The Simpsons Movie :: draft footage

This is all over the web at the moment but parts of it are pretty darn funny, particularly the baby and the monkey.

Benny Award Winner

Ian’s short film: ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ won the top award in the New Irish Short Animation category at the Galway Film Fleadh yesterday. This is wonderful news on many different levels. Not least of which being that I can now legitimately use the phrase “my brother, the award-winning director” in conversation.

Congratulations to Ian and his team. It is great to see all of their hard work being recognised and heartening to see that such a boot-strapped short film can stand its own against better funded productions.

Obviously, winning this award makes Ian somewhat of a hot property. We could see a career upswing if Boulder put some appropriate PR resources behind this win, or equally if the animation headhunters come a-calling. Now is the time to get started on a treatment for Pixar, Benny!

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Glib Analogy

Clients can often mistakenly assume that everyone in the Creative Industries shares a common mindset, but there are many different and individual approaches to creativity.

Time For A New Template

Thoughtport is about as low-tech as a blog can be these days. I am using one of the default Blogger CSS templates. I compose most of my posts by hand on my Palm PDA and I have to manually edit the code of all the outbound tag links. Ouch! Did anybody say labour intensive?

The benefit of this set-up is low maintainance: write it; post it; forget it. However, the designer in me (or more realistically the incessant tinkerer in me) keeps nagging at me to take the plunge with some grown-up blogging software and create a bespoke structure and layout for Thoughtport. Now the very thought of the time commitment involved in learning how to hack WordPress to some level of competence is usually enough to send me back into the comfort zone of Blogspot. But every now and then do I see a site that makes me say “if only...”

I was looking at Ben Hammersley’s blog yesterday. His primary blog posting page looks great. It incorporates the better aspects of web 2.0 design tropes: using large, legible, 37-Signally, sans-serif post headings and the like. But there is more. If you click on the photos you see each post presented with its text superimposed over its photograph. Nice. He is appropriating the editorial design conventions of magazines to create a very unique blog design here. Admittedly, this structure implies short post lengths, but that is the metier he has chosen to write in, and his photographs tell half the story anyhow.

My Bloglines feed-reader cannot currently present those posts in that visually rich format. Does anyone know a feed-reader which can? Or maybe I should just migrate from Firefox to Opera 9?

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The Lying Cow Virus Is The New Small

Seth Godin spreads the ideas that help you to spread your ideas.

We all have some message we need to communicate. We all need certain people to know about and understand what we are doing. I want you to read this post, I want the designers I work with to understand the goals of my next monthly studio meeting, I want my closest friends to attend my son’s birthday party. Circulating these messages and (more importantly) percolating their ideas is marketing in its very broadest and most general sense.

The techniques and tools for spreading your ideas change and evolve all of the time. To try and stay ahead of the curve I read Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow and Unleashing The Ideavirus. In writing this post I realise that I have now been reading Godin for nearly ten years. I recall tearing-out and keeping an interview with him about his then company Yoyodyne from a 1997 issue of Fast Company.

My brother Declan has recently started reading Godin’s blog, and he finds it beneficial to his (totally non-marketing related) role. To give him an edited overview and an on-ramp into the blog, I made him this list of eleven posts that I found interesting enough to cache into my Bloglines account. This is not in any sense intended as a greatest hits, more of my subjective assortment. You can also visit Godin’s lenspage for his own personal Greatest Posts list. Here is my list.

– Small Is the New Big
– Two Kinds of Writing
– Fresh Fish Here
– The Reason
– The Cutting Edge?
– Two Obvious Secrets
– Promotion, Self-promotion
– Understanding Local Max
– Tools vs. Craftsmen
– The New Rules of Naming
– Abundance and the TBR

You can find that video of Seth speaking at Google online at Google Video.

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