offers a great way to present, especially when we were at uni. But occasionally even I have to sit through one of these and even had a creative brief to design one for the BBC, of which some of the slides can be found beneath. They were merely visual cues and each slide was a visual metaphor for her speech.

Here are the issues with most people's PPT presentations according to an 'expert' Max Atkinson.

Screens are magnets of everyone's eyes

More slides increase lack of focus on the presenter. Decide if they you want them watching you or the screen more.

Reading and listening distracts audiences

If there's nothing but text on the screen, people will try to read and listen at the same time - and won't succeed in doing either very well.

Slides shouldn't just be notes
Few speakers are willing to open their mouths until they have their first slide safely in place. But all too often the slides are verbal crutches for the speaker, not visual aids for the audience.

Information overload

You think bullet points make information more digestible? Think again. A dozen slides with five bullet points on each assumes that people are mentally capable of taking in a list of 60 points. If it's a 30-minute presentation, that's a rate of two-per-minute.

The bullet point problem

Audiences don't like wordy slides. Simple

The full article can be found here

Some of our PPT slides for the Beeb, slightly more interesting than bullet points!

On a side note, we started at Leith today :)

Eyetracking emotions

:-) or to anyone from the east (^_^)

Apparently the western countries have a completely different way of interacting with their colleagues than the east.

In research, which consisted of a paltry 13 Western Caucasians and 13 East Asians, it found using eye tracker that different cultures read facial expressions differently. Apparently Asian people focused more on the eyes of a person, while westerners read the mouth and lips as a basis to relate.

This works on a personal level but is also reflected in the broader usage of emoticons.

For instance:

West East

Happy :-) (^_^)

Sad :-( (;_;) or (T_T)

Surprise :-O (o.o)

It amazes me sometimes to discover how easy it it to get cultural differences wrong, especially if work has to span broader markets than your own. We've experienced this before as specific guidelines have be in place for us to adhere to, but such a simple thing like a smile or a surprise face can conjure such a confused response from others.

Go Fast

I saw this the other day and have finally got around to taking the pics off my camera. It's clear speed cameras are nothing but an evil invention trying to get money out of you!

Bow Time

Nice piece of strategic advertising by Strongbow

teh...

Teh is an internet slang neologism most frequently used as an English article, based on a common misspelling of the. A common typographical error, this typo became a part of Internet slang and subsequently developed grammatical usages distinct from the.

It is not common in spoken or written English outside technical or leetspeak circles, but when spoken, it is pronounced te.
(link)

Apparently:
Along with pwn, teh is a standard feature of leetspeak Originating from the common typo, it has become conventionalised in a variety of contexts. It is often used ironically, and can be used to mock someone's lack of techie knowledge or skills, as an insult, or to reinforce a group's elitism.

Furthermore, teh can be used in front of a verb in a novel form of gerund, and it has the ability to turn nearly any word into an intensified noun, which can take the place of a superlative. The best-known example of this is the word suck. Thus, the phrase "this sucks" can be converted into "this is teh suck" ("teh suck" being equivalent to the superlative "the suckiest"); the word pwn can be similarly converted (teh pwn or teh pwnage). The latter phrase is primarily used by the computer gaming community, and often intended humorously.

Crikey. It's amazing how wikipedia can take over teh world, and suddenly make typos into real words. Who wants to see it in the English dictionary? Geeks stand and be counted!

Model kits aren't what they used to be

Via B3TA.

A warm welcome back

Having had a great 2 weeks off in sunny Spain the weather hasn't been my friend at home. But after a long watch of MOTD from sky + this morning and as I turned over to find the weather was on the BBC. But not how you would normally see it.

This man was presenting the weather in an Abercrombie and Fitch tee. I couldn't decide if it was dress down Sunday or weather he was thrown in at the last minute and so didn't have a suit. It just seemed really odd to me, I almost couldn't take it seriously.

Here's this weeks weather, strangely without the sound and a suit... sorry about that!