Daily Brad, the blog

KFC Boldy Goes where no brand has gone before by unveiling astronomical, 87,500 square-foot, contemporized Colonel Sanders logo in Area 51 desert to launch “KFC of the Future”.

Kicking Off a New Brand Image Campaign
The event marks the official debut of a massive global re-image campaign that will contemporize 14,000-plus KFC restaurants in over 80 countries over the next few years.

KFC’s new fresh look updates one of the most recognized, respected and beloved brand icons in the world and spans all visual elements from logo to restaurant design, advertising, packaging, uniforms and more.

The new logo depicts Colonel Sanders with his signature string tie, but for the first time, replaces his classic white, double-breasted suit with a red apron. The apron symbolizes the home-style culinary heritage of the brand and reminds customers that KFC is always in the kitchen cooking delicious, high-quality, freshly prepared chicken by hand, just the way Colonel Sanders did 50 years ago.

The Logo Construction
It took a team of nearly 50 designers, engineers, scientists (including astrophysicists), architects and other professionals working nearly three months to conceive, create and execute building the world’s largest logo.

The “Face from Space” took more than 3,000 hours to create from inception to launch and was built by Synergy, a leading event company.

The logo consists of 65,000 one-foot by one-foot painted tile pieces that were assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle: 6,000 red, 14,000 white, 12,000 eggshell, 5,000 beige and 28,000 black.

The logo took 24 days, working around-the-clock, to manufacture and ultimately produce. It then took six days on site to construct the logo, during which time the logo design pieces were kept hidden and under cover from identified and unidentified flying objects.

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Attention illustrators and designers - if you need to promote yourself and your illustration skills (and make a few extra dollars as well), why not give Threadless a try? What is Threadless? Threadless was created by a couple of guys called “the Jakes” under their DBA Skinny Corp. to give designers and artists an opportunity to unleash a little creativity and display it to the masses. Anyone can visit the site, download their templates and submit a t-shirt design. Then, the designs are voted on. The winning designers receive $2,000 in cash and prizes, huge amounts of notoriety and their design printed and sold on a tee.

Since they launched the site, Skinny Corp has received over 60,000 tee shirt design submissions. It’s been a great way for designers and illustrators to get their name out there. Over 300 winning designs have been printed and sold so far, with 6 new ones coming out every week.

The site features interviews with some of their designers, some who’ve won only a few times, while one guy from Louisianna has won over 13 times. (That’s a hefty chunk of cash and prizes) Plus, it worked into a job for this particular guy - and now he works at Threadless.

One of their winners, S. Bradley Askew when asked if he thinks Threadless helps designers:

Honestly, its one of the best things in the design community right now. Some of publicity T receives helps catapult designers who get featured in magazines like ‘GQ.’ PR like that is great and to tell clients you had work featured in publications like that, that wasn’t some sort of paid advertisement, it’s golden.

So if you’ve ever had a good idea for a t-shirt design - design it, enter it. There could be some recognition as well as a little cash in your future. (Heck, I’ll give it a try and post my design - wish me luck!)

I recieved a letter in the mail today from Sprint (or looked like it was from Sprint with the logo, colors and all - I’m always the skeptic of scams) that offered to buy my phone back. Since I recently switched from Sprint to Verizon Wireless (Sprint’s coverage SUCKS in the Western U.S. even though they have great clarity and fewer dropped calls, while Verizon’s service has tons of coverage but lots of dropped calls and shotty reception) my old phone was just sitting around in a pile of stuff to take to Good Will.

The letter says “Your Equipment Has Changed”, and they’d offer me $25 for my old phone. Include a postage paid envelope and says that cosmetic damage is alright. Some of my first thoughts included “is this really from Sprint?” and “what about personal information that is stored on the phone?” and “Why in the world would they want my old phone?”

So I figured I didn’t care about the info on the phone - probably just a few numbers for this person or that, and even if it wasn’t from Sprint - the shipping was free. And I visited the Sprint Website, and they really do have a buyback offer where they answer all the reasons to give back:

Why should you donate your used wireless phone to Sprint Project Connect?

• It’s great to be green. Donating your phone helps to protect our environment. Handsets are refurbished and resold or recycled to create other useful products like automotive bumpers or battery packs.
• It clears out your clutter. It’s one more reason to clean out your junk drawer.
• It turns trash into treasure. Donating your old wireless phone will help raise funds to support K-12 education programs.
• It’s easy. Print a free, postage-paid shipping label and mail us your phone.

In these days where never-ending (seemingly disposable) small electronic devices are filling up our landfills as we lust after the latest and greatest gadget, it’s nice to see that someone cares where our old gadget goes. Kudos to Sprint! (Now only if they’d increase their coverage area!)

AIGA just announced their next event here for the Salt Lake area chapter:

Allison Williams: Design: mw
Things/ Not-things

Allison Williams of the tribeca, ny based design firm ‘design mw’ will speak about the myriad things she has helped create at the company she founded with her husband, jp williams, over a decade ago. she will also talk about other aspects of the work at mw that never quite become tangible objects, but have a weight of their own.

Date:
Thursday, November 16th, 2006

Time:
6:30-7:00 pm - Mingle
7:00-8:00 pm - Presentation
8:00-8:30 pm - Q&A

Admission:
AIGA Students - Free
Non-member Students - $5
AIGA Members - $10
Non-Members - $15

Location:
Salt Lake Art Center
20 South West Temple
Salt Lake City, UT 84101
www.slartcenter.org

Directions and Parking info:
The Salt Lake Arts Center
The Salt Lake Arts Center is located in downtown Salt Lake just south of the Abravanel Symphony Hall. Please carpool and arrive early. Parking validations are available at the ticket table for parking at Crossroads Mall across the street.

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I ran across one of my old sketch books that I filled up with ideas and daily sketches, and noticed a couple quotes that I had written in the front. These are some of my favorite quotes about life, creativity, and design. Enjoy!

Carve and Paint LIFE!

“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. To affect the quality of the day–that is the highest of arts.”

Henry David Thoreau

Understanding the Human Experience = Good Design

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experience they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences that other people.

“Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design he/she will have.”

Steve Jobs
Co-Founder, Apple Computers
Wired Magazine, Feb 1996, pg 163

Jumpstart Your Creativity

“In a study that compared creative people who burn out versus those who continue creating, the chief difference was that the latter were constantly exposing themselves to new knowledge or techniques - in effect, giving them a fresh start.”

Mens Journal
August 1995, pg 86

And this one, that no matter how many times I read it, always makes me laugh:

The Yellow Bedroom?

“I had a special yellow bedroom at Graceland with a fur bed, and I had to climb up steps to get into it. Even the steps were covered in fur. Black and white fur. Totally wrong, in that yellow room, It’s gaudy.”

Lisa Marie Presley

Have you got a blog? Do you write about what’s happening in your world, or under your expertise, or in your realm of influence? Gannett Co. may want to hear about it. The nation’s largest newpaper chain plans to create stories with information from bloggers, people who post in Internet discussion groups and other non-journalists in hopes of winning readers from the Internet, television and other news sources, officials with the company said.

Gannett, which operates 90 newspapers, including the nation’s largest, USA Today, is hoping “citizen journalism” will reverse the company’s part of an industrywide trend of declining circulation and advertising revenues, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. Gannett also plans to merge newspaper and online operations of USA Today and other publications. All Gannett newspapers are being urged to make the transition quickly.

The question is begged to be ask, As Blogs and Citizen Journalism Grow, Where’s the News? Who writes the news, and what news is news?

Read about it in this article: Yahoo News - Gannett enlists citizen journalists

Here’s some nice commentary: The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism

When I worked for Omniture as their Creative Director, I would often check the web analytics that we ran on our corporate website to see where people were coming from (referrers). Occasionally I would find several page views that were sent through from what I like to call “Website Pirates”: individuals who would pillage and plunder our site design and use it as their own. They’d be working with the html as templates while building their own site, and forget to take the tracking code off, and send through hits that I could follow. On one “design” we had to get Legal involved since they didn’t even bother to replace the imagery we owned with their own after it went live.

While reading Joshua Steimle’s blog about website piracy on MWi’s website, I got thinking to myself - I sure wish I had screen shots of all those websites that copied my design for the original Omniture website.

To make a long story short (my blog posts always run long), I was looking at a list of public companies in Utah a couple days ago. I really only knew of a couple and was curious just how many there were. One intrigued me, so I accessed their website. The Park City Group was founded by Randy Fields, the co-founder and former chairman of Mrs. Fields Cookies. Their customers include such well-known names as The Home Depot, Foot Locker, Inc., The Limited, Albertson’s, Schnuck Markets, Pacific Sunwear of California, Wawa, Busch Entertainment and Tesco Lotus. And guess what? Their website design is pirated.

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I added another design studio to my list called angryporcupine*design, out of Park City, UT. They just came up on my “radar” when I noticed they were published in Print Magazine recently for their logo design.

I hope to occasionally profile local agencies, here’s an overview of ap*d: (the copy is summarized from their website)

angryporcupine*design
1720 Creekside Lane
Park City, UT 84098
435 655 0645 | studio
435 604 6970 | fax
info@angryporcupine.com
www.angryporcupine.com

OVERVIEW
Since 1994, ap*d has provided award-winning, successful design solutions for a variety of clients. angryporcupine*design was founded by studio principal, Cheryl Roder-Quill. Cheryl chose this unusual yet memorable name because 1) she married a Quill and 2) she wanted a studio name that was as unique as the design solutions she creates for her clients. Thus her tagline: angryporcupine*design – not an ordinary name, not an ordinary studio.

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I received my Communication Arts Magazine today which features the latest and greatest in design. (Communication Arts is nearly a must read for every graphic designer who wants to keep up with trends).

Here are the companies from Utah that were featured.

Page 14:
Struck Design, Salt Lake City, for Packaging Design

Page 59:
And Design Capitalists (No Website), Salt Lake City for a Logo Design

Page 95:
BYU Publications & Graphics, Provo, UT for an Editorial Design

Congratulations to all this years winners!

What do the following add up to?

70,000 litres of paint
358 single bottle bombs
33 sextuple air cluster bombs
22 Triple hung cluster bombs
268 mortars
33 Triple Mortars
22 Double mortars
358 meters of weld
330 meters of steel pipe
57 km of copper wire

Paint the Town for Bravia
If you guessed the long awaited 2006 commercial for Sony BRAVIA, win. This latest TV ad - featuring massive paint explosions - took 10 days and 250 people to film. Huge quantities of paint were needed to accomplish this, which had to be delivered in 1 tonne trucks and mixed on-site by 20 people. This Bravia TV commercial was directed by award-winning director Jonathan Glazer, who is responsible for a dazzling array of original work in the fields of commercial, music video and film production. You’ll agree that the effect was stunning, but afterwards a major clean-up operation was required to clear away all that paint! (Thank goodness it was water-based!)

Watch the advertisement at www.bravia-advert.com.

Balls for Bravia
Sony’s previous ad for the Bravia was just as impressive. Featuring 250,000 multi-coloured ’superballs’ bouncing down the streets of San Francisco to demonstrate Bravia’s ability to show “colour like no other”. Directed by Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig and filmed in July of 2006.

Watch the advertisement at www.bravia-advert.com.