Clubhouse introduced an in-room chat feature that allows listeners to leave real-time comments and feedback in text while listening to rooms. A room’s creator will need to turn this feature on before creating their room if they want to allow listeners to chat. Our guide will show you how to turn on in-room chat for…
Meta provided some updates on its We the Culture creative community, which was started by a team of Black Facebook employees and fueled and curated by Black creators dedicated to championing Black culture. We the Culture was one of he initiatives to come out of then-Facebook’s commitment to provide financial support to Black creators, and…
Over the last few years, we’ve witnessed consumers being more and more vocal about their love or disdain for brands, supporting or boycotting brands that don’t fit their needs or values. We know a brand’s image is of increasing importance; whether it engenders trust–and how it behaves towards its employees, its community and the planet–are…
Clubhouse allows creators to pin links to their rooms. For instance, if a room is created to talk about a recent news article, the room’s creator could pin the link to the article to the room. Our guide will show you how to pin a link to your room during the room creation process. Note:…
After marinating in conspiracy theories and Donald J. Trump’s Russia stance, some online discourse about Vladimir Putin has grown more complimentary.
Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) are all the rage these days and, of course, marketers are wasting no time jumping into the pool to cash in on what might be the next big thing. If ever there is something on the tips of tongues within the popular cultural zeitgeist, it will find itself top of mind for…
4 strategies to make lasting organizational change.
Oh, the places Flu will go, campaign encouraged the general public to get vaccinated for the Flu. In conjunction with the public health COVID vaccination campaign, we knew vaccines were on everyone’s mind. So we took this opportunity to drive home the importance of Flu Vaccines in the fall. We personified “Flu”, Uppercase the word to make it a proper noun, and placed him in the most familiar places, and high-traffic environments in Aspen. We also made it clear that he would show up somewhere else, kind of like “continue the story” or “episodes” by having him speak bubble his thoughts on where he will go next.
Stock trading is often considered a complicated matter. Known only to certain circles, because its foreign terms sound like Alien language. Saham Rakyat by Samuel Sekuritas (an Indonesian-based full-service financial advisory company) believes that each of us can understand stock trading and provide free access to all Indonesians to be able to buy and sell stocks.
Saham Rakyat (approved by OJK – The Financial Services Authority) develops an app to educate the Indonesian people on the topic of trading, to make trading a lot less complicated. It’s designed to be very intuitive, like online shopping.
With the message: Let’s Talk Stocks we wanted to break the stigma and confusion about stock trading and let people know and understand the stock trading language.
Andalusia, the region of Spain with the most inhabitants, celebrates its day on February 28, which is why Supermercados MAS, an Andalusian company, commissioned us to make a piece that would congratulate Andalusians on their day.
Andalusia is a land of painters, poets, where the first Spanish constitution was written, with a rich history, unique monuments, as well as landscapes and a gastronomy known throughout the world.
That is why the campaign is a poem written by and for the Andalusians that traces their greatness and pays tribute to the great moments, people, artists, places, traditions and festivals of our land.
Campaign from Mother L.A. subverts familiar advertising conventions with a case of the munchies.
Ecommerce site eBay wants users to think of it as a place where they can find anything, with a customer base filled with stories of their passions and interests, which its latest campaign in Italy aims to convey. Created by creative production network Dude, the aim of the campaign is to celebrate the marketplace’s community…
Sales and marketing teams both serve critical functions for their organizations, and in a perfect world, they’d work together to maximize results. As CMOs and other executives push for higher revenue accountability from their teams, aligning these integral stakeholders is now more important than ever. Unfortunately, sales and marketing often feel disconnected. Despite their aims…
Every choice we make leads to a unique future. By supporting an open internet, Criteo is keeping diversity, innovation, and choice alive so that you can choose what’s right for you—and future you.
FUSE Create works with the Pinball Clemons Foundation (PCF) to create a powerful new hero video that showcases what the Foundation does and how donor money is used to help disadvantaged kids. Their overall goal of the Foundation is to bring youth from the ‘margins into the mainstream’ through mentorship that allows youth to thrive into adulthood.
The video aims to illustrate the twists and turns marginalized youth face and how donations can help make a difference. Much like a pinball in a pinball machine, marginalized youth can feel like they’re bounced around with no real sense of order or structure. PCF helps provide that stability to every aspect of their life, to help give marginalized youth the direction they so desperately need.
Caps Lock – How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and how to Escape from it. Author: designer and researcher Ruben Pater. Publisher: Valiz.
Ruben Pater‘s The Politics of Design. A (Not So) Global Manual for Visual Communication is still, 6 years after its publication, one of the few books I keep recommending and offering as a present again and again. Caps Lock is equally sharp, visual and keenly attentive to socio-cultural contexts.
Caps Lock tells the long story of the intertwined relationship between graphic design and capitalism. Looking back at history, sharing practical examples, explaining key movements and concepts but also detailing a vision of graphic design practice that would emerge outside of this often uneasy alliance with capitalism, the book offers the kind of uplifting read I desperately need right now. I’d recommend it to everyone who loves design, everyone who is tired of design and everyone who has heard too often that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”
Ruben Pater identifies 12 roles that designers play in relation to capitalism. These roles are distributed into 3 main sections:
The first part looks at how the work of graphic designers serves capitalism. The designer as scribe can be traced back to earlier times, when scribes and clerks kept financial records, designed coins and banknotes, created graphic notations, etc. Today’s scribes use software but they still have the same mission: instilling trust in the financial system. The designer as engineer brings order to markets with graphic documents such as forms, contracts, passports, maps, infographics, shipping containers, barcodes, etc. These documents go through a process of standardisation that facilitates colonial expansion, control of movements, outsourcing and, more generally, the functioning of international markets across vast distances. The designer as a brander and a salesperson works towards the commodification of all parts of society. They create brands, logos, ads, corporation identities and interfaces.
The second part of the book shifts the focus from what designers make to how they work. The section dissects the culture of exploitation behind the glamour of design. The chapters on the designer as worker and as an entrepreneur offer the picture of a job loaded with burnouts, unpaid internship, precarity, privileges, mental health issues, exploitation of freelancers, etc. These 2 chapters also suggest possible alternatives to toxic work conditions that platforms like fiverr normalises and amplifies. The designer as amateur reminds us that the majority of design in the world is done by people who do not call themselves design and whose creativity is therefore not even acknowledged. The designer as educator details how education prepares designers to work in capitalist conditions. It questions how knowledge is produced, shared and commodified but it also presents some of the alternatives that challenge the view of design education as a costly and privatised factory that churns out design workers.
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Dennis de Bel and Roel Roscam Abbing, Packet Radio
The third part looks at strategies within design that challenge capitalism. The section opens on the designer as hacker to detail how hackers’ ethics can inspire designers to use technology not for profit but for the benefit of society. Starting with tools and platforms that respect users’ freedoms and community. The designer as futurist, usually an adept of speculative design and/or design fiction, looks to improve society by thinking beyond what is currently feasible. That same strategy is increasingly being co-opted by consultants and trend watchers to provide multinationals with ideas for new products, services and markets. Speculative design and design fiction still have an important role to play when it comes to imagining societies with fewer products and with social relations that are driven by inclusiveness, intergenerational thinking and respect for all cultures. The designer as philanthropist uses their skills to help others. With the risk that a good intention ends up amplifying the power of capitalism and keeping inequality in place. The designer as activist plays a meaningful role in society when they donate time and resources while challenging the power structures in place. Otherwise it runs the risk of falling into the “cause washing” trap.
To illustrate what design outside of capitalism can really achieve, Pater portrays 6 design collectives whose practice is not just ethical, it also aims to give designers decent salaries and labour rights through various strategies that go from local development funds to micro-donations, from grants to commissions, etc.
In order of appearance in the book:
Italian design studio Brave New Alps whose locally-rooted practice involves a community academy at a local train station, sparkling drinks projects, a Precarity Pilot website to help designers set up alternative practices, etc. Common Knowledge, a workers coop from the UK that explores how digital tools can support activists organisations and radical politics. Cooperativa de diseño, a Buenos Aires-based design cooperative run by women who want to put design tools in the hands of social movements. The journalists, filmmakers and designers of Midia Ninja (an acronym for Independent Narratives, Journalism and Action) use social media to cover the stories that Brazil’s main media outlets ignore: they report on indigenous struggles, corruption, climate crisis, deforestation of the Amazon and more. In Brussels, Open Source Publishing creates graphic design works using only FLOSS and offers typefaces, publications, workers’ knowledge and texts free to use, adapt, redistribute. Finally, members of The Public in Toronto identify as POC and/or queer or trans. Their practice blurs the boundaries between designers and non-designers by means of co-creation.
Cooperativa de diseño, Pibxs
What these design studios do is far more than simple pro bono work: they are deeply invested in the communities they work for, they believe in mutual aid principles, in co-creation and in sharing their findings, knowledge and resources. They demonstrate that a shift from competition to care is possible and gratifying.
Previously: Drones, pirates, everyday racism. An interview with graphic designer Ruben Pater, Graphic design for social change, The Politics of Design. A (Not So) Global Manual for Visual Communication, etc.
Image on the homepage: Brave New Alps.
Authentic representation is of the utmost importance to Carlyle Garrick. As witnessed by his work on Apple’s stylish “Fly Market” spot for the iPhone X’s Pay function, Media Art Lab’s associate creative director makes it clear that Blackness is not only global, but that it can shape the culture as well. “This was the first…
We’ve all had a winter’s evening where we’ve been chilled to the bone and been glad to get to our destination to enjoy some warmth. That’s the feeling that Danish brand Cocio aims to convey to Gen Z consumers as it promotes its hot chocolate drink as a social beverage, as well as an antidote…
Chronic depression can lead to hypersomnia, one of the key signs of the illness, which is being highlighted by three crafted print adverts commissioned by Dubai Science Park as it aims to diagnose sufferers. The “Hostages of Depression” campaign was released on February 22 as print and outdoor ads to raise awareness of the symptoms…
Frontier Communications hypes its $69.99-per-month Gig Service plan.
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