Suddenly, there’s no preciousness in people’s presentations. Just poetry.

I attended PKNY #6 last night. It was a great social affair, more akin to a bar night with a band than a typical speaking engagement. The Pecha Kucha method is simple and clean; get to the point quickly and efficiently, because your presentation ends in 6:40.

It was a different experience, especially considering the venue. No fluorescent lights, nobody sitting in a staid conference hall. This was Le Poisson Rouge, which is one of the Village’s most well known chic rock venues. I expected to see hipster kids partying a monday night away, (which there were some) but instead was greeted by intellectuals, creatives, geeks and artists. The audience really ran the gamut, from businessy branding strategy types, to goofy hipster girls who know some art scene people in the audience.

(more…)

And old beer cans.

‘

An awesome flickr set of old beer cans.

Via Design Observer

Suprising no one. Via Gothamist.

Gimme back that that thar fillet o’ fish.

Is all the rage in our office.

Letters best read
When printed in blue
The fleurons are pretty
And so are you!

Arial’s dead
No matter the hue,
Mrs Eaves still rocks on,
And I dig you too.

Oh you’re so sweet,
Like a strawberry lollipop,
I’m your Illustrator,
And you’re my Photoshop.

Via For The Love of Type

Interactive group Arc90 has developed what many grandparents and content purists have been dreaming of: Readability.

Readability, is a bookmarklet that when installed in your browser, allows you to transform any page into clean readable type. All uncessary elements are stripped away in favor of simple message transmission. It’s been causing a storm in the design community.

Interestingly enough, good web designers that have been preaching semantic design, and proper web standards (Like many of us here at Seed) won’t have problems. Pages properly built and styled with standard tags (h1, h2, P, UL, OL, Blockquote… etc.) Will render perfectly with the proper higherarchy and emphasis that was given to the original content.

The typography philosophy and styling used on readability is beautiful and elegant. All content is presented in a single column, in large type. The experience reading a blogpost is akin to reading a novel. All links function as normal, but are stripped of nonessential style. Images are present as well, but inherit default positioning (usually flush left, with the type wrapping around.) Like said, like reading a novel. There are three other styles (one cheeky style being terminal, for the web nerds), but all are very similar in clean content presentation.

Personally, I find this bookmarklet to be a refreshing and interesting experiment in content delivery. I can’t imagine using it too frequently, only because of the additional click thats invovled. And as far as worry about presentation, if your site is built properly and at least moderately adheres to W3C standards, you shouldn’t have any problems.

If your site breaks with Readability, perhaps its time to start getting semantic.

Continuing the analysis of email, another interesting factoid regarding email.

That’s

Crazy.

Seed Daily Factoid is an ongoing project by James Gibson of Seed.
The goal is to frequently visualize trivial bits of interesting information.

Submit your facts:
jgibson at seedgiveslife.com

As of a 2003 survey conducted by the American Management Association, via Management Issues

Really good collection of data on Google Answers too.

Ohhh…. In the Butt!

Being in this industry, one thing you’ll find that marketing people are quite fond of is numbers. Nice, cold hard facts. Nothing will ever justify a creative budget more than a big pile of metrics and data, that may or may not correlate with your agencies efforts.

One move I’m very interested in, is Facebook’s User Rated ads. Tech Crunch has wrote at bit on the process. It’s supposed to be a way for Facebook users to custom target the ad stream that they recieve on their homepages, by providing dynamic user feedback.

Although it’s not functioning quite as you expect, you’re typically served perhaps 3-4 ads that sort of loop over and over, regardless of skipping or Thumbs-Down Ratings.

So, as a nice stress reliever, I do the following. I’m sure you’ll enjoy: