ALL CAPS DAY

emailcap I was going to applaud Zazzle for making up their own holiday and excuse for a sale.

But what do I know? October 22 was ALL CAPS DAY and I find out it's real holiday! The one day when it's okay to write email subject lines and SHOUT OUT YOUR OFFER.

Pretty cool anyway. (I wonder what they did for Talk Like A Pirate Day, my favorite holiday.)

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With flying colors

Pantone, the esteemed purveyor of color released new color trends for 2010. All I can ask is, who names this stuff? (I always thought it would be fun to name lipsticks and fingernail polish shades.) Greenmarket The need for healthier and more artisanal foods has grown from traditional farmers’ markets to greenmarkets.

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Gatherings Inspired primarily by the continent of Africa with its vastness and complexities, Gatherings brings together a compilation of colors that demonstrate the uniqueness of the region.

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Galaxy Purveyor and source of light, the mysterious Galaxy is well reflected in a palette that truly illustrates the harmony of hue found in the nocturnal sky.

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Images from Pantone

Little Picassos: What Kids Can Teach Us About Creativity

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."PABLO PICASSO

As adults, we often talk about unleashing our inner Picassos. But with kids, their Picasso hasn’t been buried yet. And in their enthusiasm they can teach us about creative problem solving.

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I had the pleasure and delight of teaching an art lesson to my daughter’s second grade art class as part of a volunteer group that brings art into the classroom. At this age, the kids aren’t self-conscious yet and just let the creativity flow out of them. This lesson dealt with the graphic importance of line and shape and the contrast between geometric and organic lines.

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For this project, we were drawing monsters in black and white. Now if I had asked the kids to just begin drawing a monster, I would have ended up with a class of kids staring at a blank piece of paper. (And as we’ve all experienced at one time or another during the creative process, that blank piece of paper, screen or canvas can be the scariest monster we ever have to face.)

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To jumpstart the process, the kids dropped a string on the paper, traced it and “found” their monsters. The organic shape of string on paper provided a great springboard for the kids. They needed very little encouragement as they located the mouth, teeth or various body parts of their monsters. The kids added tails, feet, antennae, feelers, scales, a multitude of eyeballs and other body parts that defied description. As you can see, one kid drew a monster truck instead of a monster. (Kudos to that maverick for making the assignment his own.)

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As creative professionals, we make a living being creative on command. While creativity can’t exactly be learned, there are ways to foster it. And often, the hardest step is taking the first step. So the trick is developing an arsenal of “strings.” What can you use as inspiration or a starting point? One of my favorite ways to begin a project is walk away from the computer, take a stroll to a bookstore and enjoy an hour of browsing. One art director I’ve worked often looks a problem from a reverse point of view, which is an excellent way to get a fresh perspective once you’ve had time to sink your teeth into a project.

A key is to keep your mind open to additional stimulus and to make connections to problems you are working on. Recently, overhearing a conversation between two programmers during a Jelly co-working session gave me an extra insight when I working on naming a retail project in Texas.

It was enlightening to see how the children’s creativity fed off of one another once they started. One table became very carnivorous as one girl drew the fish that her shark was going to eat. Suddenly, dinner appeared outside the mouths of many dragons, fish and serpents and one child made his monster have an external digestive track. At another table, one boy realized his camel also looked like a map of the United States and drew stars and stripes for his American Camel.

The biggest lesson learned? Have a sense of humor and have fun.

I’ll be teaching more art classes this year, so there’s more to come!

Windows 7: A Time Sucker

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cX4t5-YpHQ&hl=en&fs=1&] Hey, if Ford can create excitement for cars via Tuberware parties, so can Microsoft. Here, they have every demographic covered in this HGTV-style show on how to host a launch party. But time must really drag because the clock behind the cast starts out at 2:00ish, between seconds :46 and :48, the hours pass instantly from 3:30 to 4:10 and the whole video ends at 5:20 pm. Maybe that's how much time it takes to get your Windows 7 working.

Larry Keenan

Some of my earliest memories are trying to fall asleep at night during the summers while the hippie teenagers next door sat in the front yard and played the Beatles, Stones and everything else on their guitars. If those kids had been just a few years older and living on their own, their apartments may have looked like this. This is the work of Larry Keenan, a groovy photographer from the Bay Area who captures the Beats, the Human Be-in and all the wonder before the Summer of Love became mainstream. These shots are excerpts from essays Larry did on interiors of counterculture homes and life in the counterculture with children.

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See more of Larry's timeless work here.

Interactive Spelling.

86364890 Every once in a while, I have to go back and review how things are spelled.

Internet – The omnipresent wonder invented by Al Gore gets a capital I.

Intranet – No capital.

Web page – Another capital letter. It’s two words.

home page – Two words.

email – No hyphen. Yes, it used to have a hyphen but it was dropped.

e-business, e-commerce, etc. – These have hyphens. Go figure.

But in general, the rule of thumb is consistency. If you want to spell webpage as two words go ahead. Just be consistent.

Time really flies.

william_shatner It’s something that happens to us all. You click to buy something and the eternal beach ball of hell appears, spinning and spinning while systems process a particular request. It’s the online equivalent of being put on hold on the telephone and being treated to bad elevator music.

Come on, let’s use this down time to entertain, or at least promote the product. When Alaska Airlines is processing flight information, Tim the Moose nonchalantly strolls across the screen. But my hands down favorite has to be for travel discounter Priceline, where during processing times, customers are treated to shots of longtime spokesperson William Shatner doing karate chops and proclaiming, “Watch me flex my bargainus maximus.”

What a pity they don’t have him singing.

When it's okay to break the rules.

thoushaltlong Recently, my six-year old daughter was looking over my shoulder as I was writing some ad copy.

She then said, “Hey Mom, you can’t start a sentence with and.”

“Well, Gina,” I said, rather at a loss for words, wondering how does she know this, “I’m writing Web copy. It’s okay to break the rules.”

My apologies to Gina’s first-grade teacher Mrs. Willis, I am one of those responsible for the decline of the English language. But as a copywriter, I’m not writing to please English teachers, I’m writing to strike an emotional chord with consumers in a hope to reach their wallets.

Occasionally, when a client reviews Web copy, they may question grammar usage. While overly formal, grammatically perfect copy may be a put off, overly casual language may look unprofessional. The idea is to find an appropriate balance.

In short, what’s the golden rule to remember? Consider your audience. When your audience is insurance brokers, the tone will be more formal than when hawking fish tacos.

Grammar rules that are okay to break:

1. Starting a sentence with “And” or “But”: Yes, it’s perfectly acceptable to start with conjunctions. Just remember that it is slightly more informal.

2. Contractions: Don’t. Aren’t. Isn’t. They’re all okay.

3. Sentence fragments: When you write like you speak, it’s okay to use sentence fragments for drama or emphasis. Really.

4. Slang: Go ahead and use slang, just be sure not to overdo it. Web copy for Jump Mobile, a pre-paid wireless service designed for mobile-dependent, urban youth, is informal yet very light on urban euphemisms. Nothing is worse than a client trying to appeal to a target market and looking like a poser instead.

5. One-sentence or one-word paragraphs: This is particularly applicable to writing for the Web. Readers are typically skimming a Web page looking for a particular piece of information. Huge blocks of text can be visually intimidating and chances are, your reader will go click, click, good-bye.

So there you go. Write. Relate. Have fun. Get results.