An Ode to the Stoicism of our Nation's Gritter Drivers
Man in lorry
in the snow
grits his teeth
and the road.
(Not a proper) round-up of the year
johnson banks is inviting contributions to its annual round-up of the best and worst of 2009, so here are ours.
The
‘wish I’d done that’ project of the year
Diego Monetti. As well as being funny, it's beautifully crafted and appropriate as a portfolio site for a multimedia designer. That's if Diego is a real person – we're still not quite sure. Hasn't yet got the full attention it deserves, although this may be the fate of all truly great artists.
Design / advertising trend of the year
Loser-generated content. (Charlie
Brooker's phrase for the practice of involving the public in branding
exercises, from the T-Mobile Flashmobs to democratic, ever-changing logos like Aol., to those Confused.com TV ads.)
Copywriting trend of the
year
'Appen it be the trend fert local copywriting, innit me old china? Like them thar wine labels from Co-op, and these pukka cashpoints darn sarf.
Worst design of the year
The Michael Owen Brand Guidelines.
Not so much for the design, but for the decision to produce such a thing. (Although you could argue they worked well for the client, as he signed for United shortly afterwards – the best argument
yet against the Design Effectiveness Awards.)
Iconic image
of the year
The redacted MPs' expenses claims. Beauty may be Truth, and Truth Beauty, but it seems weaselly two-faced hypocritical lies can be quite beautiful too.
Iconic image of the year (part two)
This photo (one of ours) captures something of the economic climate of 2009.
Teatime dreams
A
couple of months ago, the people at Yorkshire Tea were nice enough to send us
some free gifts – probably the highlight of our year, decade and lives so far. There's
no way you can return a favour like that, but the one thing I can do is write a
slightly forced poem. So here's a Corpoetic based on Yorkshire Tea's homepage copy
(pictured above).
As usual, the rules were that you can only use the words supplied, you don't have to use all the words and you can use individual words more than once.
Yorkshire Tea
Yorkshire
Tea is a major cause
of
lovely dreams – teatime dreams.
Dreams
of cakes the size of Yorkshire.
Dreams
of biscuits big as a planet.
Delicious
dreams of cuppa on cuppa
of
lovely, simple, natural tea.
To
all the people of Yorkshire Tea,
who
put the 'tea' in 'quality',
who
grow the tea and blend the tea
and
treat our teatime properly –
all
our love and respectful wishes.
Yorkshire
Tea is so delicious.
Punctuation problems
As of this morning, Aol. joins the likes of vitra., EAT., MORE TH>N, LV=, Yahoo! and nineties rocksters Therapy? by incorporating a punctuation mark into its identity.
You can see how messy that sentence gets.
The whole thing gets a good write-up in the New York Times.
With the possible exception of Therapy?(?), these are all successful national or global brands. There's nothing wrong with a bit of punctuation (especially if it's an ampersand).
But they do present problems for writers.
For the moment, Aol. is continuing to write its name as AOL on its website. It'll be interesting to see whether this discrepancy lasts, or the Aol. usage gradually takes over.
They could end up in the same situation as Yahoo!, who always use the exclamation mark, no matter what the context. It's especially strange when it comes at the end of a sentence, as in: "What's the point of Yahoo!?" or "Please accept our sincere condolances, from all your colleagues here at Yahoo!"
Either way, if these brands think they're onto something with their punctuated logos, they ain't seen nothing yet. Over to you, Aalto University in Helsinki.
In
your face, Yahoo!!
Corpoetics reviewed, and other things
Corpoetics (our collection of found corporate poetry) has recently been reviewed in Sphinx, a magazine and website for independent poetry publishers and poets, run by HappenStance Press. You can read the whole thing here.
Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to familiarise myself with the ins and outs of the UK poetry scene – the magazines, the publishers, the events, the writers to watch, the writers you should be embarrassed not to have heard of, the conflicting fashions and schools – all that kind of thing. It's a long journey that leads you up numerous cul-de-sacs. But one of the great highlights has been discovering HappenStance Press.
Like so much of the poetry scene, it's fired less by economics and more by love of the art form and sheer generosity of spirit. Helena Nelson runs the entire operation, fielding countless submissions, publishing several titles every year, maintaining a lively blog and website, and editing and producing Sphinx. In a right and proper world, these would be the people getting six-figure bonuses every year.
If you're at all interested in getting poetry
published, buy this:
How (not) to get your poetry published
And if you're interested in reading it, buy
this:
Unsuitable Poems
And just about anything else from the HappenStance shop.
My National Disgrace Clown Auction Shame
A few weeks back, I took part in a project called Significant Objects, designed to test the commercial power of story-telling. 100 writers were each given a near-worthless item from a junk shop and asked to write a story about it, thereby investing it
with a newfound 'significance'. The object and its story went up on eBay, with
a disclaimer explaining the nature of the project. My object was an upside-down
ceramic clown.
It's a US-based project and has won widespread support and acclaim over there, so I was both pleased and intimidated to be the only UK writer taking part. For the first time in my life, I was representing Queen and country. And, reader, I failed.
Or at least, I didn't exactly set the world alight. Despite my carefully crafted poem, Kenny came in 87th out of 100, selling for $11.61 compared to an original price of $2.
It gets worse.
During the course of the bidding, I watched as Kenny rose rapidly to $11.11, then stalled for days on end. It was late, we'd had a few drinks, one thing led to another. My wife put in a bid. $11.61. No one else beat it. We won Kenny.
(On arrival at our place, Kenny headed straight for a colour-coordinated Alan Kitching screenprint, demonstrating that he is a clown of great taste.)
So Kenny came 87th and we were the winning bidders.
I apologise to everyone.
Kenny himself is surprisingly upbeat about it. Seeing the world upside-down has its advantages – he thinks we came just outside the top ten.
NB: Despite my
inadvertent attempts at sabotage, Significant Objects as a whole has been a
resounding success and is now moving on to a new stage: a charity auction with
new writers and new objects. Well worth keeping track of developments. There's also some amusing data nerdiness over here.
