News – Page 8 – FreeAssociates

Beyond Cradle to Cradle: The Upcycle and the Future of Sustainable Design

When I get busy, sometimes the blog suffers. Luckily, our client Be Green Packaging has put up a great, informative post about William McDonough and Michael Braungart’s new book “The Upcycle”.

They contend that companies can and should go beyond Zero Emissions and actually develop processes that improve the environment. And they present examples of some who are doing just that!

The world’s smallest movie

Made by moving atoms — yes, actual atoms!!! — using a two-ton scanning tunneling microscope that operates at minus 268 degrees Celsius. The film was built frame-by-frame, like claymation, but at 100 millionth scale. To get an idea of how tiny these things actually are, check out this link.

Further collaboration with Green Hasson Janks

Our campaign for Green Hasson Janks in the Los Angeles Business Journal continues this week with a new ad in the series featuring Howard Carter, the archaeologist who discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamen in 1922 and his backer and mentor, George Herbert, Fifth Earl of Carnarvon.

Their story has fascinated generations, and is another great example of collaboration, the theme of the ads and the guiding principle of Green Hasson Janks’s relationships with their clients.

The ad appears on the cover of this issue’s list of accounting firms, and is followed by a smaller one inside that adds more to the tale. A QR code directs readers to the company’s website where the complete story unfolds.

Check out the LABJ this week. And visit the Green Hasson Janks site to read all the examples of amazing historical collaborations.

(Here’s a link to the previous post about the campaign, too.)

World’s first sketch pen that can draw in 3D

This looks like a lot of fun. And it’s an interesting Kickstarter project.

[youtube=http://youtu.be/DQWyhezIze4]

New FreeAssociates site

Come on down! We’ve launched our new and improved website today. And we’d love to share it with you.

We invite your comments and suggestions. Thanks for your interest, your support and your friendship. We can’t do this without you.

UCLArts and Healing site goes live!

After 3-1/2 years of design, content creation and development — with many stops and starts and long pauses along the way — the new UCLArts and Healing site went live yesterday, and we couldn’t be happier!

We worked closely with the energetic and forward-looking Founding Director Ping Ho, who helped start the UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), is co-developer of the program Beat the Odds: Social and Emotional Skill Building Delivered in a Framework of Drumming, and was the principal investigator of the study upon which that program was based. She was a great client — demanding, inquisitive, passionate, and open to new ideas at every turn.

UCLArts and Healing is a partnership between the Arts and Healing Initiative (a nonprofit organization), and the UCLA Collaborative Centers for Integrative Medicine. The site is intended to be a rich resource for educators, caregivers, psychotherapists, health professionals, and anyone else who is interested in using the arts as a vehicle for development, healing and growth.

We wanted to capture the energy, fun and uplifting sense of life associated with the arts — and especially with these programs — while retaining a sense of professionalism. To do that we balanced bold, playful shapes and colors with clean, well-organized typography. Differentiating UCLArts and Healing was a critical part of our design thinking. We wanted to give the organization its own authentic identity so when you arrived, you’d know it. And you’d be curious and want to know more.

Senior designer Kevin Consales and developer Chris Grau did an amazing job. Our clients, and their clients, are thrilled. Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. Here’s a quote from one of Ping’s latest emails:

Thanks, Josh, for your brilliance!!! I think it will continue to blow people away and exactly meets the goals I set for the site. Thank you.

UCLArts and Healing is an organization with real vision and a powerful sense of purpose. We’re happy to have helped them further their good work.

Dear Google: It’s not working

Just a quick follow up to my previous post. Yes, communication works better than no communication to let the steam out of the microwavable bag of opinions, rants and whining that is an Internet forum.

But you also have to get real. And repeatedly saying “We’re working on it, but we can’t tell you what’s wrong or when it will be fixed or why we decided to launch a service that will screw up all your calendars” is not really an answer.

If Google were a little more transparent about what it’s doing here — letting us peek behind the curtain at the real, live, concerned humans who I’m sure are in fact working on a fix — they’d incur less damage to their brand, and less wrath from their customers.

If this were an IOS problem, I’d think they were actively trying to discourage iPhone and iPad users so they’d switch to Android. But it’s a Mac thing. I’m not sure the Mac platform by itself has all that much impact on Google.

Apathy? More likely. But meanwhile, if the Forum comments are any indication, Mac users of Google Calendars are switching to iCloud, which seems to actually work.

Dear Google: Talk to us

Dear Google:

A couple of weeks ago, my Mac’s Calendar app started to go crazy. Duplicate events littered my display. Multiple reminders started popping up in long columns on my screen. As I clicked to dismiss them, another swarm would surface. It was like playing Whack-a-Mole.

It turns out I was not alone.

Google Calendars, which we use to manage our shared events around here, was introducing a new syncing system and let’s say there were (are) still a few bugs. Big, hairy ones with long feelers and self-satisfied smirks on their mandibles.

And there were a LOT of angry customers on the Forums talking about this. The rants started escalating, the rhetoric was flying. Everyone was getting more and more irritated.

Fortunately Google was actually listening. Two of your customer service folks were monitoring the web and took the time just to say, “Hey, we know about it and we’re sorry. We’re working on it. Hang in there.” Suddenly the problems seemed less severe and the rabble (us) were calmed.

There’s a huge lesson to be learned here — for Google and all of us. Communication works. When Katherine and Alice posted on the forum, even if they said “We’re not sure when this is going to be done” we knew someone was listening and we weren’t just baying at each other. It calmed things down and bought Google a little more time. As huge as your system is, I can imagine teams of coders working frantically at their cubicles to fix this and not really knowing how long it will take. But keeping us up to speed as they progress toward a fix is truly helpful.

We like Google and we like our Macs, and we’re not a bunch of unreasonable jerks. But when things go wrong, it’s damned annoying. To paraphrase Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, “We’re working here!” We don’t want, can’t afford, to have our day interrupted constantly. We just want to get back to our lives.

So, Google (Alice and Katherine, I’m talking to you), keep on keeping us in the loop. And I’ll try to remember to do the same with my own clients. Thanks.

(Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment.)

Quora: What are the best new products that people don’t know about?

Yeah, this Quora article title is ripe for self-promotional mediocrity. But much of it is actually amazing. Some brilliant — even life-changing — solutions to everyday problems. I couldn’t stop reading.

A bicycle made of cardboard that’s waterproof, fireproof and will cost third-world riders $9.
A smart pitcher that tells you when your milk is sour — invented by sixth-graders.
A genome sequencer that costs about $1,000 and can sequence an entire human gene set in a few hours, vs. the 13 years and $4 billion it took to do the first one 8 years ago.
The wonderful, practical Bobble water bottle that filters your water as you drink it (we own two of them).

And so much more. Check it out — it’ll get added to as people discover the page.

Timelapse video of Endeavour

The space shuttle’s long, slow drive through the streets of Los Angeles is just beautiful, and absolutely fascinating. What’s more, the beginning footage takes place just a few blocks from where we live! I was in that parking lot this morning, in fact. Really awe-inspring. Thank you, Allen!

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