This is by Rick Poyner. It’s an article in Print Magazine about how design blogs are generally low in quality.

The biggest single problem with blogs as a medium for writing is the very thing that bloggers tend to love them for: the lack of editors. It’s naive to imagine that you can just sit down at the keyboard, shoot from the hip, and hit the target unaided every time. There is no writer who doesn’t benefit from good editing, and it doesn’t matter how long you have been writing. Anyone who has worked on a longer text for publication knows how much work it takes on both sides to produce something fit to print. Some of this effort has to do with larger issues of content and the development of a strong argument; some of it with the details of copyediting.

This is by Khoi Vinh, on his blog. He sees it from both sides — he first disagrees and then agrees with Poyner.

It’s a bit like complaining that YouTube has yet to produce an equivalent to “8½.” Which is to say, so what?

I found it interesting to read about something I’ve just started doing. Maybe I’ll try harder to write better.

I just read, a day or two late, that Microsoft bought aQuantive for $6bn! If Google paid $3.1 for DoubleClick and MS paid nearly 2x that for the #2 firm, then I wonder if Yahoo’s going to view its purchase of Right Media for $680m as enough.

Also, I remember reading about WPP buying up 24/7 Real Media earlier this week and wondering why the big agency groups (WPP, Omnicom, Interpublic, Publicis) hadn’t been more active in this climate.

I’m not fully up to speed on what’s been happening the last few days, so if anyone can summarise, please comment. Thanks.

That’s what I hear someone replying when the client, Hanif Jewellers, picks up the phone and calls their ad agency to ask what the hell happened.

At one point or another, we’ve all made mistakes. Big ones, little ones — we’ve all dropped the ball. This one though, is pretty hard to let go because it’s really obvious. I bet you that no one would have missed it if the girl’s face had turned green!

All I can hope for is that there was a client-requested last minute change to the headline and it was given to a junior person with weak English skills to hurriedly enter without any time to re-check (run-on, I know). Inexcusable still, but at least one can form some sort of explanation.

To be honest, when I looked at the new Sitemeter logo, I immediately thought it was a knock-off of the Cisco logo. Upon looking at them side-by-side, they’re different enough for me to not make strange faces and wonder aloud, “Why?”

From what I recall about the history of the Cisco logo, the new one is meant to be an update of their original logo which was a depiction of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. At least, that’s what I remember reading.

The Sitemeter logo bears relevance to its statistics and chart roots, so it fits fine, but it does look a little generic because of the (too large) Myriad type that’s become all to common. I must admit, though, that it’s an improvement over that Rubik’s Cube lookalike thingey they had before.

For many years now, I’ve noticed that when I look at an advertisement, be it in a magazine, a newspaper, or on a billboard, I often ignore the communication and am more inclined to critique it. Is the imagery suitable and well done? Is the copy pithy or funny enough? Is the layout busy or uncluttered?

Even when an ad works, in that I look at it, read it and get hooked by it, I still find myself saying, “niiice,” at the end of it, rather than thinking about the company, brand or offer being sold.

I tend to wonder who created the work, rather than allow any benefit to be given to the advertiser — “The XYZ ad was really nice. EFG did a really good job with it”.

How about you? Are we all ignoring the message in others work and being critics? Can we be sold to, since we know (or assume) that the advertiser had little to do with the ads we see?

Note to the nine people who read this blog: I’m smack in the middle of developing some work for a pitch, and have been pretty tied up with work. Because of this, I’m going to be a bit irregular about posting here.