Archives for category: meaning

What’s in a blog?

November 12, 2012 //
1

I’m not a natural blogger.

Sharing my thoughts, opinions and information I find interesting with people worldwide, somehow puts the fear in me. The fear of expectation…

Of course no one is really expecting anything. I imagine, like me,  people are  just happy to stumble across something worth reading or looking at.

So, deciding that I was probably over thinking the whole blogging thing, I did a bit of research into what makes a good blog and what makes a good blog for me. I started off with getting a definition of blogging. This is the best one I found:

Noun: A website on which an individual or group of users record opinions, information, thoughts, news etc on a regular basis.

The first thing that stood out was the ‘regular’ bit. I’ve been going very wrong there. Also the ‘opinions’ bit – I’m very fussy about whose general opinions on life I can be bothered to sit down and read in a blog and I’m not one to assume that people want to read mine. So with that in mind I’ve decided to stick to informational and tip based blogging.

I’ve listed below some the best blogs I found about… well blogs. And blogging.

Blogs (and blog posts) about blogging:

25 Best Blogs 2012 – Techland, Time

Top 15 Most Popular Blogs | November 2012 – EBiz/MBA

Top 10 Funniest Blogs of All Time – MackTheWriter

Best Tumblr Blogs for Designers – Creative Bloq

Blogging tips:

20 top tips to get readers to your blog – Creative Boom

ProBlogger – Just all of www.problogger.net. It’s great.

10 Social Media Tips for Bloggers – Mashable

Sophie

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Categories communication, ideas, meaning, social media

GWR Posters

May 23, 2012 //
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GWR Cornwall London CheltenhamI love these GWR posters from the 30s and 40s.

The illustrations are beautiful, the type clean, clear and simple. They offer little snapshots of a bygone age when train travel was romantic and exciting – steam filled platforms with glamorous women melting into the arms of stoic men dressed in overcoats and trilbys.

Here’s the modern equivalent, taken from Penzance station earlier in the year:

 2012 advertising campaign
I know that designers in the 1930s had fewer constraints than today. I know that there weren’t many other options than to travel by train so they were free to focus on selling the destinations by producing lovely illustrations. I understand that it was a simpler time with less competition, less restriction and less at stake.

Even so, did the current posters have to be quite so awful?

Firstly, there’s the floating pronoun. Who’s him? Because it’s the most prominent thing in the ad, I immediately assumed it was the fish – it took me a while before I noticed the silhouette of the boy.

Maybe I was being a little slow after a long train journey but that’s not the point. These posters are meant to be instant enough to leave you in no doubt what the message is, even when glimpsed momentarily from a moving train window. If you need to stand in front of the ad and re-read it over and over, it isn’t doing its job properly.

Here are some 1930s posters for the GWR services to Bristol:

GWR BristolBack then, the city was represented by the Clifton Suspension Bridge, ornate architecture and the grand entrance to the cathedral. In the 2012 ad, Bristol is represented by a big blue fish.

Why? Is the city underwater? Is the Giant Wrasse the national symbol of Somerset and Avon?

I don’t live there so I’m assuming that Bristol has an aquarium. As a train user and potential traveller to the city, I’m part of the ad’s target market – I shouldn’t have to assume anything.

Finally there’s the statement: ‘I’m just the guy who feeds the goldfish’. It’s a sad line, very poignant. I imagine it being said by a father who’s lost touch with his son. Perhaps he’s never there to play football with the boy because he’s working too many hours at the office in order to afford train fares.

But, if all you are to your son is the person who looks after the pet, if you’re less important to him than his goldfish, I’d suggest that there are some significant issues that need to be addressed – the sort of issues that can’t be solved by a simple day-trip to Bristol.

If the old GWR posters are evocative of the 1930s, I hate to think what the current ads say about us as a society in 2012. According to them, we’re muddled, vague and disconnected from the people around us.

Mark

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Categories advertising, design, meaning

The Horror of Easter

April 6, 2012 //
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I’m rubbish at remembering Easter. My awareness of it starts with the four day weekend. Eventually I get a card from my mum and I remember that I’ll be expected to attend a roast, bring some kind of chocolate egg for my younger sister and token gifts for the rest of the family. This usually dawns on me with horror around Good Friday.

I won’t lie, I find it stressful. This year has turned out to be particularly stressful as I’m not seeing my family but have failed to put anything on the post. After a bit of soul searching I realised this is because I don’t get Easter. Like most typical UK holidays it’s steeped in a confused mesh of Christianity and Anglo-Saxon history. Like all family holidays I find it a strange mixture of comforting and uneasy. Comforting because it’s a ritual, I see my family and uneasy because it’s a ritual and I see my family.

It got me thinking, as many things do, about horror films. Why do people constantly make horror films about holidays and ritual events? Christmas, Valentine’s Day, proms, birthdays and Easter. OK, it’s partly because it’s a nice easy theme to stick with and everyone gets the premise. But it’s also because of the sense of the uncanny. These traditional days are confusing, unbalanced.

These holidays don’t know who they are or what they’re about. They have no clear identity. If they were brands (see Christmas) they’d be failing. There’s conflict at the heart of them, their history is a muddle, their message is ever changing and their identity is a free for all (see Coca Cola’s Christmas). Easter is about Jesus rising from the dead (see zom-bie noun), but it’s also about eggs (they were traditionally not allowed over Lent), but it’s also about the spring and bunnies (Anglo-Saxon festivities). It’s an amalgamation of largely forgotten traditions. It has no clear identity so I don’t take it seriously.

Then you’ve got the personal aspect. The pressure of occasion, the presents, the family relationships – and what’s more horrifying than having a happy, family-orientated, traditional day turned on it’s head? It makes me anxious.

All of this lends itself well to the horror genre. They can highjack a holiday with ease. So if like me, you’re rubbish at remembering Easter, here are some films you can watch instead:

Sophie

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Categories branding, meaning, relationships

Apostrophe Apocalypse

January 27, 2012 //
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I don’t think the apostrophe has ever had as much coverage as it has in January 2012.

With Waterstones dropping its apostrophe, grammar pedants everywhere have been given a platform to convey their outrage and hold up the apostrophe as the beacon of a rational and functioning society (see The Daily Mail and the ‘extinction’ of the apostrophe).

Language is my business. I know that without the apostrophe, meaning can easily be misconstrued and misunderstood. I don’t doubt the apostrophe’s importance in communicating clearly and properly, but I don’t really see what the fuss is with Waterstones. As David Marsh says in The Guardian (smugly), ‘no apostrophe? Hey, no catastrophe.’

I may not think Waterstones has done anything disastrous with the English language, but the apostrophe is sadly unloved in retail. Amidst the grammar drama, I couldn’t help noticing the lack of apostrophes around Falmouth, where I live. Below is pedantic evidence of the unloved apostrophe (and one ridiculous spelling mistake I threw in for good measure).

Falmouth Apostrophes

An apostrophe, like all grammar is there to define and guide meaning. With the Waterstones brand, I think people like John Richards and The Apostrophe Society have missed the point. It’s Waterstones’ brand, it’s Waterstones’ name. They can do what they like with it. They don’t stop making grammatical sense just because they’re having a bit of a rebrand. Whether you think it’s good rebranding is another matter entirely. Knock the branding but don’t knock the grammar. We’ve got more important language issues to tackle.

Waterstones Vs the apostrophe articles

Sophie

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Categories branding, language, meaning

Jargon Generator

January 4, 2012 //
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Further to our post last year about banned words, I thought I’d share something I found at my parents’ home this Christmas.

It shows that stockpiles of impressive sounding yet ultimately meaningless words have been around for a while – and they’re certainly not limited to the creative industry. This sheet was circulated in the research labs of British Steel in the 1970s:

Jargon Zammerchat

TRANSCRIPT:


BSC Special Steels
Management Training Centre
Brookfield Manor

Instant Random Jargon Generator

Technology has created a new type of jargon that is nearly as incomprehensible as it is sophisticated. We recently came across an unusual technique called an Instant Random Jargon Generator, which will help you master this jargon. With it, you can generate an almost endless variety of intelligent-sounding technical terms.

The technique is easy to use. Merely select a digit from each of the three columns below and combine the words opposite each number into your own technical jargon. For example, select ‘3’, ‘9’, and ‘0’ and you generate ‘Parallel policy options’,’ an expression bound to command instant respect – and confusion.

MORAL: Watch your language

COLUMN 1
0.  integrated
1.  total
2.  systematized
3.  parallel
4.  functional
5.  responsive
6.  optical
7.  synchronized
8.  compatible
9.  balanced

COLUMN 2
0.  management
1.  organizational
2.  monitored
3.  reciprocal
4.  digital
5.  logic
6.  transitional
7.  incremental
8.  third-generation
9.  policy
10. quality (handwritten)

COLUMN 3
0.  options
1.  flexibility
2.  capability
3.  mobility
4.  programming
5.  concept
6.  time-phase
7.  projection
8.  hardware
9.  contingency
10. performance (handwritten)

Mark

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Categories meaning, technology, writing

Banned Words

November 22, 2011 //
10

Welcome to our new website. We hope you like it.

We’ve spent a while developing the look and feel of it, even longer coming up with the content. We’re used to writing for other people but when it comes to writing about ourselves…

How exactly do you pin down what it is that you do? What words do you use to define yourself? There’s a lot of pressure when your website is your shop-window – how do you convince someone that you know what you’re doing without coming across smug or cocky or desperate?

Like any creative profession, much of our work is born out of experience and instinct, which can be difficult to articulate. It’s incredibly easy to fall back on jargon and cliché. In our industry there are certain words that are bandied about so frequently that all their meaning has been worn away. Here are a few:

Integrated
Juxtaposition
Innovation-led
Solutions
Forward-thinking
Passionate
Holistic
One-stop-shop
Fusing
Paradigm
Bespoke
Real-time
Platform
Redefining
Pro-active

Once you’ve got a stockpile of these impressive sounding words, it’s easy to link a few of them together to form sentences:

Zammerchat is an innovation-led agency offering a bespoke, fully integrated service to redefine the paradigms of your business.

or

We are passionate about providing holistic, forward-thinking solutions to ensure that your company is pro-active across real-time platforms.

A phrase like that might fill the tricky ‘about us’ section, but what does it actually mean?

These types of ready-made phrases show that you haven’t searched hard enough for the right words – they’re quick, easy, vague and ultimately lazy. By using them you might save yourself some mental anguish but you sacrifice precision and clarity.

Words should be picked for their meaning and imagery should be used to enhance that meaning. It’s not enough to say that you’re ‘innovation-led’ or that you offer ‘bespoke solutions’ – if you’re putting yourself forward as a creative agency, these things should be pretty obvious already.

In writing this website we made every effort to ensure that we were thinking clearly about who we are and what we do. That’s why, when we were writing this site, we banned every word on the above list.

If you happen to spot one we’ve missed or you come across any other hackneyed turn of phrase that gets on your nerves, please let us know. We’ll add it to our list.

Mark

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Categories meaning, websites, writing
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