November 2005
Get Podcast Transcriptions with Enablr
A big raison d'etre of KMA+C is that we're not just another creative firm: we're the in-house marketing resource team for a future string of entrepreneurial businesses. One role is to be angel investors who trade expertise, sweat and services for equity. Another is to jump on niche markets and come out with products and services quickly and simply.
So I'm proud to say we've combined both of those aspects in our new venture, Enablr.com.
UPDATE: I'll be at the Montreal Podcasters Meetup, Tuesday Nov 29th, 7:30pm at La Cabane. My first one, go easy on me!
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November 25, 2005 in King Marketing | ✍ 3
Avant Garde Gothic, Now With Ligatures
In the late 1960s, designer Herb Lubalin was commissioned to design a striking geometric logotype for Avant Garde magazine. He and Tom Carnase (both partners in Lubalin Smith Carnase) created a body font and a headline font, notable for its unprecedent number of custom-fitted, hand-drawn ligatures. The font was a hit, and has transcended its "1970s" connotations to become a genuine classic.
Avant Garde made the leap to digital in the early days of desktop publishing, but ASCII character-set standards of the day didn't have enough room for all of the headline font's extra ligatures - so we've only had the plainer book version for the last 20 years. Designers who wanted access to all those extra tasty bits had to either scan old specimen books or redraw them by hand.
This month, the full, complete set of Avant Garde headline fonts has finally been reissued in OpenType format. It took OpenType for this to happen - because it can have as many as 65,000 character shapes (or glyphs) in a single font, vs. an upper limit of 256 glyphs in PostScript fonts.
Prediction: Many, many album covers imitating Travis' "The Man Who."
November 10, 2005 in Design | ✍ 3
The Social Economics of Indie Rock (Part 1)
I've talked many people's ears off about Andrew Potter and Joseph Heath's The Rebel Sell, aka Nation of Rebels outside Canada.
The book was issued as a paperback this past summer, after a long run in hardcover and translation into nearly every language on Earth. It's a riposte and reality check for those who blame brands and advertising alone for the excesses of sociopathic corporations operating in an overly free market. Most notably, they take to task No Logo author Naomi Klein and Adbusters honcho Kalle Lasn for missing a bigger point: that so-called counterculture is actually the driving force behind consumer culture, not the antidote to it.
Where I find the book particularly interesting is in its analysis of "cool" as a kind of positional good, a term they use to explain a status item that only a few people can possess at any one time. For example, a house in a desirable neighborhood is a positional good, because the amount and availability of them is limited, compared to a cool commodity like a new iPod.
When it comes to indie bands (and the people who love them) there's a lot of jockeying to occupy the "cool" position. And in its own way, there is a cashless economy of meaning - a social economy - that drives the scene forward, pulling the mainstream along in its wake.
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Zen Steve and Complicated Bill
Compare and contrast:
It's generally agreed that Jobs is an excellent presenter, and Gates only so-so, but PresentationZen's article Gates, Jobs and the Zen Aesthetic looks deeper to tell us why - examining not only their slides, but their communication styles, word choices and body language.
