This is creepy as hell — a Steve Jobs action figure created in the remarkable likeness of the late Apple founder. Unfortunately, I don’t have many more details.

I suppose if I were still in grad school this would lead to a thesis about false idols and biblical references in modern Capitalism in the post-industrial information age yadda yadda yadda. But instead, here’s a photo of a Barack Obama action figure, holding two katanas. Who would win in a fight, d’ya think?

More photos of the Jobs doll here »

via The Artist and His Model »

Managing your messaging, tone, audience and communication strategy is delicate work. Doing it right pays off, but too often we overlook the design elements of our brand — the parts visually connecting us to our audience.

In this already overstimulated online world of our, here are a few simple steps you should take to improve your brand consistency and bring value to your audience.

1. Do less

DIY designers love to use as many colors, typefaces, photographs, illustrations and visual styles as possible, which is almost always overwhelming. Simplicity, however, is the ultimate sophistication and stepping back your design means people can focus on what’s really important. No one will get “bored” of simple designs. Ideally, they’re the wrapper for your expertise and offering.

2. Choose a font (or two)

Use one typeface for almost everything and a second one to fall back on for special cases like headlines or passages of text. Most fonts come in families, with various weights and italic variants, allowing you to create variety in your communications. Limiting your type choices (and sticking with them) will create a strong sense of recognition and your audience will begin to acknowledge your communications without reading a word.

Many fonts are created in pairs, intended to complement each other within a single piece. Examples of this are Droid Sans with Droid Serif; Mrs. Eaves with Mr. Eaves. Using two well-paired typefaces will make you look like a design ace with hardly any effort — see what combinations you can find online.

Finally, to stand out, it’s worth investing a few dollars in a typeface. There are many places to buy fonts online: premium shops like Veer and Hoefler & Frere-Jones who are masters at the craft. Sites like MyFonts and FontSquirrel also have tons of offerings at various prices (including free).

3. Set a color scheme

We live in a colorful world, but there’s no need to decorate your work with them all. Choose two main and two supporting colours. The main ones will provide 90% of what you need, but the supporting ones can be called on for diagrams, charts and more complicated materials like eBooks or presentations.

Need a starting point for inspiration? Think of what magazines your audiences reads or the kind of home they live in. Heck, might as well pick up those actual magazines or check out some interior design blogs for ideas. For more online color inspiration check out Colour Lovers or Design Work Life’s “Colour Happy” series.

4. Get a professional headshot

A good headshot becomes part of your brand identity the minute you use it. Take it one step further by asking your photographer or designer to slightly map the photo’s color tone to your brand style. Say you write a blog about camping equipment – a pale brown overlay could reinforce your values. If you’re in the high-energy world of teenage fashion, bump up the reds and yellows. A luxury brand could warrant a black-and-white photo.

Use this photo consistently. Make it your avatar on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, your blog and your site’s About page. This creates awareness and familiarity across all outlets.

5. Decide on a style for icons, illustrations, and other key art

Have a plan for selecting brand-appropriate images. For example, if you decide on a clean, glossy, futuristic look for your buttons and icons, don’t suddenly change tactic and go with a gritty, punk rock motif on your next newsletter.

An easy way to think of this is to create “sliders” like the one below. Make three of four sliders to describe your visual sensibilities and use these to govern subsequent design decisions.

6. Have a logo

Companies usually need a logo, but do people? Yes, but not in the same way. Your name, arranged in your chosen typeface and colour, can be a de facto logo. Add a simple graphic element to your name to create something distinct.

But use this wisely. Stay away from abstract symbols that may be hard to associate with your brand and don’t create a “spin-off” of any well-known corporate identities. You don’t have to over-think though. The simplest logos are usually the most memorable.

7. Hire a [real] designer

An experienced designer can give insight you don’t have yourself. Most will offer hourly consultations, allowing you to get opinions without commissioning an expensive re-design. If you’re willing to buy an expensive suit to look good in front of clients, shouldn’t you also be willing to spend $200 to chat with a design pro?

Do make sure you’re hiring a real design professional though, not a “fast-food service”. Don’t buy a logo for $99. Don’t hire someone to do a complete re-brand in 24 hours. And don’t assume your neighbor’s second cousin can lay out your entire brand campaign. These shortcuts usually lead right back to where you started.

For recommendations, browse design blogs to see who has good taste. For work samples, check out Dribbble, a site for in-progress design work, or Behance, where designers post personal projects or rejected client work.

Not everyone is a design ace, and that’s okay. When in doubt, go with something tried and true — simplicity — your audience will respect and remember it. In the long run, that translates to a stronger personal brand. Simple as that.

Thanks for Marian for the punchy editing and for letting me post!

At the start of September, Netflix announced that they would split their DVDs-by-mail service from their streaming service, and introduce a new brand (and website) called Qwikster. Today, they did a total Cmd-Z and put the idea of Qwikster to bed. DVDs-by-mail will remain part of Netflix, alongside streaming.

Netflix explains the move in a blog post. The New York Times also tells the story, in more detail.

This is interesting because it illustrates just how quickly a brand can die. Qwikster was never a popular idea with consumers; it was born out of scandal and generally created pain for the costumer. It’s a terribly vague name reminiscent of the first dot-com bubble with a tricky spelling (and very annoying to type, I might add) and no brand personality. I’m genuinely confused as to why Netflix didn’t simply call the brand Movies By Mail, using a ultra-descriptive brand name to describe the service. That would have been a challenge in creating a unique brand name, but because of their size and resources, they could have pulled it off.

But even with all that working against Qwikster, it was abandoned in a remarkably short time. How long was it a living brand in the wild? Maybe 2 months? That has to be some kind of record.

What do you think? Are you glad Netflix has everything back under one roof? Will you miss the Qwikster brand?

This edition of WTF Wednesday concerns the ever-popular topic of brands branching out way beyond their core competencies. Case in point, Pierre Cardin, the European luxury goods label, has debuted a tablet PC, presumably to capture the super-niche market of technology adopters who are too posh to be seen with an iPad.

The trouble here is two-fold. First, and most obviously, Pierre Cardin doesn’t have the reputation for electronics or computing. Establishing credibility in those sectors is difficult, and often requires years of steady delivery. Similarly, well-known electronics firms — even the likes of Sony or Panasonic — can fall from grace in no time flat when something goes wrong in their supply chair or management, or when a decision is made to cheap-out on customer service, in the case of, say Dell. In this case, it’s even worse because Cardin doesn’t make the components or the operating system — it’s just the shiny packaging at the very end of the chain. So imagine, if you will, a potentially rotten orange, but in a really nice wrapper. Would you buy that?

Second, the truth about tablet PCs is that no one in the first world really gives a crap. The consumer who can afford Pierre Cardin products, and who are even aware of the brand, can likely afford an iPad and would desire one. It is, after all the true leader in this category. Going one step further, and following the logic of Jeff Jarvis, you could say there is no such category as Tablet PCs; there’s simply iPads and iPad wannabes. So why would a brand jump on the rickety competitor to the iPad band wagon? After all, if they just want to wrap the thing in leather, why not team up with Apple? We’ve seen the solid gold iPhone, remember?

The lesson? Well, you can probably say it with me, brands need to stay within their core competencies and deliver on their expertise. Brand extensions need to happen in very small increments, borrowing skills and experience from what they know and what their customers can trust. Going after the latest hotness can result in damage to the brand, which is much harder to repair than simply listing is loss on an annual report.

via UnBeidge »

This is awesome. From Thailand. That is all.

via Parse »

These made me smile. Aaron Wood, known as Justonescarf on Etsy, has created a series of WWII-style propaganda posters for today’s popular social networking sites — Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.

One that caught me eye was this Twitter Fail Whale poster. I had to do Aaron a solid and buy a print from his Etsy shop.

I have to mention, of course, that these aren’t the first WWII-style propaganda posters to hit the Internet. In fact, there’s a whole bunch, included Loose Tweets Sink Fleets, Someone Tweeted, and more.

via Design Milk »

Since I downloaded and installed the latest version of Mac OS X, nicknamed Lion, I’ve been working at a feverish rate to re-claim certain aspects of the OS which the overlords at Apple had deemed worthy of change, refresh, or removal. My desire to customize my computing experience isn’t new by any means — I remember tweaking the colour scheme on my first Windows 3.1 laptop back in 1993 — but as I grow, these changes are more to do with productivity than simple aesthetics. Lion broke my workflow.

There are several apps and areas which needed some attention. Finder, especially with its new Launchpad and Mission Control as well as numerous interface quirks, Safari, iCal and Address Book, and iTunes.

Sidebar icons in Lion are greyscale. But why?

In Finder, one of the first things I noticed was how the icons along the sidebar now appear in monochrome only. I could write for quite a while about frustrating this is, but a quick glance at the Apple Discussion Forums will reveal that plenty has been said already. In short, I like coloured icons — they help me find what I need faster, at a glance. Apple’s new icons are tough to differentiate because they’re not only greyscale, but they’re similar shapes. But unfortunately, all the nerds of the Internet haven’t yet been able to re-claim these icons. We’ve discovered where the icons are hidden within the system, but strangely, the sidebar has a new behaviour which desaturates any icons placed there. So even if you alter the icons, they’ll be greyed out again by the system. We’ll have to wait for Apple to fix this.

Luckily, the same is not the case for iTunes! In the latest version update, many iTunes users complained that they lost their coloured icons. A tutorial was released last Fall, but it’s already out of date. I did manage a workaround, though. Here’s the long and short of it:

comparison of iTunes icons

coloured icons restored

Download this file: itunes_scottperezfox.rsrc and replace your existing iTunes.rsrc file. Be sure to backup and rename, obviously. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read the following paragraph.

Many, if not all the graphics for the application live within the iTunes.rsrc. So I had to dig in there and change what I wanted changed. The problem is that I had no idea what the hell a .rsrc file is, or how to edit it. Internet research revealed that a number of people had become expert at editing these, but apparently no discussion of it has taken place since 2007. All the systems and iTunes versions are well out of date, and I’m essentially looking into the past for a solution. It seemed the best hope for unlocking these .rsrc files lay with a program called ThemePark. (which was at some point a Google property?) ThemePark doesn’t seem to be supported anymore, and now that Lion no longer runs PowerPC-based applications, I had to employ my old G4 Powerbook to run it.

screenshot of ThemePark, messing with icons (click for larger view)

I downloaded version 3.1 and used it to open iTunes.rsrc. Within that .rsrc file are a series of PNGs which make up the system graphics. I found the one containing all the icons, and was able to drag it to my desktop. From there, it was a matter of going into Photoshop and replacing the grey ones with now-legacy coloured icons. If you’re interested in doing this yourself, here are the files I used:

1. itunes_colour.rsrc - the vintage coloured icons
2. itunes_default_10.4.rsrc - the default greyscale icons from v10.4 (for safe-keeping)
3. itunes_scottperezfox.rsrc - my resulting alteration, coloured.
4. itunes_scottperezfox.psd - the layered Photoshop file, so you can make/alter the icons to your liking.

And then of course when your finished, do the same process in reverse. From Photoshop, save as PNG, and then drag it back into ThemePark. Save the .rsrc and drop that back into iTunes. Where, exactly? Well, in the iTunes Resources folder. To access that, right-click on the iTunes application and select “Show Package Contents”. Then check out Contents and Resources folder within that. Like this:

/Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/Resources/iTunes.rsrc

Similarly, this is how you’d go about replacing the icon for iTunes if you, like others, don’t fancy the new iTunes icon. Here are two I’ve used. In this case, do the same thing, drop them in the Resources folder and rename as iTunes.icns

iTunes_alt1.icns

iTunes_alt2.icns

Right, so let’s get back to the Finder.

Launchpad is a mess in this first release. For me, apps can’t be removed from groups. Certain groups can’t be renamed, not ever app gets an X in jiggle mode, and there’s no way to adjust the icon size. Also, every new app goes to a second screen, when there’s more than enough room on the first one. A mess. There’s a little program that seeks to tame LaunchPad a little called LaunchPad-Control. In short, it’s a small little add-on that lives in System Preferences, and let’s your easily check on and off which apps you’d like to appear in LaunchPad. Unfortunately, this can’t fix the aforementioned behaviour problems, but it’s a start. Check out the write-up on Techland.

In Finder, as well as apps like TextEdit and Safari, you may have noticed the animation whenever a new window is opened. (Hit cmd+N a few times and see if it annoys you). Here’s how to fix that. Launch Terminal and type the following:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO

iCal and Address Book have been given silly interface redesigns to make them look more like their 20th century analog equivalents, I guess. If you don’t like the leather-and-paper look of iCal, check out this tutorial on how to restore the aluminum look of Aqua courtesy of OS X Daily:

As of yet, I’ve been unable to find a fix for Address Book where I can revert to the “classic” look, where three columns (and no “pages”) were visible. Fucking ridiculous.

Quickly, about Safari. Most of the new features are easily turned off, such as Reading List and Resume, but the new Tabs behaviour requires a third-party extension called LinkThing. This lets you control how the Tabs work, allowing them to open along the Tab bar in the classic fashion. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then nevermind. But if you know what I mean, you’re probably punching the air in joy/relief right about now.

Wow, this is a lot. In only a week we’ve seen the community come out in force to take back the stupid decisions made by Apple regarding the interface and functionality of many popular apps. If you’re looking for something specific, the best bet is to first search on Google, of course, but then check out the forums on Macnn.com, MacRumors.com, and MacThemes.net . Power to the people.

Found any workarounds, hacks, or hidden customisation options in Lion? Share in the comments.

Olympic news you may have missed: the 2018 Winter Games will be held in the South Korea, in the border town of PyeongChang. (Not to be confused with Pyongyang*, the capital of shady-ass North Korea). Seoul, the South Korean capital, hosted the summer games back in 1988, but since then Korean athletes have very much blossomed on the world stage, in a great number of events.

The PyeongChang 2018 website features some lofty language as to why Korea should host.

… PyeongChang presents … a new, youthful and contemporary nation marked by technological proficiency, human progress and natural splendour. A new attitude, characterized by the unique spirit of the Korean people who value friendship, fun and hospitality. And a new, compact and efficient Games plan, featuring the most accessible, world-class venues ever for an Olympic Winter Games.

Ok, they’ve got some time to polish that up, make it more concise, and add Oxford Commas, but you get the point.

However, I’m more interested in the graphics and branding. As you can see above, they’ve got a logo for the bid campaign, which may or may not be certified as the real thing. There’s also a simple visual style already emerging. We will watch this space with interest.

No word yet as to whether or not Starcraft will be an Olympic event.

via Nesvine »

* I’m not sure of how Korean cities get capitalised (in English) but I’m going off the official 2018 site for PyeongChang, and off Naenara, the official state news agency of North Korea, for Pyongyang

It was nearly a year ago that I wrote in few words about the call to design London’s Olympic torch. Well, after so much waiting, we’re ready for the torch to appear in public view.

My first reaction is how austere the torch is. Following the famously bizarre identity for the games, and the abstract mascots that followed, I half-expected a re-think of the whole torch concept in general. I wouldn’t be surprised if they opted for some kind of spherical fire-orb, which one must hold in two hands like a rugby ball. But rest assured, in the end it’s just a torch.

Here’s a video from the AP which shows the London 2012 organisers debuting the torch for press:

download .mp4 / watch on YouTube

And as usual, the official London 2012 blog has way more information than I’d expect or require for this blog.

via Unbeige »

The new label looks similar, but features some lightened verbiage. The previous and admittedly wordy description went like this:

Jack Daniel’s Old Time, Old No. 7 Brand, Quality Tennessee Sour Mash Whiskey, Distilled and Bottled by Jack Daniel Distillery, Lem Motlow, Proprietor, Lynchburg (Pop. 361), Tenn. U.S.A., Est. & Reg. in 1866.

The noted population of Lynchburg, which wasn’t 361 anyway, has been removed along with a few other bits and bobs. For more, check out the article.

While I have been known, from time to time, to get defensive of a heritage brand trying to modernise, I don’t mind this at all. I think adapting the wording of the packaging a perfectly suitable adaption for today’s modern consumer (who doesn’t read or give a fuck about history). The overall design is the same, the trademark typography remains, and the newly added icons are very much in the old-fashion style. Plus, it’s all so subtle that very few will notice — especially after a few shots.

Also, how often does the Journal use the word “rejigger” in an article title? Gotta love that.