No matter how far you travel. No matter how exotic the location or the people. Everything looks the same when you are staring at your iPhone, your Facebook feed, your…

Look up! Be present. Talk to the stranger next to you. Don’t travel hundreds of miles only to remain in the same place.

Google, in their on-going quest to omnipotence has released a fantastic tool called the  Ngram Viewer  which basically lets you search the frequency of specific words over the entire Google Books directory. And then it spits out a fancy graph of the data. Crazy, right?

Even better is that I used it to finally settle a long-term score: most popular recurring monster/menace in literature history.

http://img808.imageshack.us/img808/1770/ngrammonstersmenacesv2.png

If I were a betting man, the smart money was probably on Vampires, but who knew Pirates were that popular for that long?

And what on earth happened in the 1980s? Did Isaac Asimov just go bananas at his typewriter? I mean, don’t get wrong, I  love  robots and all, but this is taking it a bit far, no?

Mack Collier makes a compelling case for focusing on your brand evangelists. He contrasts the all-to-common preoccupation of most companies with marketing to new customers — people who currently don’t use your product or service — to the approach of the average rockstar. Rockstars tend to focus most of their energy on the people who already like them and believe in what they do.

Why would we do this when the market of new customers is vastly larger than the much smaller pool of people who already love our product or service?

Perhaps because research indicates that brand evangelists tend to spend 13% more with your company and they tend to refer business equal to 45% of what they spend.

As Mack so nicely sums up:

So let’s compare and contrast the two approaches:

Company – Targets New Customers. Loses them just as quickly as it gains them, so constantly having to reinvest in getting more New Customers to replace the ones it lost yesterday.

Rockstar – Targets Brand Advocates (Fans). Brand Advocates have a strong sense of loyalty for the Rockstar, so they not only stay as customers, they go out and actively recruit New Customers, Existing Customers, and customers with Some Brand Affinity to buy from the Rockstar.

Mack’s article is worth a read.

Lost Type Co-op has some really nice fonts and 100% of funds from these sales go directly to the designers.

Hint: Type “0” for a free download.

Thank you, Colin Harman. (Clients from Hell had it first, but it was just too brilliant not to re-post.)

Over the past few months, we have completely reinvented our studio’s approach to web development. We have adopted a mobile first, responsive design strategy that is informed by strong content strategy . While there are many reasons for our adoption of this new web design and development workflow, a driving factor is the market penetration of the iPhone and now the iPad.

While much has been made of the consumer rush to adoption of the iPad, it is now clear that corporate America has also taken note. The iPad is beginning to penetrate the Enterprise zone :

…many corporations are actively engaging in large-scale implementation, with management backing and IT support. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that 65% of the Fortune 500 has already deployed iPads or has pilot programs in the works, while trade magazine Network World now puts the figure at 80%. Of course, we don’t know just how many people within these corporations actually have company-purchased iPads, and how many of those are running company-sanctioned applications. But with names like Dupont and JP Morgan Chase in the mix, this is by any definition a big deal.

In case you haven’t gotten your daily dose of swooshes, eagles, and pseudo-airline-looking logos, CNN posted preliminary logos for the 2012 presidential campaigns. I posted Mr. Huntsman’s logo above since I thought it was an odd outlier that looked more appropriate for a Hotel than a campaign… not that I don’t appreciate people bucking the trend.

Speaking of bucking a trend (or just outright over-doing it), don’t miss the last logo in the slideshow, as it features a previous Louisiana governor’s attempt to wrangle unfortunate type gradients under what looks like a smoky, half-sun/moon. Man, oh man.

Craig Robinson’s site, Flip Flop Fly Ball, combines the love of baseball fan and a love of design. He creates wonderful info graphics (seen above), and he even has sections for pixel drawings and iPhone paintings.

QR codes by themselves are just another tool for engaging with customers. Where they begin to deliver value is when they are used in the service of great ideas that solve real problems for real consumers.

In South Korea, a grocery store set up a virtual store in a the subway station . Commuters on their way home from work can scan the QR Codes on the products, add the products to their shopping carts, and place an order online. The real groceries arrive at the commuter’s home shortly after they do. 

That is smart.

Why do some companies survive changes in the market and evolve their offerings while others are unable to make the transition?

Part of the answer may be that companies organized around a core idea — rather than a core product or technology — are in a better position to adapt to change.

This article from The Economist explores some of today’s tech companies through this lens:

An elegant organising idea is no use if a company cannot come up with good products or services, or if it has clueless bosses. But on the basis of this simple formula—that a company should focus on an idea, rather than a technology—which of today’s young tech giants look best placed to live to 100?