This year's Mini-lit hit

Due to my roots in communications design, I’m often asked this question. It’s a question impossible to answer with conviction, as no other design discipline has such a wide cultural and personal variety as communication.

Blogging may be the fashionable answer right now, but in essence it’s just more of the same. There’s a more interesting answer. A new thing is going on, that if nothing else illustrates the challenge of the continuous information overload.

It’s called Mini-lit. The phenomenon owes a lot to synchronised messaging: SMS, Twitter.com, chat etc. It’s about saying a lot in very few words - demanding more from the reader - and sender. Mini-lit is limiting the number of words you have to convey a message: a five-word film review, 12-word novel, six-word prayer. Concentrate, think and communicate and challenge me – don’t just spam me with words. That’s the idea.

Hemmingway apparently started the whole thing when he was dared to write a six-word-novel. He came back with: “For sale: baby shoes, never used.” Now you know what I mean.

I think Mini-lit will find it’s way into mainstream communication - for a while. This year’s surprise hit in U.S. bookshops was ‘Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure’. And a second six-word collection, on love and heartbreak, will be out in January. The Mini-lit thing is spreading.

Read more here

The other day I saw this sign in downtown Aarhus. It might be interesting for Novo Nordisk to know that an ice cream maker in Aarhus made a new cure againt diabetes…

By the way  - this photo is taken with the new iPhone 3G

Look at this picture - proof that the US is the mother of innovation culture. In Denmark we also have a tradition for caramel apples. Tradition with a big T, that is. It’s never changed and it is still only possible to get the red classic version that is superimposed bottom right. Randomly browsing I stumbled over this: http://www.amyscandykitchen.com, where the main picture is from.

It’s a perfect illustration of how important it is to look at something you like (the red caramel apple) and think: “that is really nice - how can I make it even better” (look at the that striped monster in the bottom corner of the tray). Thinking “We can do better…” is the heart of progress (a possible path to wealth). Thinking “…and then we can do better again, immediately!” is the heart of innovation (the safest path to survival)- always moving, changing, improving things. Look at this picture and learn a bit about what it means when innovation is a cultural business drive - not just a contemporary management book theme. In the States this drive to innovate somehow repeats itself in just about every business area you look at. Try to impose the feeling from these two pictures on your own field of business, and consider if you do as well as Amy. We can all learn from her:-)

The website “search me” have released a magnificient way of brosing the web. Instead of traditional textual search results the user’s presented with a cover-flow-ish graphical displays of the results. Very nifty!!!
Check it out at: http://beta.searchme.com/

Just take a few moments to relive an amazing old-school computer game - Mario Kart- now re-programmed in a web-version using JavaScript.

The game uses the canvas element to do most of the rendering and should work in both FF2, FF3, Opera(9.27 and beta) and Safari 3.1.1. There are a few glitches in Safari in the kart sprites, but other than that it should be playable. It’s not tested fir IE support yet, though..

LINK: http://www.nihilogic.dk/labs/mariokart/

I’m currently reading a book by Rolf Jensen, called “Dream Society”. In this book Rolf Jensen tries to define the future society of the western world. In the past we’ve been hunters and collectors, we’ve been through the agriculture and industrial societies. Many would agree that we at the moment are living in the information society. Rolf Jensen though, is stating that we are entering the “Dream Society” or the experience economy as it is also called.

Rolf is definitely into something here - and why shouldn’t he be - he’s one of the leading futurologists. In my opinion the dream society is not only in the beginning state. We are living it.

You can define the dream society as a society, where we’re not only buying products, we are buying stories and dreams. We want a good story to accomplish the product we’re buying. That can either be the wine where you “know” who the farmer is, a product styled by yourself or any other story attached to a product. For the same reason individualism is becoming more and more relevant in product design. Many of the “old” brands is learning this the hard way. People are no longer satisfied with a pair of jeans or shoes that everybody else is wearing. They want a story attached to it. Nike, Burton and other companies has taken this into consideration and made it possible for their consumers to style their own products and thereby attaching a story to the shoes they are wearing or the snowboard they are riding.

So why am I writing this. I’m doing it to open your eyes for the new possibilities and to get on the train before it’s left the station. I would also like to recommend this book to everybody who’s interested in design and branding.

On my recent vacation in Egypt I saw this ATM. I needed money, but I still walked around for almost an hour to find a bank that I felt looked reasonably safe and trustworthy.

A bank with an armed guard outside gave me more confidence that I wouldn’t get cheated than with the ATM shown in the picture.

How does this translate into design? First of all, the company producing the ATM has absolutely no understanding of the problems and challenges their client, the bank, has. And the bank has no understanding of their client, the person walking up to an ATM.

Just few days of channel service analysis might have saved all 3 parties (manufacturer, bank and client) from embarrasment, distrust and annoyance.

If a designer had been involved in the process, the manufacturer could have found a better solution for the banks challenges, the clients would still feel confident about the banks services and the bank would make more money.

Who should now feel cheated?

If you ever bump into the hard-pedalling ‘Espressoman’ in central Copenhagen — or if he bumps into you (scary thought)  — try his divine espressos or lattes. You won’t be disappointed. Waiting for my coffee and staring at his super-heavyweight espresso-bike, I asked him what would make life easier for a biking barista. I was sure he’d opt for some lightweight gear, but no. Stable weather however, providing temperature stability to his sensible gas-driven espresso machine, was all he needed. A humble wish, but knowing the weather in DK, I guess this would take some help from above. Anyways, 10 out of 10 for the coffee. And the same for the enterprising set-up which provided me with a true service value moment.

Get behind the making of the new PRO TEC catalogue in this video. After one day and some late hours behind Photoshop we ended up with 4 pictures. Thanks to the client PRO TEC windows. The people in the windows are Fatih, Martin and Carina. Erik Zappon behind the lens - beats for every second by humanbeatbox. Enjoy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C06NsnW75G4

What is good communication? Saying everything in six words, only? It’s easy, some people say.

What about using no words at all? Like Sony, in their Foam city ad. No words and still, after just one look, or rather listen-through, I recall the ad (and brand) by the subtle soundtrack. Well done!