The Best Art Vinyl awards are not something that the musos of The Logic House were aware of until recently, being more fans of Spotify and lossless rips from CD.
It was brought to our attention that the fabulous album “The Resistance” by Muse has had its cover design named as “best album cover” in the 2009 Art Vinyl awards. Phrases such as “retro-future” were bandied around.
By La Boca, an “independent design circus” (which we think might mean “agency”) the cover looks like this:
We’re really not sure what we think about this. It’s as though it takes its inspiration from the colour picker in Microsoft Word.
Mind you, that’s a design classic too.
Tags: album, Microsoft Word, Muse, winner
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Everyone at The Logic House would like to wish you a very happy New Year. The Logic House elves are all back at work, taking the odd break to download applications for their new smartphones and fighting over whether Android applications are truly better than iPhone applications (of course they are!)
If you have given up making New Year’s Resolutions because you break them every year we have have a suggestion for you. Actually, we have two suggestions.
First, make your resolutions very specific. An example of a good resolution is: “I will not eat more than chocolate bar between Monday 9am and Friday 9pm for six months.” It’s a SMART target (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-based). It gives you something to concentrate on. Saying “I will eat less chocolate” really isn’t going to motivate you as all you have to do to achieve it is to eat one gram less than you did last year, not that you kept count anyway!
Secondly you may borrow our list of “Resolutions for people doing business on the web.” Please feel free to print out, distribute and share this list.
- I will contact my customers on a regular basis because it is more cost effective to turn a happy customer into a repeat customer than it is to generate new customers.
- The regularity of my contact with my customers shall be determined by how often I can find something relevant to them to communicate about but it shall be between four months and each week unless I have very sophisticated systems that allow personalised communication.
- I will be generous in my communications with my customers, making sure that the communications add value to our relationship.
- I shall measure how much return my customer communications generate and use the information to improve.
- If I cannot currently do the preceding items I will call The Logic House and find out how they can help me.
Tags: communications, resolutions
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The clever folk at The Logic House are fans of many things. Irony and self promotion are of course the things we enjoy most, but after that we are fans of Innocent (the food and drink brand), post-it notes in funky colours, any phone battery that doesn’t need recharging desperately after you check your email and Sir Michael Caine. There was some argument over the last point so we held an internal office poll to find someone we all liked and whose loose association wouldn’t do untold damage to our brand. Therefore Jedward, Katie Price and Lily Allen all failed to make the cut. Surprisingly Peter Andre did. Anyway, Sir Michael won and we are proud to have his image on our desktop wallpaper.
Something we’re not a fan off is bullies. We have a theory that’s just because we’re so nice we never push anyone around, but we don’t like bullies. And neither it seems does EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes.
Neelie is holding up the $7.4 billion dollar takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corp. on the grounds that it would give Oracle too much control over the database market. 59 US senators wrote to her asking her to speed up approval for the deal. This came hot on the heels of a statement from the US Department of Justice pushing for a fast resolution.
Neelie is now our hero. Instead of kowtowing to the American senators and passing through the merger that could see the disappearance of MySQL (because Sun own the MySQL company and Oracle would rather you paid through the nose for their product). Neelie gave the senators what for over “interfering in someone else’s decisions rather than taking the most important decision that you have control over: improving health care.”
In a speech told them to get their priorities straight, asking: “Is this really more important than fixing your own health care system?”
We love Neelie. We don’t like big bullies. We definitely don’t like the idea of letting a US company get a stranglehold on European industry and software, especially not just to save some American jobs.
Neelie is today’s hero!
Tags: competition commissioner, Database, EU, MySQL, Oracle, Sun
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The residents of The Logic House have the greatest respect for those who work with brands. We enjoy working with them, helping them deliver the creative work that helps build a narrative between the brand and you, their target customer. We have assisted in the creation and delivery of games, programmes to run on everything from old PCs to mobile phones, web pages galore and video. We thought we’d seen it all.
We hadn’t seen it all.
Orangina have a new advert out. You can watch it here. (Warning: possibly NSFW, depending on how European your IT policy is. It’s also scary – it took us two hours to get the junior to come out of the stationary cupboard.)
We’re not exactly sure what story Orangina are inviting us to become a part of. We must respect how they have got us to blog about their advert though so maybe that is the point.
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It is the season to be jolly, and down at The Logic House we’re going tra-la-la-la-la and enjoying mince pies made by somebody’s mother. We have Christmas Carols playing on Spotify and we’re doing all our shopping well in advance through the Internet. Yes, even creative web designers and brilliant marketing consultants enjoy a bit of seasonal goodwill.
We’re not going to take issue with the people who don’t do Christmas. We can understand that. We don’t need a card from these people to tell us how lovely they think we are, they tell us all year around. What does rather hurt our feelings though are the people who use the Christmas season to send us a one-size-fits-all eCard and declare they sent the postage money to charity.
Now stop us if we’re wrong but the point of Christmas greetings used to be to make a personal contact with people you either care about or know socially. Blind carbon copying us in just doesn’t cut it.
We want to see a personal Christmas card, even if it’s mail merged. We’d like to see our names on it. “To everyone at The Logic House” is enough, you don’t have to list us all. Just make us feel that you are acknowledging our existance in your life. We know you can send us personal emails that are designed to make us buy more so it shouldn’t be beyond possibility to personalise our Christmas card.
If you would like to send out gorgeous, personalised electronic Christmas cards that will enhance your brand do get in touch.
Tags: Christmas cards, mail merge, personalisation
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We like cookies here at The Logic House. Our absolute favourite is the double chocolate chip, but there are splinter groups for cookies with nuts, cookies with toffee and even one strange individual who prefers a Garibaldi biscuit.
Being fabulous and talented web developers we are also very interested in the other sort of cookies, the ones that your browser spits out at you. When we are creating a beautiful web site for our big corporate clients we are very responsible about cookie use. If someone doesn’t want to take a cookie we understand and don’t make them. After all, they might be on a diet.
Our learned legal friends over at Osbourne Clarke (well, we get their newsletter and the feel like friends) have notified us that the EU are looking to change the rules on cookie management, demanding explicit consent for each website you visit. Read more about it here (requires log in but it’s free and worth it).
Once again the EU is well-meaning but so busy making laws that it forgets to give us clear guidance on how we need to apply it. This will be a long period of everyone in the web design industry arguing for best practice whilst having no firm guidelines to refer clients to.
As a matter of fact we don’t mind explicitly consenting to cookies. We like to know who is leaving traces on our computer. What we aren’t looking forward to is a lukewarm idea getting a lacklustre implementation. It’ll be accessibility all over again, driving costs up for those who abide by best practice and no prosecutions for those who don’t.
Tags: cookies, EU, osbourne clarke
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Here at The Logic House we work very hard, but as the best of creative people will tell you sometimes we need a little break from producing perfectly engineered websites with amazing cutting edge website design and brilliant harding hitting copy. After we’ve done some volunteer work, filed our expenses claims and called our Mums we (well, some of us) will admit to taking a sneaky peak at Coco Perez. And we are glad that we did!
If we had never visited Coco Perez (written by the challenging Perez Hilton himself) we would never have seen this monstrosity. You’ll have to click through to see but we promise it’s worth it.Yes, Cindy the pooch has been dressed up in many ways by her groomer Sandy. The picture shows Cindy as a camel, a teenage mutant ninja turtle, a pac man game and a peacock.
We started this post meaning to say something about people being mean enough to make dogs look silly but we’re starting to think that actually the doggy looks pretty cool as a ninja turtle. Where can we get one?!
Tags: designs, dog, groomer
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The talk about the digital divide has been swelling. One local council is acting before others have even created a position paper let alone voted on whether they should adopt the position.
Swindon Borough Council has announced a city-wide free Internet programme. Access will be free, if limited, and users can pay for upgrades to 20Mb.
The Logic House Team are seriously thinking of moving to Swindon. Not only is that the sort of forward-thinking council that we’d like to live under but we can see hundreds of opportunities for developing business presence on the web. Now mobile phones are wireless compatible the whole of Swindon will be accessing information whenever they need it. Shops will have their opening hours checked, businesses will have contact details looked up, pubs and restaurants will have their menus and table booking systems accessed.
All these people going around looking at websites on their mobile phones could force everyone with a horrible, shonky over-designed, inaccessible website to see that there is a business benefit to having proper, cleanly built code and a website that works with devices other than a PC running Internet Explorer 7+. We tell our clients: “Build it to be accessible or you’ll need to build it again.” We also say*: “We told you so” when people complain that A. N. Other website design company has failed to comply with the rigourous accessibility and usability standards that we hold ourselves to here in The Logic House and the client has realised they are losing customers.
Today’s moral: Accessible, usable websites are multi-device friendly and future proof. If you don’t have one you’re losing money.
*actually we never say that, but we might think it
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