BrainFuel

No, it isn’t mine. Too bad.

First time I’ve ever seen an island for sale in my life. I wonder how much it costs. It wasn’t much more than a few acres in size and I’m sure there are restrictions on what you can do there. It was in the San Juan Islands, too. Being an island, naturally getting anything over there to build would be incredibly difficult. Check out these really cool panoramic topographical maps.

Great review of a preview Macromedia did last night for the local Flash users group. It looks like MM finally fixed some things that have been broken for a long time and are “going out with a bang” as far as the unique Macromidia brand, before it’s swallowed completely by Adobe. I’ve missed WYSIWYG support in Dreamweaver since I started coding advanced CSS quite a while ago.

I’m going to tell a story that’s ripe with ethical questions (small ones you might say) and a bit of humor. There’s humor in it because it’s so very odd that it took me several seconds to even comprehend what was going on.

Now I’ve probably built up all of this suspense. Not my intention but I’ll continue my story because it’s interesting.

Story. Yes, that’s what this is about. You know… the human element to every business. The why’s, the who’s, the what’s. Any marketer would tell you that the story behind a company is what makes it interesting. Why did the founders start this company? Is there an angle to this story?

So that’s exactly what I told the client.

I said “You should write your story… write a short page saying why you started this company. For the web site.”

“Oh (long pause), I think I could do that. Ok”

“Great then! I’ll look forward to it.”

I thought nothing more of it until our next meeting. Flash forward a few weeks to our next meeting, if you will.

The client pulls out a sheet of paper “I wrote something for the story area.”

She shows me the paper and then reads what she wrote. It wasn’t longer than a few paragraphs and started this way:

“I am a mother of three young children with one on the way…”

Keep in mind this is a site geared towards consumers and probably families, so this sounds great and lines up with the business model.

The rest of the paragraph doesn’t matter. What matters is what happened next.

She changed the story.

Crossing off most of that sentence, she said “I think two kids sounds better, that seems to be the typical family.” She even crossed out the part about having a child on the way.

This is where my mind stopped. I’m thinking to myself “did she just take out a kid?? And one on the way? What?”

That’s pretty much when I realized the story wasn’t even real. It’s just marketing. More marketing without an ounce of truth in it.

The ACT web site is actually pretty nice. I like the high contrast between the content area and the background.

I hadn’t noticed the subtle refinements over at Barnes and Noble until Friday morning when I pulled it up. It has an interesting look that has progressed over the years and so I’m posting it here. The navigation looks great. It’s at least better than the new Amazon.com navigation.

In what I hope will become an ongoing theme, I present to you interesting type treatments in and around Vancouver, B.C. I took all of these pictures myself on a recent trip to the Northwest and hope you enjoy. Don’t miss my photos of Butchart Gardens.

To see the rest of the photos in this series, please click here to visit my personal photo site.

It’s Friday! Hooray! Come up with a caption for this photo and post it in the comments. Please keep it clean.

Greg Rewis, Macromedia Evangelist, will speak on/preview Studio 8 for this months Flash users group meeting.
When: August 29th, 2005 between 6 and 9 PM
Where: University of Advancing Computer Technology (I-10/Baseline in Tempe), in the Theater
What: Macromedia Studio 8 Preview
What is also very cool is that they’ve started to record and archive past meetings and stream them with Breeze. Here’s an older one.