Latest favourite font: Ode
9
2012
Writing for I Love Typography about his font Ode, Martin Wenzel says: “When designing a typeface, I prefer to explore a construction principle rather than revive an existing typeface idea. These principles or writing models are based on the tools and techniques originally used. Understanding these workings are often a great source of inspiration for me.” Read more here
An average day on Facebook
6
2012
What’s your 70:30:10 for 2012?
6
2012
At last the magic ingredient of Coca Cola’s success is now being shared. No, I am not talking about the tightly-guarded ingredients of its flavoured water.
Rather, how it allocates its precious resources for brand communications to ensure its future success by ‘gaining a disproportionate share of popular culture’. (Isn’t this what you are about: aiming to gain a disproportionate share of your stakeholders’ culture?)
For several years now, when facilitating Brand Communications Reviews or Strategic Awaydays I had been advocating an 80:20 formula – 80% of the things you do, you play safe, tried and tested; 20% you go for innovation, try new things, play, experiment, and engage more with risk.
By using this recipe, I believe you can get the best balance between safety/change and risk.
Coca Cola in its major strategic review Coca Cola 2020 goes even further. It uses a 70:20:10 ratio.
70% of activity is Low Risk, bread and butter stuff;
20% is Innovative on what works, tending to be activity engaging more deeply with specific audience (but still has broad scale)
10% is for the High Risk, potentially tomorrow’s 20 or 70% activity, where learning intent is declared upfront, and you are prepared to fail by celebrating both failure and success.
In the year ahead it’s going to be tough, But it’s not about the survival of the fittest, but rather the survival of the best fitting: who can best adapt to chnages, new demands, and capitalise on available opportuntities. How are you going to devise your 70:30:10?
Here are some key strategic tools I will be harnessing in the brand workshops I will be running for clients during 2012:
1. Be uncreative Part One: Do a faster/quicker/cheaper review of what you currently do.
2. Be uncreative Part Two: Plan for 70 or 80% of your resources to be conservative, low risk, safe bet.
3. Do a Traffic Light Analysis of your activity: what do you need to stop, what needs to continue and in what areas do you need to go ahead
4. Do something awesome with your 20 or 30%
5. What would your role model do?
6. Do a pre-mortem. Imagine yourself in a year’s time looking back on the previous 12 months in a scenario where your plans created a disaster. Examine why it was a disaster. This is a great technique as it legitimizes doubt and gets you to challenge much-cherished activity.
7. Just do the right thing
If you are not planning a strategic review for 2012 – will you still be here next year? What are you going to do different in 2012? How are you going to be best fitting to your new world?
Make your New Years resolutions happen by using Squeezesteps
3
2012
If you have made New Year’s resolutions the critical challenge is to make them happen. Here’s where you need to use ‘Squeezesteps’.
The dictionary of the future will define a ‘Squeezestep as: – Actively breaking down into smaller, more do-able, nudgeable or more compelling steps in any change requiring you or others to take.”
It implies there is an onus on anyone engaged with change to recognize the need for making change easier for the other person.
Creativity fundamentally works in the same way as if you were making a snowball. It is an incremental dynamic where you add one thing to another, and another, and another. Every idea you create is a stepping stone to take you somewhere different.
Making small steps is far less frightening than making big ones. It’s far easier, and also gives you more options, for example to shuffle to the right or left, forwards or backwards rather than to make just one massive leap forward.
Nature also works by following lines of least resistance; a river does not flow in a straight line. In your strategy you don’t need to identify the straightest line between you and your objective. You need to identify lines of least resistance.
These lines of least resistance are identified by the easiest squeezstep forward. By being prepared to make many different probes forward – and also being flexible enough to go back and start another route if necessary, you can overcome the biggest obstacles.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time is the old gag, but it’s perfectly true in your gameplan when tackling any big task you face.
One of the key reasons why an idea, a new business venture, or a lifestyle change is unsuccessful is that you may have been required to make too many unbridgeable steps.
Equally, it may have required you to say an immediate ‘Yes’ to your idea, to travel too far for their small steps.
When you have an idea in your head, the tendency is for it to be in concrete detail in your mind. The picture is a vivid, yet self-contained vision. But it fails to take into account the niggling little things, the minor interventions, hurdles and diversions that people have to overcome to also get to your destination.
Whenever you have an idea you need to ask yourself beautiful questions of : ‘What are the small steps I need to ask people to make?’ and ‘What squeezesteps do I need to introduce to make the change happen?’
I would recommend identifying five Squeezesteps – between where you are now and the place where you want to be. The crucial trick is that two of your five squeezesteps you should have already done.
The reason for this is that it makes starting easier – you have already made the first step. By identifying the second step you have already done, this creates a sense of momentum to make your next step even more compelling and likely to happen.
You can diagnose the optimum step ladder for you to reach the place where you are at by using these 4 motivations:
1. When looking at the detail of your situation, explore beyond its immediate features, identify its benefits – what it does for you, both on a practical and emotional level and the inter-relationship between different elements of your situation.
2. In what ways can you go the extra yard compared to what is already being offered?
3. What niche opportunities are there to the left or the right, foreground or rear of your situation can you take advantage of?
4. Making, consuming and experiencing as many squeezesteps as possible expands the range of opportunities available to you and gives you more to think flexibly around.
Taking squeezesteps helps your flexible thinking move quicker. It can also bring you dividends for you when you least expect.
Here’s to you fulfilling your New Year resolutions and taking Squeezesteps 3,4 and 5.
Happy Christmas to all our friends
22
2011
Happy Christmas to all our friends. This lovely picture is from one of our favourite blogs – Spitalfields Life – and one of our favourite artists Paul Bommer. Who is currently acting as Spitalfields Life Artist-in-Residence for December, contributing a page of the Advent Calendar daily and other surprises along the way.
Font of the week: Gotham
9
2011
Gotham is a family of geometric sans-serif digital typefaces designed by American type designer Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000. Gotham’s letterforms are inspired by a form of architectural signage that achieved popularity in the mid-twentieth century, and are especially popular throughout New York City.
Since creation, Gotham has been highly visible due to its appearance in many notable places, including a large amount of campaign material created for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, as well as the cornerstone of the One World Trade Center, the tower to be built on the site of the former World Trade Center in New York.The Gotham font was initially commissioned by GQ magazine, whose editors wanted to display a sans-serif with a “geometric structure” that would look “masculine, new, and fresh” for their magazine. Although the magazine was initially considering a series of fonts that either looked like techno CD covers or were more traditional like Futura, they agreed that they needed something “that was going to be very fresh and very established to have a sort of credible voice to it,” according to Jonathan Hoefler.
Frere-Jones’ inspiration for the typeface came from time spent walking block-by-block through Manhattan with a camera to find source material, and he based the font on the lettering seen in older buildings, especially the sign on the Eighth Avenue facade of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. “I suppose there’s a hidden personal agenda in the design,” Frere-Jones said, “to preserve those old pieces of New York that could be wiped out before they’re appreciated. Having grown up here, I was always fond of the ‘old’ New York and its lettering.”
The lettering that inspired this typeface originated from the style of 1920s era sans-serifs like Futura, where “Type, like architecture, like the organization of society itself, was to be reduced to its bare, efficient essentials, rid of undesirable, local or ethnic elements.” This theme was found frequently in Depression-era type in both North America and Europe, particularly Germany.[4] This simplification of type is characterized by Frere-Jones as “not the kind of letter a type designer would make. It’s the kind of letter an engineer would make. It was born outside the type design in some other world and has a very distinct flavor from that.”
Reviews of Gotham focus on its identity as something both American and specific to New York City. According to David Dunlap of The New York Times, Gotham “deliberately evokes the blocky no-nonsense, unselfconscious architectural lettering that dominated the [New York] streetscape from the 1930′s through the 1960′s.”Andrew Romano of Newsweek concurs. “Unlike other sans serif typefaces, it’s not German, it’s not French, it’s not Swiss,” he said. “It’s very American.”
According to Frere-Jones, Gotham wouldn’t have happened without the GQ commission. “The humanist and the geometric … had already been thoroughly staked out and developed by past designers. I didn’t think anything new could have been found there, but luckily for me (and the client), I was mistaken.”
Five Songs for Twixtmas
7
2011
What five songs have changed your life – or would you recommend to a friend to listen to during the Twixtmas break – the five days between the Christmas and New Year holidays?
Twixtmas, which is supported by GREEN Communications, is an ideal opportunity to indulge yourself.
The five days of Twixtmas represent an ideal time to creqte space for yourself, to savour what you like and to make your own world, and the wider world, a better place.
Here are five songs recommended by Andy Green of the Flexible Thinking Forum to catch up on during the Twixtmas break:
1. The Harder They Come by Jimmy Cliff (pictured): Andy is obsessed with the Jamaican film/stage version and anything associated with the Jimmy Cliff epic. The lines ‘I’d rather be a free man in my grave, than live my life a puppet or a slave’ are particularly inspirational.
2. Itchycoo Park the Small Faces – ‘why [indeed] go to learn the rules of fools’?
3. An Englishman in New York by Sting wonderfully captures the essence of the maverick’s struggle with the world at large. Andy relates to the line: ‘It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile.’
4. Teenage Kicks by the Undertones – the most wonderful expression of raw energy ever. (And Andy claims to be Britain’s oldest teenager, and oldest angry young man!)
5. Stranger on the Shore by Acker Bilk. A haunting early 1960’s instrumental that Andy heard on his car radio on the way back from the birth of his first daughter, and now associated with one of his life’s most wonderful experiences.
What are your five favourite songs? Share them at www.twixtmas.com and on Twitter at #twixtmas.
Frank’s trick and treat on Twixtmas
7
2011
You’ve heard of Christmas and New Year, right? But what do you call the period in-between?
Welcome to the five days of Twixtmas where you are being encouraged to make the most of this valuable time.
Do five things to change your world for the better: Do something different from the shopping, scoffing and slothing.
Twixtmas is a brilliant opportunity. A significant part of the population is on holiday and has free quality time to do something. So many thanks to Frank Haschka for putting together this neat trick and video on the idea behind Twixtmas.
Frank Haschka is an award winning full-time magician, available for hire throughout the United Kingdom and overseas. Offering live entertainment at its finest, Frank provides close up table magic, strolling magic and stand-up shows for all occasions. From intimate private parties and weddings to large corporate functions, trade shows, and more. Looking for quality? You’ve just found it.
International accolade for this blog
30
2011
We’ve just been recognized as ‘Blog of the Day’ by global blog aggregator site paperblog.com.
The award was given for the quality and reader interest value of the greenblog site which featured material ranging from latest developments in social media, through to insights on creativity and innovation from partner Andy Green, along with a diary log of the firm’s Ian Green’s efforts to grow a moustache in support of the Movember campaign.
GREEN Communications is a leading digital PR, social media, media relations, SEO and brand marketing consultancy.
Commenting on the accolade Andy Green of GREEN Communications said: “We preach to our clients about the need to create interesting, relevant copy for their businesses in order to raise their profile, be easier found on the web, and gain new business. It’s welcoming to be recognized for our own efforts.”
In the first quarter of 2011, Paperblog International received 10 million regular visitors. The site helps find quality articles from the blogosphere, providing a participatory media site where talented experts and enthusiasts can share their knowledge and experience.
Infographic of the week
28
2011
Our love of infographics continues with this from mindflash with a step-by-step Linkedin Bootcamp giving some steps to get the most out of the B2B social network.
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