Make Seriously | Design and Life

You Website Will Be Assimilated

As is fairly typical during my day, I checked UnderConsideration’s Quips. It’s basically a wall where Armin Vit posts cool design-related things on the left, and visitors do likewise on the right. Sometimes it’s just normal stuff, sometimes it’s cool stuff. And sometimes, just sometimes, there is something so amazing it blows my mind. It’s no secret that YouTube has been getting revamped by people wanting to use it in new ways. Many will already be familiar with Nintendo’s very cool advertisement for WarioLand: Shake It. If you’ve been a loyal reader here, you may also be familiar with YouTube Street Fighter.

Well, BooneOakley just blew my mind. Think about the video below that you’re about to watch. That is their website. Yes, that’s correct. Their website is embedded in my website as a fully-functioning, fractal-style, mind-blowingly creative concept:

That this can happen, period, is incredible. You can even try going to their home domain: www.booneoakley.com. Guess what you’ll be redirected to? Yep. Not only do they not need to design or host ANY content, they can have any other company (or design blog, a lá MakeSeriously) HOST their website by embedding the YouTube video. It helps that they’re creative and have cool work anyway, but the concept itself is just amazing.

The only costs for their entire web promotional efforts are to purchase a domain name. No hosting required. No site-building. No broken links to worry about. No one to maintain content. No bandwidth restrictions (thank you third-party hosting!) All of those costs slashed, with SO much value added by taking advantage of a free, universally known video hosting website. They can have their whole website hosted anywhere that a video can be embedded. They can upload and easily change content and “linking” at any time. It’s just so cool to see companies to look at new forms of “media” and take such great leaps to make them awesome.

Why Music Shouldn’t Be Allowed at Work, Part II

This is to supplement and help explain the “Why Music Shouldn’t Be Allowed at Work, Part I” comic. My colleagues noted that I like to chair-dance to music. This went on for about twenty minutes before they started filming me, so this is the end of the dance attack. It was much better for the first few, or so I’ve been told. The end is the most humiliating part.

Now: Pay Attention Class:

Things have been crazy at the MakeSeriously headquarters lately (located, appropriately, inside my skull). But fret not, there will be content coming as well as a new feature I’m hoping to do monthly. The plan, anyway, is to do an artist profile and this month’s will be featuring designer Dane Benton, who’ve I’ve mentioned before. So do stay tuned, and if you’re interested in being profiled in future months, let me know. Now for the regularly scheduled programme:

There’s a fellow in Britain by the name of Charlie Brooker. He writes for The Guardian and is one of those funny guys across the pond who can approach something very American and in a dry, curious way reveal that it’s completely absurd. Of course, this is America so we have lots of the absurd. About 40% of the Stumbles I make are popular primarily because they are absurd. Sure, it’s amusing and well worth seeing. But it’s neither useful in any utilitarian way, nor is it practical. What’s a bit frightening, however, is when people actually listen to the absurd as though it’s sane or rational. Unfortunately, the prime-time American media fits the “absurd” category pretty well, and here’s the humorous Mr. Brooker to raise an eyebrow at it:

It goes without saying that we should be paying some attention to the way things are presented to us as well as listening to the content. Marshall McLuhan is a name tossed around a lot lately because of his 1967 work “The Medium is the Message”. One of the ideas of the medium being the message can be summed up like this: the way an idea is presented, the medium that it is messaged through, is more important than the actual content. It’s something I think we all can understand in a visceral way, and that’s part of what makes the media so absurd. And dangerous. Think about the most passionate speakers you’ve heard. As they get moving, you don’t just hear and agree with them, nodding your head in silent assent. You begin to feel something. And that something is the result of the medium, the presentation itself rather than the words. To compare, it’s like a religious experience where the devotee must enter a state of emotions through worship. The medium of worship helps create the connection, it develops the visceral reaction.

The danger is when we confuse the visceral reaction for reality. There are times when it is real, when the passion is good. When Dr. King gave his “I have a dream” speech, I think few would call it inappropriate to feel passion for that speech. But the thing to consider is that Hitler spoke with a similar passion. The difference in the two was the message, not the medium and the danger is to confuse those two. That’s where Brooker’s commentary should make us all pause: are we hearing the message or are we confusing it with the medium? It’s called the news, but is that what they’re actually presenting? Are they pulling on our emotional side in hopes of persuading us to do something for them? They are good questions to ask, especially as the increasingly absurd television news media becomes more profitable and popular despite a decrease in quality and content.

Oh, and Brooker is hilarious.

New Charlie the Unicorn!!!

This is FilmCow’s Part 3 to the Charlie the Unicorn series. In case you missed them (and it’s very unfortunate if you have) here are part 1 and part 2. And, if you’re particularly awesome, you may be interested in some Charlie merch. (I don’t even know this fellow, but the Charlie clips are too good not to pimp his stuff…) Personally speaking, I want this.

Twitter’s new… uh… Competitor

At first it kinda seems like this mockumentary about “Flutter” seems like any other “make-fun-of-Twitter-because-it’s-popular-right-now” youtube videos, but then it begins to sink in. People really do act this way about Twitter. It’s all about creating a market where there isn’t one, and hyping it up to cash out. At the end of the day, a good portion of the people on these services are doing just that: talking it up so they can be “experts” and make a buck. It’s been going on for centuries of course. As a designer at an ad agency, I can’t really say I’m not a part of that. Let me persuade you that you need me and/or my service. You don’t just want it, you need it. Let me tell you what it can do for you. And, pretty soon, someone makes another spin to make another buck, all the while a ton of people are out there wondering why they aren’t making any money. “Where is my kick-back?” they ask. And the answer is that there isn’t one. You’ll only get the value you make out of it, not the value someone else promises you. Anyway, it’s pretty funny. Enjoy.

Today Show Hates David!

…not really. But a lot of people do.

Many around the world, like me, turn the toob on in the mornings to catch parts of the Today Show in hopes of finding something between news and entertainment. For example, it was highly entertaining to hear about Matt Lauer picking a fight with a deer, but it wasn’t really news. Same goes for the “octo-mom” stuff. Frankly, I was hoping for an eight-tenticled woman rampaging in defense of her young, but it turns out it’s just some lady with another eight kids.

And it’s those stories that get me slightly frustrated. The octo-mom isn’t really news. There are laws to protect the kids, and frankly it’s none of our business. Likewise, it’s no news story that “David Goes to the Dentist” is absolutely hilarious. It seems however that many in the world lost their funnybone, according to the Today Show, and are now criticizing the parents for posting the video of Dazed David DeVore. It seems to me that anyone who’s had a kid in this state before knows that it’s humorous and it would take quite a stretch to imagine that his parents are taking advantage of a cute and humorous moment in time. That said, here’s the clip: