Scott Chafer
Architectural Street Furnishings

After a long and productive day at the digital coalface, there’s nothing quite like a cool refreshing beer. A personal favourite is anything from Brooklyn Brewery (I can recommend the pictured Black Chocolate Stout by the way *). This isn’t just because of its cool, refreshing taste * but also because of the design of its packaging and labelling which I’ve always liked.

So I was happy to find out that the entire Brooklyn Brewery identity - from day one - has been designed by New York graphic design legend Milton Glaser.

Good stuff, inside and out!

Milton Glaser Inc
Brooklyn Brewery

* Although true, this is an obvious plug in the vain hope that Brooklyn Brewery sends me some free beer.

I was really excited to be asked to design WWF New Zealand’s Annual Report for this year. I had some really great imagery and content to work with.

Anyway, see what you think. You can download and view the report here: WWF New Zealand

Well, who’d of thought it! A week or so ago I received an email from a budding web designer asking how I'd created the header graphic for my site. He said he'd seen Elastic Media featured in Web Designer Magazine. I had no idea, so I bought a back issue, and bingo! There we go, No. 8 in the "Blog Beautiful" section. Thank you Steven Jenkins!

" Smart, stylish, contemporary and cool are just a few adjectives to describe what you will find in this issue's Blog Beautiful. Features editor Steven Jenkins has taken it upon himself to choose 24 of his current and former favourites that has left him open-mouthed in awe… "

I needed a new phone. My long serving SPV C550 had degraded to such a point that it had really started to annoy me, so I was on the lookout for a replacement.

Initially, I was dead set on HTC’s Touch HD. Side by side the specs looked comparable to the iPhone, which I was also considering …and it ran Windows Mobile.

Now, Windows Mobile isn’t a great OS by any stretch of the imagination, in fact its pretty much awful, but that’s what worked with my outlook/exchange setup, and I was looking for the path of least resistance.

Unfortunately in their wisdom, Orange decided not to offer me the HD on upgrade. I’m unsure why it wasn’t made an option, but I gave up trying for it and my attention wandered back over into Apple territory.

The iPhone is obviously a great phone, but the 3GS had just been launched on O2, prices were raised across the board(!), and the 24 month contract that was on offer started to seem like an awfully long time. Then the HTC Hero was launched.

The HTC Hero runs on Android. Initially developed by Google (and continued by the Open Handset Alliance), Android is an open source operating system for mobile devices.

When I first heard of Android, I was intrigued by the novelty of it, but < designer > a bit let down by how it looked < / designer >. Android like most Google offerings, did lots of interesting and entertaining things, but visually it was pretty basic. Dull even. Like aesthetics were a bit of an afterthought.

Then along comes the Hero. HTC have a track record with taking ugly mobile operating systems, and making them shiny and useable and nice. The Touch HD is a prime example. The HD’s ‘Touch Flo’ system runs over the top of ugly, ugly Windows Mobile. Most of the time you’d never know your were using a Windows phone. The word on the street was that HTC had given the same treatment to Android with their ‘Sense UI’ system, so I checked out a couple of demo videos for the Hero, and took the plunge. I bought one.

So here are my thoughts…

Firstly the packaging (I’m a designer after all!). The box the Hero arrived in was very nice, very white and of the slidey-out-from-the-bottom opening type. A definite nod to Apple packaging. It reminded me of the kind of box you might find surrounding an expensive perfume, or an exotic Japanese whisky? It’s a little thing, but that kind of presentation adds to the experience of owning a gadget.

The phone itself is a nice piece of kit. It’s weighty in the hand without being heavy. It feels quality.

Much has been made online about the phone’s ‘chin’ – an area angled forward at the bottom of the phone – but it isn’t that prominent in real life, and allows a more natural access to the Hero’s hardware buttons. It makes sense. The touchscreen is also pin sharp and viewable in all but the strongest direct sunlight.

HTC have again done a really nice job with their Sense UI system. It’s a smooth flowing, well rounded experience full of clever touches.

The contact list for example checks your Facebook profile and asks if you’d like to merge your friends’ profile info (updates, profile photo’s) into the phone’s address book. This automatically updates in the background, so if someone changes their profile photo on Facebook, it updates on your phone. You can also update your own Facebook status directly from the contact list. It’s a nice little touch.

There’s also a pretty nifty Twitter client, which allows you to Geotag your tweets (using the Hero’s built in GPS).

One of the areas of concern for me before I got the phone was the Android Marketplace. Marketplace is to Android, what the App Store is to the iPhone. I had worries that their wouldn’t be much to choose from, and that the experience of installing apps might be a chore. It certainly isn’t a chore. A single click to select the app and one more to install it, all done again in the background. Couldn’t be easier. As for the choice on offer, while there’s a lot of crap on Marketplace, there are some genuinely useful applications. I’m currently running a nice VNC client, and a pretty swish BBC iPlayer gadget, both of which were free.

Downsides? If I’ve been hammering several applications, the smooth flowing Sense UI can stutter – a little – but I’ve not found it big a problem or irritation (like say I did with Windows Mobile!), and a soft reset clears the issue. The applications themselves are unaffected.

Oh, and the touchscreen is a grease magnet. It’s meant to have a Teflon coating. It might be that I have particularly greasy fingers though.

Overall, if you’re looking for a venture into the world of Android, I’d recommend the HTC Hero.

This doesn't mean a huge amount to most Facebook users. Most people leave their profile page fully viewable only by people they've become 'friends' with (this is the default setting). Your friends have you in their friends list, therefore there's no real need to have a short, memorable URL to give out to people.

However, Vanity URLs make much more sense when you look at Facebook Pages. Any user can create a Facebook Page. People create pages to allow Facebook users - or 'fans' - to congregate around a common interest.

For example, you might create a Facebook Page about The Smurfs. This would allow you, and people like you, to virtually 'get together' and enjoy The Smurfs on one page. Discussions can start, pictures can be shared and a virtual community can take shape. You might choose the username 'thesmurfs', and your Facebook web address would end up as facebook.com/thesmurfs.

This is also great for companies (who can also create Pages), or individuals who are looking to promote their Personal Brand.

However, before you rush out and set up a Page with the username of 'Microsoft', there's a couple of things to note. From the Facebook website;

Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time.

This limitation is temporary. All Pages created after May 31, 2009 or that had less than 1,000 fans on that day will be eligible to claim usernames on Sunday, June 28, 2009.

So go ahead, get your Page on! http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages

But what if sharing cat pictures isn't your main concern. What if you're a fledgling business and want a professional website to reflect that? Generally you'd employ the services of a web designer, but if money was tight, how would using these free web services compare to a bespoke website?

As there are hundreds of services like this, for the sake of argument I'm going to thin the field. Any service that you can't visually customise your pages to reflect your branding has to go.

As an experiment I've created sites on the Blogger, Google Sites, and Tumblr. I gave myself roughly the same amount of time (a couple of hours) and found out what could be achieved.

My test was to produce something similar to elastic-media.com, which is more or less a blog. Admittedly, as most of these services are blog based, if your website doesn't look/work like a blog, you'll probably need a little more time.

First up we have Blogger from Google. [ http://elasticmedia.blogspot.com/ ]

The clue is in the name here. Blogger is a blogging service and as such, you can't really include static or separate pages in your site (let's say you wanted to add an 'about us' page). There's a way to do this using separate blogs-per-page, or post dating, but these are ugly workarounds. Having said that, without any knowledge of html, you can change your site's column order, include page 'gadgets' (such as link lists or slideshows), change fonts and colours and include a header image.

For the more adventurous, the 'layout' section of the provided dashboard allows you to get your hands dirty and edit template code. This is fairly standard ccs/html stuff and isn't too hard to pick apart.

If you spend a little time with blogger, you can achieve reasonable results, and the service itself (the dashboard) has a fairly good 'feel' to it.

Next up is Google Sites [ http://sites.google.com/site/elasticmedialeeds/ ]

Google Sites differs from Blogger in that it's designed to create and maintain static, standalone pages. It's not a blog and doesn't follow the posts/dates format.

In a similar way to Blogger, Google Sites allows you to shift page elements around, add background images, and change font colours etc, but that's all really. There's no access to html code at all, so it's much more difficult to brand your pages.

A minor point, but Google Sites has the least brand-friendly URL of all the services I've gone over here. http://sites.google.com/site/elasticmedialeeds/. Bad! As with all the services outlined here though, you can point your domain name to them.

Also, it may be just me, but the minimalistic style of Google Site's management pages aren't adding anything to the experience. Like a lot of Google applications, it looks like a work-in-progress.

It's not that horrid, but I'm not a fan.

Last but by no means least is Tumblr. [ http://elasticmedia.tumblr.com ]

Tumblr is gaining in popularity with social media types such as Gary Vaynerchuck and Kevin Rose.

Again, Tumblr is primarily a blogging platform although it's easier than Blogger to create static pages in my opinion. Simply create a 'private post', share it (which creates a static URL) and link to that URL in your theme. It took me longer to type that last sentence than it did to create the page!

Tumblr like Blogger allows you to get at the html/css, but the default template layout I found a little 'kooky' (Lot's of odd positional elements). Though obviously you can trash this and use any code you want.

I think Tumblr could be the most adaptable of the three, although I'm not biasing this on any standout reason.

In summary then, you get what you pay for. These sites may not be best suited to run as a main company website, but with their ability to introduce your own look and feel, might be very well suited to creating 'buzz' for your exhisting projects / products / content.

(also, claiming your name and cross linking these sites may help in the eyes of Google search)

Nice film. As a small business myself, I identify with a lot of points in this.
...especially the hours!

But what is personal branding? Well, what is a brand?! Generally speaking, a brand is the way people associate with, or feel about a product or service. Branding is the act of manipulating that association or feeling to differentiate said product or service from it's competition. So, personal branding is manipulating the way people associate or feel about you. Reading that back, it sounds much more evil than it is!

Think of it this way. If you're going to a job interview, you'll clean your shoes, comb your hair, wear your Sunday best. You want the interviewer to have a good impression of you. Well, in the world of business, and especially online, there's a myriad of ways to 'clean your shoes'.

With the likes of twitter, facebook, youtube, flickr and a vast number of other social networking sites, there are now more than ever, new ways to reach your audience or customers.

However, these sites are doing more than opening up new avenues of communication, they're changing the communication itself. The smart people, such as winelibrary tv and personal branding expert Gary Vaynerchuck, are realising that the game is changing from presentation, to conversation.

But which sites are the best to use if you want to promote your special self online? Simple answer: all of them.