The advertising agency who came up with this logo for the Office of Government Commerce in the UK clearly did not try and see things from different angles:

Read the full article in The Telegraph.

Thanks to Greg for spotting this.

I spotted these McDonald’s custom-packaged Nudies when flying out of Sydney almost a month ago. While this is hardly an unusual practice, I was surprised at the low quality of the McDonald’s Nudie packaging.

The colours look wrong, the deep-etching is bad, and the printing is low resolution.

I wonder how this affects the perception of the Nudie brand? The quality is …

Spotted on Gizmodo:

Embarrassing mistakes like this could have been easily avoided had there been some level of diverse/alternate/wider/real-world thinking amongst those involved in the product development.

At first glance, this poster ad looks like it is advertising soap.

It is actually for muesli bars.

It is interesting how a few seemingly innocuous and minute factors can add up to a larger mis-communication.

The cascading stream with the white foam in the background could say clean and fresh.
The shape and size of the box is reminiscent of a box of five soaps.
The tan …

This post on 437signals will come as a surprise to some. The MacBook Air, despite all its lacks, is selling well.

The soft stuff, the emotive stuff, is what matters. A huge part of any purchase decision is emotive and irrational.

From a completely rational viewpoint, the MacBook Air should not be selling so well. After all, many have complained loudly about the lack of various “essential” technical …

I went McDonald’s website recently to look up the nutritional information for their Deluxe Brekkie Roll – which I have developed a soft spot for.

The site has certainly come a long way since I last visited years ago. The current incarnation is without a doubt a beaut piece of Flash “experience” work. The transitions and animations are fluid and smooth – fun …

I came across this website which really how not to do a first contact experience on the web.

Here’s the engagement process:

1

When I first arrived, there was a blank area in the middle of the page. So I started reading the text on the right.

2

Suddenly this Flash element appeared, and pushed the text off to the right. How rude!

Now I couldn’t read …

A 3D graph can be deliberately subverted to skew the perception of the information it contains. By simply increasing the perspective, you can give artificial emphasis to a particular slice of the chart, to make that slice appear larger as it were.

Note how very different the perception of the size of the green slice is relative to the other slices on each of the charts …

I walked past these two interiors last night.

Similarities:
They are both customer service / retail spaces.
They belong to two large corporations – Telstra (a telco) and MBF (a health insurer).
Their design employed more or less the same materials (stone, glass, wood).
They used the same lighting was (metal halides).
My guess is they probably cost more or less the same to fit out, excluding the cost of the …

When you have no real differentiation, and you are selling a commodity product, and you don’t really give a damn about doing any better; you resort to gimmickry.

I had a case of deodorant can failure this morning. I pressed down on the trigger of a new can and no freshness came out. I looked closer at the can and saw this:

WTF?!! Someone invested effort, brain …