Found this on the interweb most amusing… by Jim Walls on the www.160over90.com/blog

A couple of weeks back, Forbes ran a little article deeming graphic design as snooty business, before profiling a site called CrowdSpring where clients go to throw spec logo projects to a pool of 13,000 Photoshop jockeys. The winning design gets about $200 or so, the rest go back to their day jobs. For some, apparently, the day job unfortunately involves designing more free logos for other contest sites – a career that likely ranks second in salary behind Hopelessly Addicted Scratch-Off Lottery Ticket Enthusiast.

Of course, the design community went apoplectic in response to the article. Ethics! some lamented in the comments. Iam sure a few of them even dashed off another design manifesto or two or fifty.

Here’s the truth, though, and why all the good designers need to relax: the vast majority of the self-described designers on sites like CrowdSpring aren’t really designers. Sure, they may have a (likely pirated) version of Adobe CS4 and spent an hour or so on a few online tutorials. But owning a copy of Pet Sounds doesn’t make you Brian Freaking Wilson. And from the looks of things, most submitters are doing nothing more than manipulating a few drop-down menus to add type over top of some clip art and calling it a logo…

Read the rest here… it is worth it for the giggles >>

So the much publicised Michael Jackson UK tour went on sale last week… and the whole process reminded me exactly why I rarely go to live events in this country.  The face value of the tickets for the O2 started at £50.00, the event goes on sale at 7am and the nation starts dialling the ticket hotline… after several hours of being on hold (thanks again honey ) and trying to log onto the website which was crashing, try googling tickets and what do you get? Michael Jackson tickets on sale upwards of £300.00 - within minutes of being released!! Why can’t they finally get their act together and limit the amount of tickets you can purchase to, say, two which have your name printed on and you have to show ID when you enter the event? It really is about time that touts and last minute sold out events companies are stopped in their tracks and allow true music fans (not just corporates with several hundreds of pounds to blow on a gig) to get involved. Having worked in corporate events for several years, I regularly purchased tickets at massively inflated prices (£5k for a pair of tickets to Wimbledon once just to send a good client..) and if events full of no atmosphere and individuals staying in their corporate boxes for more champagne and canapes is what the promoters and artists want? Then so be it.

Needless to say I didn’t get Michael Jackson tickets!

This week We Love helped support Great Ormond Street Hospital, by donating Dripping In Fat t-shirts to a fashion show organised by students of Greenwich University. The designs were modelled by breakdancers who entertained the crowd during the show, before handing out t-shirts to lucky members of the audience!

The event successfully raised some much needed funds for such a great cause and helped spread the Dripping In Fat message of making the world a better dressed place!

It’s been a few months since Jimbob the Builder made his fashion debut on the Brighton housing scene (to much critical acclaim), but the Grand Ocean development is now almost fully built and ready to hit the Sussex market – so without further ado we welcome you to www.gograndocean.co.uk

We Love, tasked with overseeing and implementing a cross-channel campaign for the launch of this prestigious, landmark housing development, designed and developed brand and all on/offline comms for INplace Housing Association, around a central concept of 1950’s, ‘Breaking the Rules’.

These are not the finished items and as such pricing and textual content is purely indicative.

The property’s colourful heritage and 1950’s Butlins roots, provided wide scope for an alternate line in property marketing. The result, GO Enjoy, is a concept that cheekily contrasts and compares the lives and values of yesteryear with those of today – extending strategically through:

• a website and brochure that break away from the traditional presentation of floorplans and interiors, and welcomes the user into a rich, intuitive environment that engages and informs;
• contextual outdoor advertising in the form of high impact 6-sheet posters, playing with situationally relevant messages and themes;
• guerilla use of apartment window graphics (still to be revealed);
• and a plethora of local media activities – revolving around our slightly risque themes – plus a few tricks and treats to be revealed over the coming months… (Redcoats!!)

We’re looking forward to a highly successful outcome to this campaign and will keep you informed on further developments and activities as they’re implemented. In the meantime, Go Enjoy – Live the life, break the rules

Our recently released site howarths.nl has generated quite alot of interest, especially for its graceful degredation and deep linking for content. Howarths was built on an agile version of the “hijax” methodology – i.e. a working site was built using the open source Drupal CMS before all links on the site were “hijacked” to allow for the ajax and animation to take over.

When each link is hijacked (the link returns false and the url passed to a handler), the page request is then modified to include certain parameters that remove the header and footer from each page and only display the juicy bits in between, which is then inserted into the DOM.

The benefits:

• SEO – having a standard, non-ajax version of the site means that all content is available to search engines and standard robots.txt rules etc can be applied as they never even see the javascript.
• Accessibility – rather like search engines screen readers, elderly browsers and users with javsacript turned off never need know the functionality they are missing out on.
• Flexibility – the various content types can be delivered using various url parameters to allow the pdf stock list, for example, to be generated using the same framework.

All navigation is handed over to the excellent SWF Address library to allow the back button to function. The structure of the SWF Address anchors were kept identical to the actual page, allowing the server to check for javascript whenever a regular deep link is used (i.e. from a google search), and if detected convert the url to the SWF Address pattern and redirect to the homepage. You can see the effect here: http://www.howarthsnl.com/?q=products/category/50 and with a normal SWF Address deep link here: http://www.howarthsnl.com/#/products/category/50 . To most users, no difference!

There are many other cool little features around the site, including a custom image magnifier, prettified select lists (using a modified version of the jQuery selectbox plugin), a custom setpped coda page slider for navigating through product lists and an also heavily modified jQuery cycle plygin was used throughout to manage gallery transitions.

All in all, an exciting project to work on!

We Love will be exhibiting at Kent 2020 ’09, Kent’s largest business exhibition and conference. With an expected 350 exhibitors and around 3,700 attendees, We Love will be showcasing our services amongst some premier businesses and really letting Kent know we’ve arrived.

Come and see us there and put some faces to the names – see you on stand D6!

For information about showcasing your own business, you can visit the site at www.kent2020.co.uk