Category: Brand
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Linters and style guides and standards and tests
Consistency matters. Consistency matters for branding, because of copyright and recognition reasons, because you’re investing lots of money into that exact arrangement of letters. Consistency matters for code, because computers are terrible at approximation and “close enough”. Consistency matters for documentation, because human language is really hard and weird. Consistency matters, but it’s wicked hard to…
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Try not to insult your audience
I keep thinking about that catastrophically bad Apple commercial for the new iPad.I can see what they were trying to do, to say that all these tools could exist inside their new, skinnier iPad. But the way it read to people who care about painting with paint and playing tactile instruments was that iPad was…
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Identify the problem, then offer the solution
You’ve got trouble, right here in River City It starts with P and that rhymes with T and that stands for trouble. The good people of River City were not dying to spend a lot of money on trombones and band costumes because they’re shiny. It’s because they understood a new problem and wanted to…
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How long has this been going on?
It’s easy to feel like AI* was the domain of science fiction and IBM moonshots until ChatGPT burst onto the public consciousness like Kool-Aid Man. It’s easy, but it’s not correct. What even is AI? LLMs have been around a lot longer than that, fixing your spelling and grammar and missed semicolons at the end…
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Brand and the Trust Thermocline
How do you feel about getting on a Boeing airplane right now, March of 2024? Maybe not as secure as you did last year, or before the 777 stories started appearing? 10 years ago, we never gave it a thought. Air travel was (and still is) much safer than the drive to the airport. We…
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Brand defense
Watching Elon Musk’s “go fuck yourself, advertisers” interview gave me full-body cringe. I couldn’t help but sympathize with Andrew Russ Sorkin, who was just trying to ask some reasonable questions and give this dude a chance to recover what is left of X’s brand. They weren’t softball questions, but they had answers that could have…
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1-inch stickers, big inclusion
Hey, friends! I, the person you know who cares quite a lot about stickers, am here to say that now is the correct time for you to be thinking about June, which is Pride Month in the US. If you design and order stickers now, you’ll have them in time for all the many, many June…