Here is the infor­ma­tion about the new iPhone update and new model in no frills form:

iPhone OS 3.0

We have an oppor­tu­nity to meet with a new client and it would help greatly if you could give us some infor­ma­tion. If you fre­quent the Dallas area cafeteria-​style restau­rants (Luby’s, High­land Park Cafe­te­ria, Furr’s, Golden Corral, etc). Take a moment and fill out our survey. We’re paying one lucky indi­vid­ual with a $100 gift card.

Thank you very much for your help!

Work­ing in the cre­ative world, you see a TON of pho­tographs. Find­ing the right hero image for a brochure means look­ing at some­times hun­dreds of the wrong ones. And who can think of more fun than search­ing for stock photos on the web? Can’t think of a better way to spend a day. That’s why when we see great pho­tographs, and great pho­to­graph sites, we want to point them out.

If you haven’t already, stop by and check out Boston.com’s The Big Pic­ture. Better yet, grab their RSS feed and down­load the pages that look inter­est­ing. Today’s fea­ture has some stun­ning shots of For­mula 1 racing. That’s the auto race that requires something other than a left turn.

Why do you think F1 racing is big around the world, but not in America?

Chocolate and peanut butter. Starsky and Hutch. Frylock and Meatwad. We think some things are better in teams.

Since 2006, Mar­ble­head has been about two things. Cre­at­ing a better cus­tomer expe­ri­ence and treat­ing our clients like we would want to be treated. Cus­tomer expe­ri­ence is one of those terms (like “consulting”) that can mean a few dif­fer­ent things. For us, it meant mar­ket­ing strat­egy and cre­ative design focused on making every inter­ac­tion a cus­tomer had with our clients as enjoy­able as pos­si­ble. Cus­tomer inter­ac­tion as a des­ti­na­tion. People antic­i­pat­ing and liking marketing con­ver­sa­tions. We take great pains in our areas of exper­tise to make this happen. Clients would ask what we could doto  extend this phi­los­o­phy into adver­tis­ing. Nada. That was one thing we had no exper­tise or train­ing in. I didn’t know that media had to be planned and bought. In fact, the clos­est thing I knew about adver­tis­ing what Bob Hoff­man had to say at the Ad Con­trar­ian. And that scared me.

Late last year an adver­tis­ing firm approached me about team­ing together to expand both our offer­ings. It would give them a chance to offer inter­ac­tive and direct mar­ket­ing and give us tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing exper­tise. So after lots of spare time fig­ur­ing out all the details, we are now part­ners with the adver­tis­ing agency Com­merce House. www.​com​merce​house.com.

The first thing we did was create a new web­site. Let us know what you think.

The Mar­ble­head Blog will con­tinue to pro­vide all the inter­est­ing things you’ve come to expect. But we are also tin­ker­ing with the lessons we’ve learned and our new part­ner­ship to make this blog even better. Look for some new posts coming up in the next week.

Hi-

We love our Mar­ble­head blog, but some­times work gets in the way of fun. It’s the car­di­nal sin of social media and we’ve com­mit­ted it. We have had some big changes come along Marblehead’s way and it con­sumed us for a bit. I’ll follow up with another post about that. But, we are now begin­ning to see the light ahead and will get back to blog­ging with a new con­tent strategy.

Thanks to all our vis­i­tors and thanks for the patience. We’re back on the wagon.

Yeah sure, Apple and a handful of other design focused companies do a pretty good job these days, but for jaw-dropping style that spans a generation, Bang and Olufsen takes the gold medal by a mile.

Their cre­den­tials? Let’s start with a small, super­fi­cial exam­ple: Bose makes luxury car stereos for high end Fords and VWs, B&O makes the stereo for the Audi R8, and Aston Mar­t­ian V12 Van­tage. (that’s better) Beyond that, their prod­ucts are often so dis­tinc­tive, they don’t put any badge on the front. If you have a Sony TV you can tell, because its a big silver logo right below the screen. If you have a TV made by B&O, you can tell because it looks like no other TV on earth… and because you’ll be broke after buying it.

That’s all very impres­sive stuff. But any new-​money, design obsessed brand with deep pock­ets can make crazy stuff. (Delo­rian anyone?) The reason B&O is design brand­ing roy­alty is they’ve spent the last 30+ years making prod­ucts with cut­ting edge tech­nol­ogy and design… and their design lan­guage has barely budged. You could place their 1970s turntable in a show­room along side their modern prod­ucts and have a hard time find­ing anyone who’d think it seems out of place. Their design aes­thetic for the last 30 years: min­i­mal lines and phyco futur­is­tic. It’s a bold strat­egy since most people don’t live in the space sta­tion from 2001, but it works for them. Here’s one of my favorite designs:

When I’m design­ing an iden­tity for a client, this is what I’m ulti­mately after. I try not to get caught up in the fash­ion of the moment or short term effect. I define brand­ing suc­cess as a com­pany designed so well, they remain aes­thet­i­cally rel­e­vant for at least 10 years.

Designers everywhere are starting to rejoice as the online community steadily marches towards an internet where typography can be displayed with the beauty and functionality demonstrated in printed material. Now the real fun begins!

What’s the worst part about design­ing online? The fuzzy res­o­lu­tion? The unpre­dictable browser window size? The insan­ity of mul­ti­ple browsers dis­play­ing lay­outs mul­ti­ple ways? Those are all pretty bad, but the thing that gives me gray hair is the awful way type is ren­dered. There’s no kern­ing, no lig­a­tures, and no real font choices. This prim­i­tive form of text was great for the basic infor­ma­tion orig­i­nal browsers were built for. It is even pass­able for the web as we view it on a casual basis today. But, as the online world grows, web design becomes more and more life­like and little short­com­ings that seemed small when we were just happy to be online, become glar­ing arti­facts sur­rounded by bright color images from high res­o­lu­tion dis­plays. Lucky, there are a lot of smart folks out there work­ing day and night to give us all better type online.

The Horizon

Sooner than you think, web pages will be able to dis­play incred­i­bly smooth fonts that design­ers choose from an enor­mous cat­a­log. When nec­es­sary, the fonts will con­tain lig­a­tures, mul­ti­ple char­ac­ter sets, and beau­ti­ful details you never thought pixels could deliver. With CSS3 down the road break­ing para­graphs into columns, hyphen­at­ing words and doing proper full jus­ti­fi­ca­tion will be as common as it cur­rently is in brochure design. If your not famil­iar with the tech­ni­cal end of type design, I can sum­ma­rize this para­graph by saying, web pages will look so good, you will barely real­ize you are online.

The People Who Make It Happen

There was a time when I believed that most devel­op­ers in the web world were most inter­ested in the linear deliv­ery of infor­ma­tion. I thought they rolled their eyes at flash and fancy designs because they simply didn’t see the rel­e­vance to their single minded cause.

Turns out I was pretty short sighted. I’ve met tons of devel­op­ers in the past few years who truly care about good design and appre­ci­ate how much better it can make their sites. They are work­ing very hard to increase the form and func­tion of the web. They also seem to under­stand that if the web is all about con­tent, then typog­ra­phy that dis­plays the con­tent is at the center of web design. That’s why sev­eral groups are cur­rently devel­op­ing stan­dards and build­ing sup­port to give us the online type we deserve.

Tech­niques for improv­ing the fonts we have to work with on the web have been around for some time. There are always the tech­niques of image replace­ment and sIFR to improve text ren­der­ing on the web but these tech­niques have relied on trick­ery to get the job done and while inno­v­a­tive they are not per­ma­nent solu­tions. One of the com­pa­nies lead­ing the way for better typog­ra­phy on the web is Microsoft. They devel­oped the stan­dard for embed­ding fonts in web­sites some time ago and it unfor­tu­nately hasn’t taken off. Safari has upped the game and added sup­port for embed­ded fonts too, with a slight dif­fer­ence from Microsoft (I’ll talk about that later). Mozilla has been push­ing type for­ward in a dif­fer­ent way with the latest 3.0 ver­sion having sup­port for lig­a­tures and kern­ing in cer­tain types of fonts.

The Hang-ups

As much as the new stuff being devel­oped excites us, the web world has its unique set of prob­lems when it comes to evo­lu­tion. In print work, advances in print­ing presses and layout pro­grams could instantly be seen in work that was dis­trib­uted to the masses. Web design relies on each indi­vid­ual user to have a com­puter, mon­i­tor, browser, and most impor­tantly the fonts that are all suit­able to your work. This means even though new browsers make great things pos­si­ble, it is irre­spon­si­ble to build sites that can’t been seen by some people.

One of the major issues with embed­ding fonts is licens­ing issues. What’s to stop people from includ­ing a font file in the site that just about anyone could down­load and then use? Microsoft with their Embed­ded Open­Type stan­dard has devel­oped a system that incor­po­rates DRM for the embed­ded font. Fonts on your system hold an extra piece of infor­ma­tion in them that tells the com­puter if they can be used in a pro­grams inter­face for text ren­der­ing. Microsoft’s tool reads this bit and makes a new font file out of a True­Type font and includes the license infor­ma­tion for account­abil­ity in the file. Safari’s imple­men­ta­tion is much dif­fer­ent in that it links to any True­Type font you want to embed. While this is great and opens up the amount of fonts avail­able by a wide margin, to avoid licens­ing issues you would have to stick to free and open source font faces.

Another prob­lem with embed­ded fonts is a lack of sup­port in browser imple­men­ta­tion. Safari and Inter­net Explorer are the only two browsers to imple­ment embed­ded type. Fire­fox and Opera are work­ing to imple­ment embed­ded type in the next ver­sion of their browsers. With those browsers at least a year away and browser upgrade cycles being quite slow we prob­a­bly wont see wide­spread use of embed­ded fonts for at least another 3 years.

You can follow the progress and drama behind embed­ded fonts on the web in a couple of places. Fontem​bed​ding.com is a web­site started by Microsoft that is trying to build sup­port for the Embed­d­a­ble Open­Type format. Web​fonts.info is a site that col­lects arti­cles and keeps track of embed­ded font sup­port in all the major browsers. The Open​Type.info blog is a also a great resource for the latest devel­op­ments regard­ing typog­ra­phy in browsers.

The Revolution Is Starting Anyway

Most of the exper­i­ments going on to bring good type online are still a ways off. But good design has never been born out of tech­nol­ogy. Design is always about solv­ing a prob­lem within bound­aries. Lots of folks are off to the races build­ing sites that do a great job of work­ing with the lim­ited tool box we already have in cre­ative ways. Of course, this is a huge inspi­ra­tion to guys like me. So I’d like to point out a few cur­rent heroes:

THE SEED CON­FER­ENCE SITE
The idea that we treat every web site like a brochure, a book, or a sheet of paper is a tough one to get over. The fact is, in spite of all out typo­graphic con­straints, there is great free­dom in design­ing for a canvas that can do lots of things noth­ing else can do. The good people at Coudal and Part­ners prove that with this beau­ti­ful site announc­ing the 2008 Seed Con­fer­ence. Their solu­tion is so obvi­ous it hits you over the head with bril­liance. They simply made a poster with all the con­fer­ence infor­ma­tion. Why have links and unnec­es­sary nav­i­ga­tion if you can get it all in one spot. And why worry about a “design look” when you can simply design the whole page with the infor­ma­tion. This site wins the award for making you forget you are on a web­site. www.​seed​con​fer​ence.com

QUIP­SOL­OGY
Not con­tent to let the web  devel­op­ers have all the fun, the east coast design com­mu­nity is lead­ing the way with inter­ac­tive design that is pur­pose­ful and beau­ti­ful. Under Con­sid­er­a­tion has been out in front with great blogs and a very fresh approach online for years. No where is their fear­less spirit more appar­ent than the inno­v­a­tive Quip­sol­ogy blog. Why write a ton when you know you just want to say “check out this cool thing right here” And that’s all this blog does. a few lines and a link. To match that inno­v­a­tive approach they built a blog like no other. www.​quip​sol​ogy.com

JON TAN­GER­INE
What hap­pens when a web designer with a love for type is giving unlim­ited time and com­plete cre­ative con­trol to work on a site? You get to see the edge of type refine­ment with cur­rent tech­nol­ogy. At first glace, you’ll see that the site is clean and well orga­nized. Look closer and you’ll start notic­ing little details like his logo which is actu­ally made of web text!the site is billed as a work in progress, so keep check­ing back to see what Jon will do next. www.​jon​tan​ger​ine.com

THE SHOW
Alright, here’s one more just for fun. This is actu­ally not a new design at all. I remem­ber seeing this a few years back when I was first get­ting into design­ing online. I was floored by the cre­ativ­ity, sim­plic­ity and audac­ity of this Coudal cre­ation. While most design firms were still trying to figure out what their loader ani­ma­tion should look like, these guys were chang­ing all the rules. If web design were rock and roll, this site would be Smells Like Teen Spirit. Here, Coudal proves big type looks cheesy, really big type looks awe­some. www.​theshowlive.com

Rebrand­ing is a huge plunge for a com­pany. Some­times it ends in dis­as­ter. But often, with the right focus and very few deci­sion makers, a rebrand posi­tions a com­pany for the future. Each year Rebrand.com finds the good ones and awards them. I high­lighted a few that grabbed my attention.

WebEx 

I always thought the WebEx globe and painted people was corny. They were trying to be hip and dotcom after every­one else had moved on. It reminded me of the 40 year-​old guy still trying to extend his col­lege days by partying-​till-​you-​puke every Sat­ur­day after­noon. At some point you have to grow up and become legit. With this rebrand, WebEx has left the dorm room, bought a suit, and is ready to be serious.

Brewhouse Beer

With the Brew­house rebrand, col­lege is exactly where it wants to be. In the crowded cheap beer market, Brew­house is hoping the “honest with attitude” ads will bring the just-turned-21 crowd into the convenience store to grab more Xbox fuel. While I’m a long way from my col­lege days, the ads made me laugh.

Mont Blanc Gourmet

If I could sum up the cur­rent trend in food indus­try brand­ing right now, it would be; “all about the ingredients.” Perhaps influ­enced by the organic craze a few years ago, com­pa­nies are break­ing apart their prod­ucts into its com­po­nent parts and high­light­ing them. Mont Blanc’s “your secret ingre­di­ent” does a great job of this.

What others did you like?

A friend tipped me off to an out­stand­ing col­lect­ing of work from artist Chris­t­ian Faur whole made pix­elized por­traits entirely out of crayons. It’s not exactly ground­break­ing avant garde, but it is an impres­sive feet, and worth a look. You can see the whole Crayon Series here.

Thanks to mud­puppy for the tip.

What happens when you blend weird, laid back Austin style with a classic Texas eating institution? It all explodes into post-modern barbecue perfection you have to visit to fully appreciate.

Comfort Food

This week­end, Jay and I ran in the Austin Half Marathon. On the fol­low­ing day, we limped down to Guatalupe and 2nd Street to indulge in some post race bar­be­cue at the famous Austin hot spot, Lam­berts. We were pre­pared for world class food, and they didn’t dis­ap­point. What I wasn’t expect­ing, was some of the best brand­ing I’ve seen in a long time.

Style and Substance

I could go on for a para­graph about the way they blend smoky ware­house style with 50s modern flare. And the food? It’s just as cre­ative as the atmos­phere, and tasty enough to be included in Texas Monthly’s pres­ti­gious list of top BBQ in Texas. The next time your in down­town Austin, you should make a pil­grim­age of your own.

lam​bert​saustin.com