Happy Thanksgiving. For anyone interested I will be “liveblogging” Black Friday over at Brandchannel.
Andy Rooney is rolling over in his grave,
Also, to aid digestion, read this hilarious email correspondence:
From: Simon Edhouse
Date: Tuesday 17 November 2009 11.07am
To: David Thorne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Logo Design
You just crossed the line. You have no idea about the potential this project has. The technology allows users to network peer to peer, add contacts, share information and is potentially worth many millions of dollars and your short sightedness just cost you any chance of being involved.
From: David Thorne
Date: Tuesday 17 November 2009 1.36pm
To: Simon Edhouse
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Logo Design
Dear Simon,
So you have invented Twitter. Congratulations. This is where that time machine would definitely have come in quite handy.
It is good like rhubarb pie.
How clever. How twee. How wrong.
Assuming a best case scenario where this particular model has no filings, there is still no getting around the fact that he has a significant number of tattoos. What’s tattoo ink made from? Solvents and metals, including, in many, alcohols, anti-freeze, formaldehyde, and gluteraldehyde.
Organic!
So as this product tries to speak to the over-manufactured conditions of our lives, using as a medium the sort of product label often employed to mislead consumers about the contents, it itself is not fully accurate. 100% Ironic.
Gavin: I just realized I did an interview with brandchannel and didn’t really mention branding. One thing about “brand building.” I never want to hear those two words again. I always hated the idea of someone building a brand. It sounds so affected. Like marketing companies and “Cool Hunters” sending CDs and shit to “tastemakers.” People can smell that bullshit from a mile away. Just be yourself. Pinky and I are old and Canadian and not very attractive but we are the faces of the company because that’s who we are. Anything else would be a lie. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people marketing works. It doesn’t. People only buy what their friends tell them they should buy because that’s the only thing left they can trust.
I spoke with Vice and Street Boners and TV Carnage founder Gavin McInnes for branding industry trade magazine Brandchannel. It was about building brands . It went about as well as expected. READ IT
The fetishization of American Indians is by no means the sole province of athletic programs. Commercial interest from Indian Motorcycles to Leinenkugel Brewing Co. to Land O’Lakes Dairy leverage American Indian iconography to sell products with no relation at all to native culture or history. Halloween costumes and other debris round out the inheritance of insult. But the athletic logos are the most widespread and most egregious simply because they are employed by organizations whose foundations are predicated on equality, opportunity and absence of the inescapable judgment, habit and bigotry of the “real world.” We are so quick to see it, even when maybe unintentional, in political cartoons, Vanity Fair covers, “chink eyes,” protest posters, Australians, illegal alien costumes, sports movies, Nick Douglas Internet theories, movie posters and other nation’s outrages. Asian women trigger our outrage but not Indian faces?
Can anyone even imagine a world where “Indian” is interchanged with another people in features editor Jaine Treadwell’s recent, hard-to-believe-it-got-published ruminations for The Troy Messenger (”Circle the wagons, the Indians are coming“) and it still gets published?
READ IT
It was brought to my attention recently that graduates of Yale have but one choice for framing their degree. It is the official Yale frame, with seal. (Below)
Now I admire this informants Yale degree; it was certainly earned with impressive work and labor of which I am not plausibly capable. An yet, the Yale degree and its official frame pretty much sum up many people’s feelings about the institution.
First, the degree is completely in Latin, which, ironically, the vast majority of Yale grads probably cannot read (including the aforementioned very intelligent holder of the degree I examined.) Ok. Fine. But then why does the official frame feature the “Yale University” script in very (dumb) modern English (but in hat old timey suggestive script denoting “literary!”)? Does not such an inclusion tips the hand and betrays the whole undertaking’s arrogance?
Left: Quattro “Mow the Lawn” ad
Right: Virgin Mobile “it’s not contageous” Never Stop Talkig Ad
Top: One white, one black, both ballsy, cocky, regular-dude soldiers who, despite finding themselves out of their element when thrown into sci-fi circumstances, manage to cowboy up and save the day, all without losing their swagger. GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, 2009
Bottom: One black, one white, both ballsy, cocky, regular-dude soldiers who, despite finding themselves out of their element when thrown into sci-fi circumstances, manage to cowboy up and save the day, all without losing their swagger. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, 2009
I have noted that Deadspin shouldn’t write about media. Well, Gawker shouldn’t write about sports. Today, Foster Kamer bends himself all out of shape over the Yale-Harvard football game. The only thing more cliché than the trotting out of the legendary 1968 “Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29.” game is trotting out the “Yale - Harvard football sucks” cliché. Of the Yale - Harvard game Kamer writes
“So, yeah: basically, the same shit every year. Big old tradition for people who don’t normally care about football to care about football. These people don’t have time for football! Between all the awesome regattas and going to one of a handful of schools getting a degree from now maybe matters, football’s mostly bullshit to them until they own a stake in whatever team is smashing the Bears this week.”
Maybe the only thing more cliché than pointing out Yale and Harvard are not that great (comparatively) at football is associating their students with regattas. As for them being “one of a handful of schools getting a degree from now maybe matters…” well, certainly they teach sentence construction, “mattering” notwithstanding.
And true. the level of football played at Yale and Harvard is not BCS bowl quality. So what. As a football fan, one of the great things about the game is that it’s fun to watch as long as the teams are evenly matched. As to implying that Yale and Harvard students are not interested in football? Well, what can one say to a statement that stupid? Except, maybe, that for Kamer it’s not unexpected...
Kamer is accurate in one regard; he names himself an “asshole blogger.”
In the end it looks like Gawker content and analysis is to journalism and writing of Yale and Harvard are to football.
After the jump, apropos of nothing, my favorite Yale Alumni Magazine ad. It runs every single month.
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Axe Fever is the the brand’s new South of the border offering “designed to help you ignite your caliente spirit and get the party going.”Axe! It’s like Mexian swine flu, but for your nads. After the jump, Axe’s Earlier HBO tie-in.
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Ok. I think it’s about time to retire the quirky, 3-D hand-drawn middle-school Trapper-Keeper font for a while. Because now you’ve even got the Germans doing it (bottom) and you know what happens when ze Germans become fond of something…
Also, below is a Spanish international version of the Srarah Marshall film poster, font reproduced and all. But do kids in other countries doodle like this? Does this font translate to the same twee sense of nostalgic quirk as in the States?
And, after the jump, it looks like the font has reached its logical conclusion. (more…)