Market Research Primer

To Truly reap the benefits of market research, you must know when each method will be most productive

Giving an overview of marketing research, Brianna Sylver gives a preliminary understanding of four methods currently utilized: ethnographic research, listening labs, focus groups, and surveys.

As a preliminary or rough draft, this is a good start. Marketing is a complex field and as a designer it is beneficial to know to conduct the various marketing research methods.

The good of the article is the overview aspects. She offers insight into each of the methodologies while assessing each methods strengths and weaknesses. She give Use, Cost, and average Time needed to conduct each method. In the end she gives a matrix of method versus use which can be used as a tool to quickly assess how to use each method.

But this "primer" for marketing research does not take into account the stated target reader, which would be someone who is unfamiliar with any of the market's terminology. She consistently uses undefined terminology and sometime does not fully explain how a method is actually conducted. One example is she explains Listening Labs by comparison to Usability Tests, but does not define a context for the comparison.

In the comments section many ambiguities are flushed out by the readers which balances out many of the inconsistencies in this primer and as a whole offers a fuller understanding of Market Research.

Published on Core77 on May 2, 2009 by Brianna Sylver

http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/spend_it_wisely_a_market_research_primer_for_designers_by_brianna_sylver_13355.asp

Design Week Dates and locations

For those Designers in NYC, May is the month for us with Design Week coming up.
Core 77 has the schedule and locations.

http://www.core77.com/nydesignweek/

What if...

What if you didn't have to buy a new phone every year or two?
What if there were a replacement guarentee, no matter what?
What if the sales stopped being hardware and became only software and service?
But what if the software updates were free for life?

Could you accept the idea that the next new Thing was the last version of it and no Next Thing would be developed for next year?

http://www.core77.com/blog/technology/the_last_iphone_by_robert_fabricant_13727.asp

Politics and Marketing strategy. 1953 Iran

Andy Wibbels writes a great comparison between a Political overthrow of the Irnanian Government and Marketing strategy...

Quite brilliant.

http://andywibbels.com/2009/06/iran-1953-coup-cia/

Copyright Debate

From the economist

http://economist.com/debate/days/view/310

Comic Sans will never grow up

The ground-swell against Comic Sans continues with the re-translation of a bunker scene where Hitler finds out his Marketing Department used Comic Sans for their propaganda posters.

There is a large fraction of people who feel hatred towards this poor simple font, but I believe in Comic Sans' innocents--like the saying goes about Guns killing people:

Comic Sans doesn't kill good design, People kill good design.

What is the environmental benefit of blocking email spam?

The benefits would be the elimination of the consequences.

According to a McAfee report about spam, the consequences of the worldwide spam emails sent in 2008, estimated at a total of 62 trillion emails, has the same footprint as 3 million passenger vehicles on the road for a year.

An important idea to get from the 12 page McAfee report is to clear up a misconception that electronic communications are a truly green method of communication, and this is because the amount of energy used to generate, store, and disseminate the electronic communications negate the positive effects of not using print media to communicate.

The report states, "Spam email accounts for just over one-third of the total emissions related to business and personal email globally because about 80 percent of all email messages are spam messages."

The energy required annually to create, send, receive, store, and view spam adds up to more than 33 billion KWh, approximately equivalent to 4 gigawatts of baseload power generation or the power provided by four large new coal power plants.

View the pdf report here:

http://img.en25.com/Web/McAfee/CarbonFootprint_12pg_web_REV_NA.pdf

Awareness Test

When communicating with the millennial audience, the advertisements need to be more intelligent, more witty or capture the attention interactively and finally should also be meaningful.

I believe this psa for England's transportation authority target the audience well and has personal impact for each of the viewers. There are other videos which do not impact as personally and therefore are not as memorable.

NYC at its best

This has been a 10+ year endeavor which now has parts of it open to the public. Not just a park but a City Park. They have created a balance between the concrete:landscape ratio, which changes from one area to another. But I believe that the central idea behind the High Line is the creation of an Awareness of the intermingling of nature and society. How the plants creep up from railway ties. How the cement gives way to grass with a slatted edge. And how it elucidates the impact of society on nature, for example: the water fountain photo below.

It does not have the usual sink drain where the water disappears. This fountain has the excess water follow a trough, then down the side of the fountain, and finally, the water disappears in a typical street drain. This makes a visual connection between the user and their waste.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2009/06/the_high_line_o.html

Alice's Restaurant guy #3

Ancient wisdom from the 60's (although I grew up on this stuff)

Alice's Restaurant By Arlo Guthrie

For those not familiar with the 18 and a half minute song, there is a part about trying to not be accepted by the army draft by singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant to the Army Shrink which goes like this...

You know, if one person, just one person does it
they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.
And if two people, two people do it, in harmony,
they may think they're both fagg*ts
and they won't take either of them.
And if three people do it, three, can you imagine,
three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant
and walking out. They may think it's an organization.
And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,
I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of
Alice's Restaurant and walking out.
And friends, they may think it's a movement.

Full lyrics on Arlo.net
http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/alices.shtml


One, two, three, fifty.

Its what Malcom Gladwell writes about in The Tipping Point (a quick, deep, inspiring book). How one person doing one thing suddenly blossoms into a movement through a natural process of interaction.

And this is also what Seth Godin's simple blog about a guy dancing alone becomes a "dance tribe." What is a "Dance tribe" you may ask. Well, you can see what trend forecasting, marketing incentives, and viral video blogging have in common with dancing at a concert. Follow the link below.

Watch how it becomes an UNSTOPPABLE movement. And the first three guys are forgotten!

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/guy-3.html



Seth talks about Guy #1 being important/CRAZY
and Guy #3 also being important, but more
that aguy #3 was the brave TREND SETTER.
After that, Seth says, they are all FOLLOWERS. Meaningless.

I agree more with Mr. Guthery. A group of fifty people is a condensed organized bubble of True Believers. A Movement. All the people in the Dance Tribe were already participating in the concert. If this were an experiment in Central Park and the central reason for gathering in the first place was to soak in the sun, be with friends, etc, and a Dance Tribe occured, I still believe that the Fiftieth person, although not so brave, still merits importance. As would the first Mosher in the middle going against the established trend.

Wisdom

Image of Socrates' school of learning from http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/SA.html

What I see in class all the time, with my classmates being mostly Millennials, is that they don't listen to the teacher's advise and it seems that they believe that technology will save them in the end. They value technology over wisdom. We are "knowledge workers" but wisdom comes from experience and understanding the experiences. I'm not knocking the Millennials for their innovation, creativity, and energy. But they seem too impatient to absorb the importance of the verbalization's from their teachers. I attend (Pratt Graduate program for Graphic Design) a trade school, sure, but it should be more a place of wisdom where those of experience and understanding impart value to Knowledge Seekers!

In a pantopicon blog, they discuss the tribal society, where the elders were respected for their wisdom. Which is what photographer and director Andrew Zuckerman has done in The wisdom project. Interviews with wise people about wisdom.
http://www.pantopicon.be/blog/2009/03/10/the-wisdom-project/

NYTimes The moment

http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/graphic-content-and-the-trophy-for-the-most-generic-trophy-goes-to/

Daily Heller

http://blog.printmag.com/dailyheller/2009/06/04/MakingTypeFromInscriptions.aspx

zettabytes

By the end of 2013, the equivalent of 10 billion DVDs worth of information will cross the Net monthly

By Larry Greenemeier in 60-Second Science Blog

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=soon-there-will-be-so-much-video-on-2009-06-09

But that's the boring part of the blog.

The exciting part is:

The company's report comes one day after Apple announced that its next iPhone, called the 3G S, will be able to record, edit and send video clips (via e-mail or
multimedia message service, MMS).

iPhone 3G S users will also be able to upload an iPhone video to YouTube using voice commands, the Washington Post reports.

ma.gnolia

Citizen Garden is a site of Factory Joe's (I think) who usually does pod casts, but this time he posted a Vimeo session with Larry Halff, the creator of ma.gnolia. For those who do not know, ma.gnolia recently had significant data corruption, and being a site to upload, store and share links with groups or communities, this was a serious crash.
Two significant ideas (among many others) come from the 25 minute video. The first is how a single individual with an interesting idea can create a substantial global community with the tools available today. But the second point is that if a single person can create a site which appears to be run by an organization, because there is no transparency with the site, how do we safeguard against significant disruption of life when the person does not properly backup the site or system, as in the case of ma.gnolia? Should it be mandatory to have transparency in all community based websites?

In the video:

Citizen Garden discussing ma.gnolia's downfall.
Ma.gnolia was developed by a cultural anthropologist as a collaborative qualitative research tool. The site appeared to be a large corporation but it was only Larry with some help from up to 4 other people. Ma.gnolia is testimony that

An individual can build a substantial community with the tools available today...

but it raises a question about our dependence on data storage in the cloud.

If your email went away, what would you
do?

Citizen Garden Episode 11: Whither Ma.gnolia? from Larry Halff on Vimeo.

Link to the Citizen Garden Site:

http://citizengarden.com/2009/02/15/episode-11-whither-magnolia/

Graphic Objects

The technique unleashed an immense range of seismographic marks, symbols, letters, word fragments and phrases that soon spread to the imposing two-sided works she called Graphic Objects. Here multiple sheets of rice paper dotted with regiments of little marks and letters, as well as big press type, are sandwiched between sheets of plexiglass. The disembodied, translucent patchworks and textures suggest different layers of sound caught on scrims — black on white, red on white and white on white.

This is an art show I have been waiting to see for a while. It closes on the 15th and I will be going this weekend.

I believe that Graphic Design does not need to be considered merely a beautification of a communication. We are supposed to be intelligent, good communicators, and have a visual understanding of information, but we are also supposed to be invisible, like a good film director or editor, or a good writer. The "I" in graphic design is supposed to be silent. This can be argued quite easily with the current trend of Rock-star Graphic Designers (such as http://www.sagmeister.com/index.html). But the impression I'm getting from many of my professors is that Graphic Design is a Trade not an Art; only famous graphic designers sign their names.

I believe graphic designers are primarily artists who happen to be expressing the communications of other's.

I believe that one does not need to be a Rock-star to have a graphic design Voice.

I believe that Communication Artists need to embrace their artistic side and their authorship potential, but also to see themselves as teachers; who know the historical lineage of the graphic arts.

Seeing art is essential in grasping your own vision, while gaining an understanding of past voices.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/arts/design/03moma.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=Tangled%20Alphabets&st=cse&scp=3

2030AD Designers

"What would Shakespeare create for this world?"

Maybe it’s because Tom and I are both incurable optimists, but we imagined a future where sustainability becomes a part of everyday life (her smart house closely monitors energy consumption for example), a future where chefs are collaborating with Foodex (a future version of Fedex), for the “everyone eats well program”, a future where fabrics are created from crops, things like this.

I love to speculate on what life might be like in 20 or 30 years. This article talks with Tom Klinkowstein and Irene Pereyra about the incredible work of creating a day in the life of a 40 year old woman in the year 2030. It is more about how she interacts with the "smart things" around her.


http://www.pantopicon.be/blog/2008/01/26/designers-2030-ad-the-interview/

Container Ship Pollution

A single container ship may cause as much pollution as 50 million cars and release as much as 5,000 tons of sulfur oxide into the air annually. And there are 90,000 such ships of varying sizes across the world at any one time.

I think the most shocking fact from this article is that the Emma Maersk (pictured above) burns a gallon of fuel every 28 FEET. Or maybe it was the suggestion to put sails on this 1/4 mile ship to begin its journey across the ocean...

--------------------------------------

Some more facts from The New York Times:

1 Gallon of Gas Weighs 6lbs

When burned the carbon combines with Oxygen

and produces 19lbs of CO2

Add in Making and distribution systems:

1 gal of Gas averages: 25lbs CO2

e.g.:

1 car, getting 21mpg is driven

30 miles a day (without traffic)

uses about 1.5 gal per day

equaling 35.7lbs of CO2 per day

In NYC there are 2.1 million cars

In Sao Paulo there are 4.5 million cars

--------------------------------

If

CAR:

1 Gal Gas = 25lbs CO2 = about 1lb CO2 per MILE

And

CONTAINER SHIP:

1 Gal fuel = 25lbs CO2 = 28 FEET

188.5 Gal fuel = 1 MILE

Then

ATLANTIC OCEAN:

= 3,462 Miles

= 652,834 Gallons

= 16,320,857lbs CO2 per Ship crossing once

Written by Christopher DeMorro
Published on June 3rd, 2009
Posted in Carbon Emissions

http://gas2.org/2009/06/03/one-container-ship-pollutes-as-much-as-50-million-cars/#more-2505

Was I Wrong?

Peter Burrows of Businessweek wrote about Qi Lu (pronounced CHEE-loo) knows how strong the Giant, Google, is. He was the lead technologist for Yahoo, competing against Google's search engine. After 10 years, he left Yahoo in August with vague plans. Soon after Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, asked him to rejoin the front against Google.

"The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a duty," says Lu

The new search engine, Bing, will be a tool for certain specific queries, rather than a general search engine, and through this MS hopes to gain ground. It will also directly utilize some extensive research; for example, the web surfers think they are happy with the Google technology, but the findings are that they don't find what they are looking for more than half the time.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_23/b4134040743599.htm

And yes, there is a 100 million dollars to be spent on advertising:

In one TV spot, Microsoft will poke fun at Google by comparing its search to a bad relationship where your significant other takes too long to respond to questions and then gives the wrong answers three out of four times.

Innovate and succeed

Bruce Nussbaum's post from April 23, ruminates about the failures of many CEOs is due to the differences between the pampered realities of their daily life and the unpampered daily lives of their employees and customers. CEOs, Nussbaum thinks, live on another planet, which is why they fail.
He also points to a few companies who have not stopped innovating during this recession.

"Want to know how to innovate and succeed in a horrible downturn. Look to Apple, Amazon, Flip (just bought by Cisco), and ZipCar for lessons."

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2009/04/how_do_you_inno_1.html

Keeping Facebook Nice and Clean

There's nothing arbitrary about his judgments: at Facebook, they have developed semiformal policies like the Fully Exposed Butt Rule, the Crack Rule and the Nipple Rule. In this photo there's no visible areola, he decides, so it stays.

I believe [CENSORED].

Keeping Facebook Nice and Clean
By Nick Summers NEWSWEEK
Published May 23, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jun 1, 2009

http://www.newsweek.com/id/199117

SVA Design Crit site

http://dcrit.sva.edu/

5 Writing Tips for Designers

Drum roll please........

1. Use your skills
2. Kill jargon
3. Tell a story
4. Don’t be afraid
to put yourself into your writing
5. Finally, and most importantly, don’t
say too much

Although his article has a premise that at some point most designers will need to write something, I believe that Designers are starting to become the drivers of the content, rather than merely making some other person's copy look nice. For designers to have full Authorship, they must know more than a few simple rules of writing. They need to constantly be striving to be better communicators in all ways possible.

Posted by William Bostwick 2 Feb 2009

http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/how_not_to_write_like_a_designer_5_tricks_you_didnt_learn_in_studio_12363.asp

NRG presentation

link to a presentation on the hypothetical rebranding of the DOE website
http://www.slideshare.net/dridgewa/nrg-presentation

Blog Brother thinks I'm not human!

What happens when technology is used to appraise the daily interactions people have with each other? We have SPAM blocker, Email rules based on specific criteria, Speed checker with cameras to shoot your license plate number, Automatic Thermostates, EasyPass, and Mobile Gas Speedpass. We should soon have a refrigerator which throws expired food away automatically.

How much do we loose of ourselves when we stop interacting with the minor aspects of daily life? Who writes letters any more? Who strolls up 5th Avenue any more? Who sits on the porch any more?

None of this was conceived yet when Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock. A book about the future as seen from the 1970s. It was not a book about a utopia. It was a book about us. Although we still think we have our humanity, while, if I remember correctly, Toffler thought we would loose it.

At Pantopicon, there is a link to the Future Shock documentary from 1972, narrated by Orson Welles. Oooh, how dramatic!

http://www.pantopicon.be/blog/2009/05/08/future-shock-the-movies/

Three Yes' for Susan Boyle

Being that I like to keep my head in the sand when sensationalism occurs in the media, I had not seen the show Britain's Got Talent. I'm sure just as many American's saw that show. The YouTube video of it has 7.7 million views, 14 thousand 5-star ratings, 16.5 thousand COMMENTS! And that's just one video.

Bruce Nessbaum sees the possibility that she is an icon for what he is calling the "New Normal" era.

I wonder how the New Normal correlates with the No-Product mentality?

From a post by Bruce Nussbaum on April 22
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2009/04/susan_boyle_is.html

Sticky Conversations (Tag, you're it)

The web makes things sticky.
I get on the web, I become sticky. I go to person-A's site and they stick to me. Like a synapse in the brain being solidified. Person-B sees Person-A's post and all three of us stick together. Now, Person-C comes along and can travel along the connected synapses to read the Global Conversation being created.

For example.
Seth Godin wrote about the $100 million dollars (pinky to the crease of the mouth)... that Micsoft is throwing at Bing. He also mentioned the Wave Keynote Presentation and put a link to Andy Wibbles' blog. Andy Wibbels wrote about the Google Wave presentation after he found it on the YouTube site. But Andy embedded the video into his blog and talked about how incredible the presentation is.

Because I liked what Andy was saying, I looked at some other things he's written about.
Such as his "5 Things to Do Everyday to be Successful". Andy is part of a network of people who are telling everyone 5 simple things that they do each day or week in order to be a better person in some way. The connections range from random bloggers who have never put these ideas into words, to people who have created whole blog sites about personal development.

On his blog people comment with their own 5 things to do, or give links which further the sticky conversation.
http://andywibbels.com/2007/04/5-things-to-do-everyday-to-be-successful/
Andy was tagged by Ellen Britt on her blog Marketing Qi
http://www.marketingqiblog.com/2007/04/simply_successf.html
And she was tagged by Hueina Su at Intensive Care for the Nurturer's Soul
http://blog.beyondhorizoncoaching.com/2007/04/my-simply-successful-secrets.html
While working on a experiment started by Aaron Potts called Simply Successful Secrets
http://todayisthatday.com/blog/simply-successful-secrets/

Ellen writes about the whole process of tagging back:
In this way, we can share our secrets of success with our readers as well as with the readers of all the other bloggers who participated. In addition, we are supposed to *tag* as many bloggers as we like to participate in this experiment.

What's the Opposition?

Going up against Google? How big is the Giant?

The Giant is a Surfer-dude riding the wave of polysyllabic conceptualizations.

Andy Webbel has a link to the YouTube video for a Keynote presentation on Google Wave.

http://andywibbels.com/2009/05/google-wave-keynote/

Take 12 minutes of your day to see what this is all about. If you're still interested, you can watch the rest of the 2 hour presentation.

Marketing with Opposition

Question: How does another company compete with The Giant (David and Goliath)?

Google is the King of Search Engines and Microsopht thinks it can eek out a little of that market for itself by spending $100 million dollars (pinky to the crease of the mouth)...

What do they name the new search engine? the acronym of

"But It's Not Google..." Bing.

Not Bling. Not Bing Crosby. Not Bing Surfboards.

Setting up an apparent opposition is to create a market from the dissatisfaction of consumers. But what happens if you oppose a company which does not have a lot of dissatisfied customers?

Their marketing campaign, naming convention, and their $100 million dollars (pinky to the crease of the mouth)... are revolving around a concept which has already named Mocrisoft the looser. The Mac/PC wars are old now, but the model remains: If you are in opposition to Microsoft then you are probably the Better Company!

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/the-next-google.html

Collecting Collections

In praise of Alice Rawsthorn
Posted by Mark Vanderbeeken

Cognitive Self Awareness is what sets us apart from the spiders, dogs, and (probably) the dolphins (though current research is being done on this here). Being self aware, the Here-link quickly became in bad taste. "Here" is the catchword of the day. Like calling to a dog, "Here, Spot, here." As opposed to Hear, although that's just as possible when talking about the web, v-blogging and electronic social interaction.

And the internet blogging system, though truly too dense to consume it all, augments this self awareness through connecting like-things to like-things. "If you like what I write about you might like what I read too."
Mark Vanderbeeken writes about some pretty neat things. He is a Hub. A Central Station where you go forth from to different new locations, strengthening the connections within the web-iverse. (*as opposed to uni-verse).
Mark has given us a LIST of works to read from the design critic of the International Herald Tribune, Alice Rawsthorn. He has also given us the link to her personal website Here which has links to articles which the New York Times seems to have "disappeared altogether" for some reason.

Alice is a goldmine. Go. Read.

A link to the Mark Vanderbeeken post is (t)here:

http://www.core77.com/blog/object_culture/in_praise_of_alice_rawsthorn_13627.asp

To Sell No-Product

John Hockenberry's essay begins with the question:
­What are the implications for industrial designers if the strongest consumer impulse becomes not buying?
This is an exploration of ideas more than an exploration of answers. It is a mix of economic understanding, timeline extrapolation, future speculation, market trends, and marketing trends.
He jump starts many ideas for further exploration, but essentially is tunneling through to explore the ideas of the designers' place and the consumers' place in an society where less or no products are being bought and sold.

http://www.metropolismag.com/story/20090318/within-the-product-of-no-product

Ellen...

What more can I say, but what a wonderful person this Ellen Lupton is! She is like the Redhat of design. DIY advocate. A prolific and interactive Teacher. And she gives things away. Words. Ideas. Digital books. Typefaces, too. She talks to students and tries to get them to have a little more authorship in their designs; for them to create content. I heard her talk about how designers should create art because artists are creating design. She is one of the pivotal graphic designers today and to know her is to be part of contemporary design.


Below is the cover of a typographic 2008 calendar which can be downloaded from lulu.com
Cover design by Ben Levy.


http://elupton.com/

The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes

This is my introduction to Seth Godin. I enjoy his writing because he leads you to his main point through incremental steps from a general understanding or perspective and layers over it multiple perspectives. But then he aims his telescopic eyesight towards the future to give you an insight into what it all means.
In this blog entry he begins with identifying a trend where printers, such as Ben Franklin, who was a printer, came to write his own content. He goes on to describe the reversal of this trend with the computer, where writers are printing their own material.
He then talks about the potential solutions not yet found, for a job in the new economy where someone collates and leverages these DIY and Desktop publishers into a public demand.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/05/when-the-writer-becomes-the-publisher.html

Kumo

Kumo:

I find it interesting that Microsoft is struggling to eek out a bit of the search engine market, when it has usually been the target of Antitrust lawsuits for being a monopoly.
But as nascent technology becomes more sophisticated, especially with semantic search technology, it is still a race to see who lands on top… at least for a while.

Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Billgates.JPG
Article by Larry Greenemeier in 60-Second Science Blog
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=searching-for-answers-microsoft-set-2009-05-20

Personal Connection

Part of what makes blogs such a powerful and important tool is the Speed of Information has been exponentially increased through a network of connected Gatherers and feeders, each referring link back to the Original Source is spiced with a little preparatory opinion. It is not merely an unbiased hyper-text connection, but a personalized connection of what is important within the Network community.

Nussbaum is just making a simple comment about the impact made with data visualization, as any Wired subscriber knows. And re-filtering people back to something which made an impact on himself. Which I find hides a secondary layer of meaning because the original source is the NYTimes Online. He makes a comment about the "decline of the New York Times" while simultaneously helping to reinforcing their position as an online entity...

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2009/05/great_data_visu.html

What Elephant? An interview with Frank Luntz

Frank Luntz is a Communications Specialist.

He takes phrases used in the public arena and—through a complex procedure—figures out a new phraseology to communicate a specific attitude towards the phrase in question, hence, hopefully, changing people’s behavior.
The current phrase he has been charged with investigating is about Obama’s “healthcare reform.” A 28 page memo was sent to the Republicans in Congress, suggesting they refer to the healthcare reform as “a Washington Takeover.”
The rest of the article questions Luntz about who he is and how he works.
To me, it seems that Frank Luntz is probably a difficult person to talk to if you are not on his side. He is a man who works with language and how it affects the listener (or reader) and does not couch his words with vagueness or subtlety crafted platitudes unless he is completely avoiding the question. When asked questions in this interview, I got the distinct sense that he was a hostile interviewee. I will also say that I believe the Interviewer was a bit hostile also.
When Luntz talked about Dick Cheney’s answer to a question about 70% of Americans disagreeing with the war, where Cheney answered “So,” Luntz stated that this monosyllabic answer was a slap in the American face. But Luntz answered a few questions of his own with “Who cares?” and “It’s not relevant.” They weren’t monosyllabic, but certainly, for a man who understands words, he would understand the intention of those answers were to force a new question.
It is important to follow a person like Frank Luntz, because he influences how words are used publicly. He is very knowledgeable and ingenious at times with the phrases he creates to change people’s perceptions of certain issues or policies. He is a staunch Republican. So. If you agree with his politics then you might see the benefits of changing the “estate tax” to be called the “death tax.” And if you disagree with his politics, then you might see deception created when “eavesdropping” is referred to as “electronic intercepts.”

Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON with FRANK LUNTZ
Published: May 21, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24wwln-q4-t.html

Form Deconstructed

I found this a very interesting article. The author is basically trying to apply a rationalistic and scientific analysis to the aesthetic impression of a surface's curvature and/or flatness.

His arguments do not consider the dividing factor of individualistic Opinion, without which we would not have such fierce debates on such topics as the quality of the Comic Sans typeface.

I commend Gray Holland's efforts for I have felt the impulse to document the empirical aspects of what remains within an elusive realm. A tremendous uphill effort.

As a designer in a commercialistic world, it is reassuring to have a qualified answer to a client’s question of: Why?

Link

http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/a_periodic_table_of_form_the_secret_language_of_surface_and_meaning_in_product_design_by_gray_holland_12752.asp

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TeenSpot.com - offers teen chat rooms, message boards, profiles ...

My Future. Military Opportunities. Money Matters. Beyond High School. ...

Magazine style site which features chat, message boards, and news..

54% of the following site's customers are under 18

www.bebo.com/

"Hottest bands, sexiest celebs and fresh new videos

Your one-stop-shop for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Delicious, Twitter, AIM, AOL Mail, Google Mail and Yahoo! Mail updates.
Keep track of friends on other social sites from one place

Find friends and buddies.
Invite your network to join."

Current Website

US Department of Energy.



Youth Area



Their splashpage on Nuclear Energy with three age groups

"Just Right Details" page