Gillico

When Google announced and subsequently unleashed Buzz on the world, on February 9, 2010, it was hoping to have a social networking hit on its hands. Instead, it was met with a lot of frustration and anger from users, who found Buzz thrust upon them, turned on and connected to the rest of the internet before users even knew it.

And when I say connected, I mean connected! Everything in your Google profile, including all your contacts and links and your YouTube Profile (like your sharing links to Twitter accounts), Picasa, your Google Reader shared items, and more, became available to anyone familiar with your Gmail address who wanted to follow your Buzz account. And this wasn’t a choice to opt-in, but instead was switched on all at once from Google headquarters and shoved out the door.

posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 in communication, social networking, web
Comments Off

My 90 year old stepfather was just recently claiming to my mother that kids didn’t pick on each other back in his day. When she told me about it, we nodded knowingly, smiled, and agreed he has a touch of the old-timer’s. Anyone who is a kid, has been a kid, or has a kid of their own knows that bullying is a big problem, at home, at school and on the playground. But with the advent of the internet, it’s moved into an entirely different arena- online, and taken a new name- cyber-bullying.

posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 in communication, social networking, tips, web
1 comment »

Sometimes when you’re bored, you put your name into Google just to see the results, right? I’ve done it, you’ve done it, we’ve all done it… Then that gets boring, so you start looking for other stuff, just to see what you can find.

The staff of Nina Hale Search Marketing compiled some of the funniest and weirdest searches that they charted on Google over the past three months from their clients’ accounts, and found:

1. gloves that people can shoot out web
2. wool gangster shirts
3. what were the boots worn by Tom Selleck in Quigley Down Under
4. do tuna cook while they swim
5. who invented friction
6. kitten smells like rotten eggs
7. is turkey poop brown
8. what is tuna made of
9. what does Farrah Faucet look like
10. did duck hunting change the world

…continue reading »

posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 in communication, social networking, tips, web
Comments Off

I was going through my RSS feeds yesterday, when, to my surprise, I came upon a glowing review of the tech blog I used to write for. “Techi.com Will Not Bore You” proclaimed the headline! And when I clicked through, I read a shining review of how original the content and magnificent the site was. Surprisingly, for a design site, there was no mention of the site design itself, which, at least from this designer’s standpoint is plain, at best.

The sentence that really caught my attention, however, was “I’m familiar with the guy behind this project and can honestly say he knows what he is doing.” I, too, am familiar with the guy behind this project. His name is Walter Apai, and he is also the guy behind Web Design Depot, a clearinghouse for web design links that has had middling success on the web. He’s also a self-admitted control freak, micro-manager and will freely admit to knowing little to nothing about technology or how to run his business. From what I gathered while working together, he got lucky once and is hoping to replicate his success with Techi.com.

posted on Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 in communication, social networking, tips, web
13 comments »

I don’t really want to bitch wildly, but there has been an undercurrent I’ve noticed around a lot of sites and services lately that has caused me no end of frustration, and I want to take some time to discuss my recent experiences with:

Customer service.

Those fifteen letters might as well be a four letter word, the way they make people feel lately. Yeah I know we’ve been in a recession; my wallet has felt it as much as everyone else’s. But so many companies have decided that the the fastest and easiest way to “trim the fat” is to cut back on their customer support services.

posted on Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 in communication, eponymous, tips
Comments Off

I’ve never been a fan of at&t’s corporate branding since they took Saul Bass’s iconic logo and inflated it into a fussy, overly dated “death star” look. But now BBDO’s really gone off the damned deep end with their new “Rethink Possible” campaign. The hideously shaded and gradiented (yeah I know it’s not a word) 3D globe is now as bloated and fuzzy as their spokesdrone, Owen Wilson.

Oh, there are other versions, too, now without shading, and built of a variety of objects to fill out the logo, reminiscent of the recent rebranding of AOL by Wolff Olins.

Apparently the ultimate goal is to make at&t a company that exists solely on a name-less logo like Apple or Nike, but hideous crap from a company with huge customer service problems like this ain’t gonna cut it. ››Brand New

posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 in advertising, communication, design
Comments Off

Sometimes a logo redesign signifies a change in identity from the bush leagues to the majors. Such is the case with Calgary’s Mount Royal’s transformation from college to university. Their new logo is classy, understated, and a lot less beholden to a period in time than their previous identity. An excellent job. ››  Brand New – To Maple or Not to Maple

posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 in communication, design, outlinks
Comments Off

In January 1971, @ was an underused jargon symbol lingering on the keyboard and marred by a very limited register. By October, (Ray) Tomlinson had rediscovered and appropriated it, imbuing it with new meaning and elevating it to defining symbol of the computer age. He chose the @ for his first e-mail because of its strong locative sense—an individual, identified by a username, is @ this institution/computer/server, and also because…it was already there, on the keyboard, and nobody ever used it.

posted on Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010 in communication, design, outlinks, web
Comments Off

I wimped out a little and decided to go with this:

I incorporated the gradient like a couple people suggested, and dropped the “@” symbol. This is what will be on the other side:

posted on Monday, March 15th, 2010 in communication, design, eponymous
Comments Off

Tropicana discovered that their new upscale/generic looking packaging alienated and scared off their customers and has decided to revert to their previous “straw in an orange” motif. Change needs to be generated by some actual reason, not just for the sake of change. Link

Related topics via Technorati: branding, rebranding failure, Tropicana, New York Times, orange juice.

posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 in advertising, communication, design, outlinks
Comments Off