A few days ago I received an email from Twitter, informing me that I was being followed by Betty Draper. I followed back, and a few minutes later, Betty sent me a message, “You can’t sleep either? Thanks for keeping me company ;)”.
I’ve never been much interested in fan fiction or the fiction that inspires it, but there’s something about these characters moving in this medium that’s startlingly powerful. Both Mad Men and Twitter derive their stories and interest mostly from small revelations between carefully or carelessly controlled public and private personas (be it through multiple accounts or stolen dog tags). Like all fan fiction, the Mad Men on Twitter extend and bend the story beyond what’s possible in the stingy one-hour-a-week, one-way format of a TV show. But because Tweets are text and Twitter is a social space, @trudy_campbell and @harrycrane are able to avoid the visual dissonances that can befall a fat Batman at a comic book convention or a kitschy dinner theater performance at Disney’s MGM studios.
Within hours of @bettydraper’s email, I was following a dozen Twitterers in her orbit, including her daughter, her rival, her husband, his coworker, and his past. I followed as they converse with each other and us from 1963 – flirting, skirting, throwing dinner parties, and pouring gimlets, all using a technology that wouldn’t be invented for over forty years and whose only purpose is to capture “what people are doing right now”. @_PeteCampbell effortlessly closes the gap between his now and ours, simply by ignoring it.
Some of my favorite tweets:
“@ken_cosgrove I’ve got a stiff one for anyone who needs it. The Prosecco’s almost gone anyway. @Paul_Kinsey? @_PeteCampbell? Who’s ready?” – Sal_Romano
“Mrs. Draper is a cold, cold princess. Not much better than mom. I’m all alone.” – glen_bishop
Some articles:
- i am @bettydraper (Including dirt on her rivalry with @betty_draper
- Confessions Of A (Fake) Mad Man by @don_draper
- A Marketing Move the ‘Mad Men’ Would Love
- AMC decides to allow fans’ ‘Mad Men’ Twittering
- There’s Alka Seltzer in my Scotch (In which I trash Mad Men and AMC. What can I say, in retrospect, Season One was a necessary mess ;)
Tokyo Metro has been making “subway manners” posters since 1974 to promote a harmonious riding experience. These posters have focused on just a handful of rules: don’t apply cosmetics on the train, don’t take up too much space, don’t play loud music. But they always seem to avoid the subject of this guy or for that matter this fella, or this chap.
So when the latest round of clever posters came out, this time with a creepy little salaryman silently passing judgment on all, us gaijin couldn’t help ourselves
Spot-on illustration by Office of Mesker
Today, a few hours after an unsatisfying lunch at around 3 o’clock, I left the office for a nearby convenience store, to pick up a snack for me and one for Eiko.
I ate my entire snack before arriving back at the office. Upon my return, I immediately went to the kitchen and threw away my plastic wrappers, then returned to the work room to give Eiko a carmelized custard.
So then how, with no clues from me visual or otherwise, did she, on our way home, correctly guess that among the hundreds of edible choices available at the convenience store, I ate one onigiri and one cream puff?
I have no regular pattern of buying choux cremes or onigiri from the convenience store, and in fact buy nothing but chocolate 80% of the time.
I just posted some photos from our trip to Seto Inland Sea from a few months ago.
AQ is designing a website for the Setouchi Art Festival, set for the summer and fall of 2010. A quick rundown of the who/what/when/why over on our blog.
My friend Ashley stopped by the office this rainy afternoon to take a few head shots for upcoming activities that blossomed out of Art Space Tokyo, a book he created with Craig this winter.
These guys are headed to New York next month for the US release party. They worked their butts off on this one, and it shows in the writing and design. Wish them luck!
A few months ago we launched a New York sister site to Tokyo Art Beat, with all the same great features Tokyo’s users have enjoyed. Even from thousands of miles away from actually being able to attend the events on NYAB, I find myself checking back almost every day to see the Pick of the Day. It’s hard to compliment NY without implicitly dissing Tokyo, but let’s just say that those tiny 169px images alone are doing a lot to back up NY’s reputation as one of the great art centers of the world.
For now, the NYAB site is basically a clone of TAB in purple, but already we’re starting to see a development wishlist accumulate that will inevitably pull NYAB in its own direction, making it a better, more native site for New York, and hopefully improving TAB as well.
In the course of consulting work, I’ve seen local web teams improvise design tweaks and add ons to meet the needs of their users, slowly tugging at brand coherency, until one day the global office wakes up, and squashes often useful sites and features in the name of uniformity. This always seemed silly and heavy-handed, but as an outsider I had no emotional attachment to the established visuals and voice that were being defended. Eventually NYAB may grow to the point where some design and development happens independent of Tokyo, and I hope that when that time comes I have the judgement and humility to known when to hold on, when to let go, and when to encourage.
The album’s finished. Buy it Here. Listen on MySpace or Last.fm.
Design by Office of Mesker
Show this weekend too!
We’re in.
This essay on the ethics of moonlighting designers seems to be making the rounds, and strikes me as completely ignorant of how reputations are built in the web industry.
Full disclosure, I’m a friend and ex-colleague of Luke Wroblewski, a designer at Yahoo whom the author uses as an example of a well-respected web professional, whose personal design consultancy “makes him look flighty and unprofessional” and “makes both his consultancy and Yahoo!’s design practice look a bit dodgy”.
On the contrary, I bet that the existence and maintenance of that very site is part of why Yahoo decided he was right for the job in the first place. The work and thinking contained within the site shows that Luke is aggressive, independent, well-rounded and engaged with the outside world, all qualities I look for and admire in AQ’s small staff. Likewise, as a prospective client of Luke’s, his position at Yahoo combined with his lukew.com presence would give me a pretty good idea of the type and caliber of design problems he’s capable of addressing.
More than ever, people in general create multiple online identities as a way to make themselves easy to find, give the world a more complete understanding of who they are, and attract and maintain interest in what they’re doing. While the writing style of lukew.com may be a bit more corporate than it needs to be, the site essentially acts as one these identities for Luke, and I, for one, am glad that he continues to maintain it. I imagine his employer is too.