Skiilight’s entry into Penguins on the March has been chosen to be part of the Space Needle Launch Event on June 12th. Come out from 10am – 12pm and meet Tinker and the guy that painted him, Jonathan Rundle.
What is Penguins on the March? Woodland Park Zoo and The Greenwood Collective are inviting artists to participate in Penguins on the March, a community art project designed to celebrate the zoo’s new penguin exhibit, spotlight Seattle’s arts community and benefit Woodland Park Zoo’s field conservation projects around the world.
Artists are invited to paint, embellish and decorate 22-inch fabricated penguins by the end of May. Penguins on the March will be unveiled at the Space Needle on June 12. The artist decorated penguins will migrate throughout Seattle neighborhoods (including Fremont and Ballard) landing at The Greenwood Collective during the July 10th monthly art walk for a silent auction to benefit the zoo’s field conservation projects.
Skiilight is proud to be a part of this great art project throughout the city of Seattle.
Tinker is coming along nicely. Shown here is the original mold and the chest coloring as well as the beginnings of his WWII-era “bomber” jacket and flight hat and goggles.
Skiilight’s Jonathan Rundle will be painting “Tinker,” the only airborne penguin in the world! Complete with jetpack! Stay tuned for photos and updates.
What is Penguins on the March? Woodland Park Zoo and The Greenwood Collective are inviting artists to participate in Penguins on the March, a community art project designed to celebrate the zoo’s new penguin exhibit, spotlight Seattle’s arts community and benefit Woodland Park Zoo’s field conservation projects around the world.
Artists are invited to paint, embellish and decorate 22-inch fabricated penguins by the end of May. Penguins on the March will be unveiled at the Space Needle on June 12. The artist decorated penguins will migrate throughout Seattle neighborhoods (including Fremont and Ballard) landing at The Greenwood Collective during the July 10th monthly art walk for a silent auction to benefit the zoo’s field conservation projects.
My favorite advertising of recent weeks has been the rebirth of Sprint as a company selling “now.” Formerly known as the cell provider your dad has through work, Sprint appears to be appealing to a graphically-motivated purchaser with its upcoming iPhone competitor, the Palm Pre.
With this new look, comes a new tagline: “The Now Network.”
In addition to the great new commercials concentrating on “nowness,” Sprint has rolled out banner ads that receive (or appear to receive) data in real time, showing things occurring “now.”
The Sprint microsite also “receives now”- which is just a branded way to say gathers aggregated content.
The Sprint commercials remind me of one of my favorite commercials of all time, this Areva spot (shown here in its french version)
In actuality it appears Sprint has been moving in this direction for awhile now, as evidenced by this internal video showing their response to Hurricane Katrina:
While Sprint appears to be moving in the right direction, we have another company dropping like a hot potato no one wants to touch. With consumer confidence in all things GM at an all-time low, reassurances from Saturn simply don’t hold water. All major news outlets report that GM is trying to sell Saturn and if there are no buyers, look for closure of the brand and a GM bankruptcy. “We’re still here” just isn’t going to cut it.
Meanwhile, a very plain-speaking video explaining what GM plans to do to save itself is buried on its corporate page.
So, the question is, which GM do you believe? The one who still thinks Saturn will be around in a few years or the one that says they’re closing nameplates? Honesty is always the best policy, especially when no one will believe that the “still here” Saturn will be that way for much longer.
Adweek posted an interesting article (with an entirely misleading headline) about Yahoo Sports vs. ESPN in March visitor metrics.
Headline: “Yahoo Sports Slams Foes”
The story: “Yahoo Sports reeled in 14.4 million and 12.7 million weekly uniques during the tournament’s first two weeks (per Nielsen), versus ESPN.com’s 12.8 million and 9.8 million uniques.” (Uniques in this sense are visitors)
The Reality: “John Kosner, ESPN’s senior vp, general manager of digital media, said ESPN.com draws a more passionate fan base, one that visits more regularly and stays longer than Yahoo’s does. Kosner argued that because Yahoo can funnel casual sports fans from its home page and e-mail pages, its audience is less valuable. He points to ESPN’s huge edge in total minutes (216 million versus 144 million in the second week in March) as a truer indicator of engagement. “ESPN.com’s users are consistently more valuable than Yahoo’s,” said Kosner.”
This is a great example of how quality metics and knowing how to interpret them helps you identify your place in the world. Taken at face value it looks as if Yahoo really took ESPN behind the woodshed. However, as John Kosner eloquently explains, the unique visitor metric does not hold as much value as time spent, especially when the total visitors number is as close as theirs are.
I love direct spoof ads. Shooting one across the bow of your competitor. The originally smart and funny Heineken ad is made even better in this ad by a European competitor.
Seth Godin, one of my favorite marketing authors and bloggers, writes about how design can impact your bottom line.
“Return on investment is easy to measure. You put money in, you measure money out, divide and prosper. But return on design?
I think there are four zones of return that are interesting to think about.
Negative return. The local store with the boarded up window, the drooping sign and the peeling paint is watching their business suffer because they have a design that actually hurts them. The same goes for their identity and/or website. If the design actively gets in the way of the story you tell or the utility you deliver, you lose money and share.
No impact. Most design falls into this category. While aesthetically important, design in this case is just a matter of taste, not measurable revenue. You might not like the way the liquor store looks, but it’s not having any effect on sales. It’s good enough.
Positive return. We’re seeing a dramatic increase in this category. Everything from a bag of potato chips to an online web service can generate incremental sales and better utility as a result of smart design.
The whole thing. There are a few products where smart design is the product (or at least the product’s reason for being). If you’re not in love with the design of a Porsche 911, you would never consider buying it–same as an OXO peeler. The challenge of building your product around breakthrough design is that the design has to in fact be a breakthrough. And that means spending far more time or money than your competitors who are merely seeking a positive return.
Knowing where you stand and where you’re headed is critical. If you have a negative return on design, go ahead and spend enough money to get neutral, ASAP. But don’t spend so much that you’re overinvesting just to get to neutral. Watching a local store build an expensive but not stellar custom building is the perfect example of this mismatch.
If you’re betting the whole thing, building your service launch on design first, skimping on design is plain foolish.The Guggenheim in Bilbao would be empty if they’d merely hired a very good architect.”
Skiilight sometimes crawls Monster.com looking for companies that think they need someone in-house for their marketing. In reality, our firm can provide the same solutions with less overhead – so in these cases we say hello and offer our services. Naturally, I have a Monster.com account (and a LinkedIn!). So recently I had just completed a resume overhaul and was proud of my work. I’d spent all evening rearranging information and cutting out what didn’t need to be there. Being in design and communications (and knowing how to manipulate MS Word), I built a resume that conveyed my information beautifully.
So, I uploaded my resume to Monster and like Godzilla to Tokyo, powerlines started falling and I could hear the screams of people running away. Monster ignored a good majority of my formatting, forcing my resume to two pages and destroying my carefully-honed style in the process.
What happened?
Through trial and error, I have decided that the following is what goes on behind the scenes when you upload your Word resume to Monster.com
Monster does not care that you changed the margins. They will revert to the default margin size.
Monster has no interest in your bullet styles. It will default to Symbol, size 12.
Because of this, any line spacing less than single space will be lost on the line with the bullet. Curiously, Monster DOES respect your line spacing setting, but the 12pt type size will force the bulleted line to a miniumum of single space. If that initial bulleted line continues into a second line, the second line will retain the line spacing. In my case, .8.
Monster will not retain any images that may be in your resume.
Monster will force any header or footer information into the body area. Don’t even try to gain that little bit of extra space.
Fig. 1 – Original Resume
Fig. 2 – Edited to comply with Monster’s reformatting.
Note line spacing difference. My 0.8 line spacing is retained for first job description,
ignored in second job description because of the size 12 bullet.
Fig. 3 – How Monster displays it in HTML. (note the line spacing and bullets)
Even though the line spacing looks incorrect in Fig. 3, once downloaded from the link above (“Download Job Seeker’s Word Resume”), the Word doc will display correct(er) line spacing, as shown in Fig. 2.
So, I hope this might be an interesting read to anyone who may have wrestled with Monster’s formatting in the past.
Happy holidays from Skiilight Interactive! We hope your holiday is filled with warmth. Naturally, should you have any business-related New Year’s resolutions, we’d love to hear about them!
