Take That in Cardiff, also Oasis for that matter

Over the last week Cardiff has been invaded on friday Oasis were in town and performed at the Millennium Stadium, then yesterday and I believe today Take That are in town, a slightly different Lancastrian band but no less popular. These are huge events for the city and the events pretty much take over the whole city centre. The clean up alone is huge and is pretty similar to the end of a six nations game.

Obama kills fly - slightly dubbed

Saw the report of this on the BayCar this morning on BBC breakfast, granted this one is slightly dubbed but made me laugh.

we are having branding.hoffi

So what if .com and .co.uk became obsolete and you could have any ending. I can think of the endless possibilities. A recent study in conjunction with The Future Laboratory is looking into the possible changes in internet endings.

Do Lectures

I came across this flickr presentation about the Do Lectures via howies blog. Over the last few years with my involvement with Cardiff Design Festival it is so obviously about people who get things done and go beyond talking. Through our (Hoffi) work with the Design Festival we setup up www.nakedwales.com to try and drive art + design community and also bring exposure to those who want to put the effort in. It is still early days with the site but hopefully it will develop and grow. Ultimately though it is up to the community to make it what they want.

Recession what should we all do?

It's funny that when recession hits peoples first instincts are to reduce their spend on nearly everything. Being a director in Hoffi a brand design business it obvious that I am going to say that our clients should keep there advertising and design budget the same and if they want to become a bigger player in the market then they should even look at spending more. However where is the proof? I came across this article via twitter and Paul Rowen. This is some of the first historic information I have found to support the concept of increasing spend during times of recession. 

See here for the article

iPhone 3G S - announced on american site

There have been rumours of the latest incarnation of the iPhone for months and some sneak previews of the new bits and pieces that will be incorporated into the Phone. For me personally I got a 3G iPhone a few months ago and as you start to use the phone you start to realise how brilliantly it works. I always described it to people as mobile phones up to now have functioned yet the iPhone just works. The way you can switch from text to web to email are fantastic and truly groundbreaking, with some of the finger gestures being incorporated in to the most recent MacBooks (interesting if this would have happened if Mac never went into phones). 

Yet as time goes on the shine dulls and you start looking a bit more objectively at the iPhone. In someways the iPhone is a victim of it's own success, because it works so well you think it should do other things automatically and then get annoyed when it does have the ability. For me the obvious things that the 3G model should definitely had was the ability to send an image with a text, be able to rotate the keyboard allowing for bigger fingers, record video and finally copy and paste from application to application. So fast forward to the 3G S and all of these have been incorporated into the new model plus having a better camera quality (i secretly wanted that as well). 

So the question as always with Mac is are their products designed we obvious gaps in their products which allow for 'new' models? It's an age old issue and very much a chicken and egg situation. On the one hand you could argue if you only brought out a product when 100% happy with it you would never bring it out at all, as it would always be in production. Yet on the other hand are companies such as iPhone designing with definite stages in mind to maximize sales and profit.

New way of looking at things

Came across this lovely way of visualising a map. The map shows the London underground via time.