The Future of the Business Card
Just finished reading this interesting article via Mashable that’s a nice follow-up to a post I wrote back in October on business cards. While traditional business cards can be a great vehicle for design and creativity the truth is that one day they will be obsolete. And, with apps such as Bump and LinkedIn’s Cardmunch (not to mention the prevalence of smart phones), that future may be just around the corner.
While this doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the business card as a whole (currently, 10 billion business cards are printed annually – that’s a lot!), it does mean a re-shaping, or re-imagining, will need to take place. How will the business card adapt to avoid extinction? Mainly, how can designers re-invent the business card so that it is readable and translates well into a pre-configured application? Time will have to tell…
Karl’s Diary
These videos from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant about their friend, Karl Pilkington, kill me. You can also see their new show on the Discovery Channel, An Idiot Abroad – awesome! Watch, and try not to laugh!
Data Art
As I’m sure you can tell by now, I’m a fan of the infographic. And these visually stunning data visualizations take the infographic to a whole new level – one could say, a more artistic one. These graphics were compiled by Wired Editor Thomas Goetz using various artists to help in the project. The results are an online exhibition of fancy infographics and animations depicting online behavior. Goetz sums up the idea best,
“Basically, I wanted to use the digital medium of the web to show data visualization – to show it in a new and robust way,” he says. “I landed on showing how digitalized people’s lives are, through Skype, tweets and Facebook – the part of our lives we do online.”
And, it’s true. We tend to forget that online activities have a history to them. Even if we consistently clear our cache, the analytics behind our behaviors remains – making digital communications fascinatingly traceable and visualized.
The images and animations are derived from data centering on 3 themes: Wikipedia as a crowd-sourced network; how Twitter’s platform of followers, interactions and re-tweeting ranks its various users; and the “impact and fluidity of an online financial social network” – read more about it here.
Google Doodles
Agghh, I’ve been terrible at keeping up with this blog. However, when I revisited it on a whim recently, I noticed that it received a surprising amount of visitors 🙂 Now, considering most people wound up here because they were searching for things like, “car advertisements,” I’m pretty sure once they saw the crying babies collage below, they steered their attention elsewhere. But hey, whatever, at least someone’s looking! (And, apparently I should write about how crappy car ads are more often!)
Anyway, so I guess I’ve decided to get back in the game a little. And what better way than to talk about today’s Google Doodle. Google has really been stepping up their game lately in terms of the interactivity of their infamous Doodles. From this summer’s Lucille Ball and Les Paul tributes, Google continues to showcase why they are leaders in innovation on the web. No longer just pleasurable visuals for the eye, their doodles have now taken on a whole new level of complexity, creativity, and excitement. And today’s Freddie Mercury Doodle is no exception. Well done, Google. (And, nice song choice!)
MEDIA MINDED 
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