Blogs by Magic

Thoughts & ideas from a digital magician.

Product geolocation

Taking a local approach to candy bars, Nestlé recently launched 19 new Kit Kat flavours in Japan that reflect food specialities of specific districts. Each flavour is sold exclusively in the region for which it was created, making the limited edition Kit Kats popular souvenirs for travellers.

The uniquely Japanese Kit Kat varieties include yubari melon and baked corn from Hokkaido island; strawberry cheesecake from Yokohama; cherries from Yamagata Prefecture; and sweet potato, blueberry and soybean from the Kanto region. Other varieties include wasabi, green tea, apple, green beans, chilli and miso. Tapping in to the Japanese tradition of sending students good luck wishes before their exams, Nestlé also launched a marketing campaign with Japan's postal service to create "Kit Kat Mail," a postcard-like product sold only at the post office.

via springwise.com

I look at this and wonder at what point this won't even be necessary anymore. If e-paper ever becomes cheap enough, you may be able to localize products on the spot. And while that might not happen at any time in the foreseeable future, you could do this sort of thing today with displays at retail. I've seen a few examples of this from time to time, but with the myriad of information available I'm surprised you don't see more electronic displays at retail that localized creative and copy. It might be a lot of extra work, but it sure would draw people in.

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Announcing Pictodeck v1.0

Pictodeck is just what it sounds like — a deck of pictograms. It’s a collection of over 700 vector pictograms taken from four different sets: PICOL, Android Icons, Pictoico, and Freshpixel. I have converted all of these sets into graphical assets that exist within a Keynote deck. No need to open them in a program like Adobe Illustrator and import them individually. All you have to do is open Pictodeck in Keynote and copy and paste or drag them into your own decks. You can even drag the entire series of 720p slides into your decks (although I wouldn't recommended leaving them there, since Pictodeck is rather large at about 30MB).

       
Click here to download:
Announcing_Pictodeck_v1.0.zip (374 KB)

I created this because I’ve found myself spending a lot of time using Keynote to tell stories. I like telling stories through creative uses of typography and pictograms. I found myself using PICOL (Pictoral Communication Language) a lot last year and decided to formalize my collection and distribute it a way that makes the entire library more accessible to those in advertising, marketing, finance — any industry really. If you work with Keynote, Pictodeck is for you.

You may not realize it at first, but Keynote actually runs on a vector based layout engine. When you drag a vector-based image (Adobe Illustrator, SVG, EPS, etc.) into Keynote the vectors are preserved. Keynote converts all vector based images into PDF assets that preserve the vectors. Just look at them in the Inspector — you’ll notice they all get the filename “droppedImage.pdf”.

If you have no idea what vectors are (or why you should care), I’d encourage you to look up the difference between vectors and bitmaps on Wikipedia. If you just want the short version, it’s this: There are two primary kinds of image files: bitmaps and vectors. Vector graphics can be scaled to any size without a loss in quality; bitmap images cannot. You know how sometimes you find an image and try to make it the entire size of the canvas, only to find out that it’s terribly blurry and pixelated? That’s because it’s a bitmap image and they can’t be rescaled without a loss in image quality.

In addition to a massive collection of vector pictograms, I’ve also included a collection of 32x32 bitmap icons for popular social networking sites created by Komodo Media. 

You can download Pictodeck v1.0 for Keynote ’09 here and a package for Keynote ’08 here. They are both ZIP files. I'm currently hosting them on Dropbox. If it's really slow for some reason let me know and I'll move them to Amazon S3.

☞ Pictodeck is made possible only because the original authors have graciously chosen to license their work under Creative Commons (in one form or another).
☞ I claim no copyrights of my own and only ask that you respect theirs.

Pictodeck exists to help others tell their stories visually though Keynote. I hope you find it useful. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments or shoot me a note if you know of any other pictograms you feel might be worth including in a future version, or if you want to share something you’ve created with Pictodeck. You can also contact me on Twitter @ralphthemagi.

I’m already planning the next version which will feature a mirror set of pictograms with inverted colors so that you can make better use of them on color backgrounds. In the meantime, if you want to use the pictograms on a black background, consider matting them on top of a white rounded square.

Cheers.

IMC leads to mediocre ideas

By IMC, I'm referring to integrated marketing communications – integrated comms planning specifically. Not long ago, at a previous employer, we talked a good deal about the merits of integrated campaigns and integrated communications. There were those who thought it was a good idea, and those who thought that perhaps a better idea was simply to have a coherent communication plan across all mediums. I tend to subscribe to the latter philosophy.

When you see an agency that's really good at TV venture into digital ideation, that doesn't have to deal with video content, they produce horrible results. Usually this the end result of an IMC approach. You can tell that there might have been a really good idea somewhere, but forcing it into an IMC platform turns it into garbage. It's like forcing a banana into a square box half its height. And why does anyone believe that an integrated communications platform matters in the first place?

I don't own a TV. It's not really going to matter if the communications for the TV spot is the same as the message in a blog post. I'll never see the TV. Integrated communications just doesn't make sense in a world of personalized communications platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. An idea that works on TV doesn't always work online – and 'online' or 'digital' is no longer a single kind of media. The broad message that you have to create in order to have make sense on every platform means it's going to be diluted, non-specific, non-personal and get lost in a sea of other messages.

Sometimes you'll read some really good TV and flip forward a few pages only to see that there are other ideas for other mediums that are simply horrendous. You wonder how it ever got to be, then you notice the line about "integrated communications" or a "360-degree approach" and all you can do is sigh and  *facepalm*.