iFloss

The second campaign we're doing for Strat Writing II is "packaged goods - personal" .. and I wanted to do floss, one, because I need to floss more, and two, because I thought it would be challenging. I wanted to avoid the conventional shiny-happy-flossing-people concept that's been done to death, and I didn't want to be preachy or mundane. I had started to develop an idea in my head of a single thread of white copy winding (like a piece of floss) through a simple color field and ending at the floss box, but then I remembered another rather popular ad series showing thin white lines through a color field .. which led to this:

Looks like a fun game!

I might have to pick up another copy of Roller Coaster Tycoon for myself ..

The 100 Best Fonts

Not sure whose list this is .. I guess FontShop's? But this is a PDF of their 100 "Besten Schriften Aller Zeiten" .. Best Fonts of All Time. It's a fairly large download, and unfortunately all the text is in German. But if you're into fonts at all, many of these will be recognizable. I find it hard to argue with Helvetica (#1 on the list) but some of the others I'm not sure I'd have there .. and some others that are there, I would have ranked higher. But it's a neat list overall.

Four ads you won't see this Sunday

Some Budweiser ads a little too risque for broadcast .. but pretty funny. The first one is the only one that really has to do with beer .. the other three are just silly situations. Unfortunately, I only have these in .wmv format.

Bud Light #1
Bud Light #2
Bud Light #3
Bud Light #4

Uh oh

And we'll be there in May, ladies and gentlemen!

Damned Lies and Statistics: Is the Vatican a Rogue State?"

The top crime neighborhood in the world isn't in Sao Paulo or Lagos. It's not the Bronx in New York, or even Wedding in Berlin. It's the small city ruled by Pope Benedict XVI, which apparently sees more criminal cases per capita than any other part of the world.

The Vatican's attorney general Nicola Picardi released the astounding statistic at the start of 2007: The tiny nation's justice department in 2006 had to contend with 341 civil and 486 criminal cases. In a population of 492, that measures out to 1.5 cases per person -- twenty times the corresponding rate in Italy.

By this measurement at least, crime is soaring in the Vatican in spite of a security force that would put a police state to shame. The seat of the Catholic Church has one Swiss guard for every four citizens, not to mention museum guards and police assigned to the Vatican by Italy.

Spiders on drugs

I thought this was just hysterical ..

Perky newsbabe's career goes "flush"

The kind of nightmare that I suppose gets on-air journalists sitting bolt-upright in the middle of the night in a cold sweat ..

Apparently, this is a portion of an on-air broadcast of an anchor woman, who didn't know she was live, having a candid conversation about her colleague's sex life, and making the implication that the person off-camera was having an affair. There's no explicit dialogue here and you really can't hear who she's talking to, but clearly she's not aware that her viewers are watching her primp herself and gossip.

Remember kids -- anytime a camera is pointed at you, it could be watching you!

Minute Maid ads

My last two classes are both about strategic writing and design (of advertisements). I'll be doing a lot of ads this semester so I thought I'd post my work here. The first campaign we're doing is for a packaged food product, and I chose Minute Maid, because I usually drink it every morning, and while I was trying to think of a concept I heard Lewis Black's voice when he was doing some joke about "rocket fuel" .. which led to the following:

Engine-starter (Thanks Kirsty!):


Energy source:


Power cell:

Trinity's Revenge

If you haven't seen Matrix Reloaded this won't make sense. I thought it was funny though. That third panel is just priceless. Click to see a larger version.