Ben Maxwell's blog
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About the author
Hello, I'm Ben. I write about things I'm interested in: brands, design, marketing and communications and how these can be used to create a more sustainable world.
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.
Albert Einstein (via the excellent mrsamweller)
Stories trump statistics
Zainab Salbi - Iraqi American writer, activist and social entrepreneur
via @johnmaeda at davos
I never seen this brand before but I love it. The packet just yells energy.
Photograph by the super talented Simon deGlanville of the urban wildlife fame
Design in the backwoods
Really enjoyed a series of blog posts about the design and meaning of signage in and around the National parks of Northern Wisconsin by Richard Bucht. The posts are a great read - opinionated and multi-referenced they’re really similar to having a conversation with Richard himself at the Garrick St Waterstone’s.
The signs are natural and easy going. Being hand-crafted from the woods themselves they respectfully integrate into their surroundings rather than demand to be noticed. Conventional typography and layout rules are foregone and a truer meaning emerges. As he says in the first post “When and where is ‘good design’ good design?”
Maths doesn’t change behaviour
I love Calvin and Hobbes! To me, this strip highlights the problem with the approach that a lot of organisations take with behaviour change: the insistence on quantifying everything.
How can we expect to change behaviour if people don’t care?
Know your audience!
The WHSmith at London City airport showcases finance, ski and wine books instead of the usual John Grishams and Dan Browns. They know what interests their audience of well heeled, picky business travellers. What are your audience interested in?
Found this looking through my brother-in-law’s present pile. Its Beck’s first simplified sketch of the underground map. I like the principles that Beck (not that Beck) applied to simplify it from the unworkable previous versions:
- make all lines either horizontal, vertical and diagonal
- remove link to geographic scale to show relatives rather than absolutes
Amazing to think that the map that we all have a strange affinity with started as a spare time project.
Saying no is such a powerful differentiator.
Especially in this world of growth obsessed aquiessence (think google and yahoo giving dissendents’ web history to the Chinese authorities).
What can your brand be known for saying ‘NO’ to?
Don’t have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve.
From a post about how an organisation can catch-up on web strategy on Seth’s Blog
My mate Tom is trying to buy these trainers. I love how Agassi is framed in this image: bursting into the frame from left. Explosive and impossible to contain.
(image via www.whatsalltheracquet.com)
A Japanese street jazz band giving a lunch time concert is pretty much the last thing you expect to see outside a photography shop. That’s what I love about Lomo and what makes them such a great brand. They understand that life is all about the exciting things that happen when you mix it up.
