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Umair Haque over at the HBS blogs has created a compelling manifesto that deals with the essence of 'Awesome'. His ideas connected with me instantly, so I thought I'd try a mini-visualization with my new toy, Mind Manager. Haque's open-sourced his manifesto and is looking for examples of awesome, so I urge our readers to contribute.
The list:
GOLD - Best Multidisciplined campaign - Dove Sleepover
GOLD - Best B2B - Nissan/Infiniti Dealer Web program
GOLD - Best Account Specific - Sunlight Eco-Action Kids
GOLD - Best Dealer or Salesforce - Nissan/Infiniti Dealer Web Program
SILVER - Best multidisciplined campaign - Becel Heart Truth
SILVER - Best activity generating brand loyalty - Dove Sleepover
SILVER - Best Cause Marketing - Unilever Go Blue
We're thrilled, humbled, and more committed than ever to creating campaigns that showcase content, creativity, and humanity.
After Kanye West’s outburst at the VMA last night, I visited his site to see if he had attempted to explain his bizarre behavior. No dice, but I was in for a treat regardless. Designed by the Time 100 visual artist Takashi Murakami, kanyeuniversity is a community playground with plenty of amusements such as music clips, videos and a newborn blog. We’ve marveled at Murakami’s work before, loving his ability to capture pop culture in what Wikipedia calls a 'blurring of high and low art'.
Inspiring enough to make me forget what I was looking for.
I'm reading David Winner’s brilliant ‘Brilliant Orange’, a look at the development of Dutch football (soccer) through the wider lens of national culture.
Via the awesome COS:
Winner claims that “space is the unique defining element of Dutch football. Other nations and football cultures may have produced greater goalscorers, more dazzling individual ball-artists, and more dependable and efficient tournament-winning teams. But no one has ever imagined or structured their play as abstractly, as architecturally, in such a measured fashion as the Dutch.”
Total Football exemplifies the Dutch conception of space. It was “a conceptual revolution based on the idea that the size of any football field was flexible and could be altered by the team playing on it”
Of course, the size of a football field is not flexible. Winner attributes this mentality to the land the Dutch have been given. A small, low-lying country with a long sea coast and a relatively large population, the Dutch have in fact expanded their land through the use of polders and other elaborate water control measures. Winner sees spillover of Dutch attitudes toward land into Dutch soccer. He calls the Dutch “spatial neurotics” and says that “the Dutch think innovatively, creatively and abstractly about space in their football because for centuries they have had to think innovatively about space in every other area of their lives”
The best design flows naturally out of need. Utility triumphs over glamor, every time. Okay, most times :)
