The Customer is Always Right

Most people work at a job at some point in their career that involves interacting with customers. Seth Godin stresses the importance that the customer is always right. Customers come to a certain store because of the treatment that they receive. So even if they are wrong, as the employee it is their job to appease the customer so that they come back. As with anything it is not certain that they will come back but it should be the customers choice not because of something the employees did. 

Interior Design

This wall is an accent wall but its design is what makes it special. The grid makes it easy to hang things on the wall. Otherwise you would have to take out a leveler and then hang the pictures. It also splits up the wall in a pleasing manner. Unfortunately i just redecorated my room, if not i would have done something like this.  

Adjustable Book Shelf

Being the owner of many books this bookshelf caught my eye. My book cases arent filled so i have a quite a few book ends. But they are annoying to move because it invloves shifting the books. This book shelf all you have to do is twist the knob on the bottom and move the cube down to fit more books. This shows thinking ahead with the design because most people have something that holds their books up and including it in the shelf combines the two.  

iPhone Business Cards

This is a business card design for someone that i found on swiss-miss' blog. Its taking something that everyone is familiar with, i know in every one of my classes i see at least 5 people with their iPhones on their desks. The benefit to a business card is sticking out among all the other plain business cards. However these are full color, have gradients and are two sided and appear to be larger than a regular business card; so they must be very expensive. Theyre must be a balance between these two aspects, the cost and the ability to stand out. If you can afford it, it might be worth it. Otherwise youre stuck with a much simpler business card. 

Logo Exercises

Coca Cola Hug Machine

I found this on stumbleupon a few weeks ago so when i was going through swiss miss's blog i was surprised to see it here as well. Swiss miss didnt have a lot of information on it so i did my own research and found a fox news article here. 
This machine is at the National University in Singapore and its part of Coca Cola's Open Happiness Campaign which their purpose is:

"to spread some happiness. Our strategy is to deliver doses of happiness in an unexpected, innovative way to engage not only the people present, but the audience at large"

Another form of the happiness campaign is the Happiness truck which drives around Brazil giving out free drinks to people who dont have access or the money to drink Coke

Polish Movie Posters

While on Core-77 looking for something to blog about this post caught my attention. The colors really jumped off the screen and peaked my interest. The thing that i found most interesting was the fact that even though they were movie posters not one of them showed an actor or actress. This is very different from movie posters today because that pretty much all they feature, the main person in the film some cool effect to make it pop out and the movie title. But all these movies in Poland from the 1960s and 1970s just had vector images. Not one was a photo, all images were created. I didnt think that they had the technology to create and mass produce these images back then, now people mostly use illustrator to create   objects like this and it was  no where near as advanced then as it is now.
 

Snow Art

When many people think of art they think of the known and famous artists with big paintings and other important works of art, permanent and unchanging. When someone says snow, children think of a play thing and adults find it a nuisance. But people do not often think of the two words together.  Sonja Hinrichsen creates these massive snow drawing pieces by using snow shoes. 

"I’m generally not interested in creating lasting art pieces, as I believe that our world is over-saturated with man-made products," she says, "I like to unfold my work into large experiences, however I prefer work that lives on in its documentation only, 

and--hopefully--in the memories of my audiences."

This is a completely different take on the traditional way that people perceive art. She knows that her pieces wont last long but she still wants to make an impact on her audience. 

Twitter

      Twitter has become a public forum to complain about or share many things. One thing Mark Hayes suggests is to have something that monitors brand mentions that makes it easier for companies to distinguish what their consumers are saying about them. Hootsuite offers a service like this that tracks twitter traffic to be used as a customer service outlet. This can be very helpful to business because many customers dont fill out customer service surveys and if consumers were complaining about it then they wouldn't tweet at them. Hootsuite tracks all mentions whether they were tweeted at or not so its easier for businesses to see what people are saying about them.  
      Ive tweeted about bad experiences that ive had at certain stores and by using this service its the companies taking full advantage of all the social media outlets that are available to the consumers. 

Photoshop Exercises

HP Logo

A business' logo is how a business is recognized on their products or an ad. A good logo is immediately recognizable without necessarily having the business' name printed underneath it. HP was thinking about changing their logo and even had a design agency create something for them in 2008. 

The middle image was the proposed change but after they released the logo it was met with a lot of criticism. Many couldnt tell if it was supposed to say 'bp'.  After some consideration HP decided to stick with their original logo because it is more recognizable to the general public. 

Asteroid Inspired Pictures

Asteroid Images

Keyhole:

Asteroid:

Crater:

Destruction:

Satellite: