virgin mobile: screw you recession!

I don’t normally talk about my own work on here much, but Virgin Mobile’s new campaign (which I obviously helped worked on) is getting some big buzz. We started it off with a huge billboard installation at the corner of Yonge and Dundas in Toronto. Oddly enough, the balcony from my place looks across a park… right into the corner of Yonge and Dundas Square. So basically I fall asleep staring at my own copywriting on a gigantic billboard. There are worse things…

Last Friday the billboards and the impending campaign got profiled by Jennifer Wells in the Globe and Mail and the billboards got some talk time on Stimulant.  We’re working right now on a very cool website, Screw You Recession!, that’s launching very soon. So stay tuned…

joe davis: telescopic text.

Check out “Telescopic Text“, a slick little online and interactive story, from UK-based self-proclaimed “dreamer, designer, illustrator, animator, filmmaker, and musician” Joe Davis.

oneword.

Something amazing has happened today. Truly, gloriously, angel-trumpetingly amazing. If I was Mahalia Jackson, I would literally be breaking into a deep-throated chorus of “Oh Happy Day”. That’s just how happy today is.

A bit of history. A few years ago, I stumbled upon oneword. I wasn’t as much of a writer/geek/internet whore as I am now. shape+colour was just a twinkle in my eye. Beautifully simple, each day oneword gives you – wait for it –  one word and you have 60 seconds to free-flow write about it. Be literal, be poetic, be non-sensical, be Seussian – it’s all up to you. I went to oneword religiously, daily, without fail. Something about the creative simplicity of a little poetic outburst and it’s accompanying mind-drain was therapuetic, cathartic, and mildly euphoric.

And then one dark, evil day, oneword was down. The error message was non-sensical, not a site-based message but just a random geek speak. There was no soothing reassurance, no explanation, no time frame of it’s return. I didn’t realize how much I liked… nay, loved… oneword until I suddenly couldn’t have it. I checked it a few more times and begrudgingly let it go for the day.

Except that it was down the next day too. And that’s why my deepest fears were realized, as each day for the next two weeks I went to oneword and the same completely unhelpful message of broken nothingness still sat there. Eventually, for my own sanity, I had to give up. I checked a few more times, randomly, over the following weeks but after a while it just became annoying. The fucking thing was just gone.

And so, as it is with so many things that are worth loving, oneword slipped out of my life as quietly as it had slipped into it. Until last night. When, for whatever reason and I have no idea why, I went to oneword and it was back. Glory.

Here’s my oneword for today. The word was “substance”:

Created by Arvind Singh, not only was the site back up but with an explanation on his blog about what had happened: server switch error. God damn servers. I’m trying not to think about it too much because I don’t want to jinx it. My beloved oneword is back in action. That’s all that really matters.

edible.

When I first found this I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or a conceptual exercise or a viral. Turns out it’s real. Which leaves me feeling very conflicted: a mixture of curiosity, admiration, bewilderment, and abject horror.

Edible sells the most fucked up shit you’ve never eaten. And for good reason…

Edible is an online smorgasbord of exotic foodstuffs from around the world. And we’re not talking escargot-exotic. If your idea of pushing culinary boundaries is steak tartare, then please stop reading now. Because we’re talking “Giant Toasted Leafcutter Ants” exotic.

The site is so chic, and the monochromatic Helvetica-heavy packaging so modern, that you might not realize that your Antlix Lollipop isn’t just pretty to look at – it’s filled with bugs!

Besides being visually appealing, Edible is also a treasure trove of amazing sales and marketing positioning – necessary when you’re trying to sell things like this. For the Antlix Lollipop, they make it clear that not only is it peppermint flavoured (as opposed to “ant flavoured”, I suppose) but that it’s “less daunting to try”. And anytime licking ants is considered less daunting, you know you’re in for a real treat.

Real treats like Tequila Worm Lollipops, Scorpion Toffee Candy, and Scorpion Vodka…

That’s right. The Tequilalix Lollipop is not only sugar-free, but it’s got a real live worm suspended inside. If years of hitting the end of the tequila bottle and realizing that “why, yes, I am drunk enough to eat that worm” have left you desensitized, then how about scorpions. Big ones. With stingers. When you’ve reached the end of your bottle of Scorpion Vodka, there’s a full-sized edible scorpion to chow down on (though, and I’m not joking, as the site says “please be careful of the sharp stinger”). And if you want to try eating bugs while sober, there’s always Toffee Scorpion Candy.

Moving beyond insect-laden booze, the site also offers some more mainstream romantic gifts, like the Pearl Lollipop (made from ground pearls) and the hand-rolled 24 Karat Gold Lollipop. Useless, yes. Impressive, possibly.

But, let’s be real, on a website that sells Thai Curry Crickets, gold suckers are for pussies. So let’s get onto the carnivorous stuff…

That’s right. Reindeer Paté is the perfect holiday treat – sing about Rudolph while spreading Blitzen on a cracker. My personal favourite, the site makes a worthy bid for understatement of the year when it describes it’s hand-picked Mopani Worms as “an interesting addition to dinner parties”. No shit.

ten:15.

The web has allowed a whole new medium of collaborative photography to flourish. Artists teaming together is obviously nothing new, but the ease and instance of the interwebs make it totally free-flow for strangers around the world to shed their own little bit of creative light together onto one project.

I’ve noticed that lots of these collabs have found a way to focus on something universal and immutable: time. Our locations and cultures and languages are all different, but it’s always going to be 10:15 am everywhere and that’s not changing anytime soon. Similar to Craig Geffen’s awesome Humanclock, which collects photos from around the world visualizing every minute of every day, ten:15 wants you to send in a picture of whatever you happen to be doing at 10:15 am no matter where you are in the world.

There’s something about the communal collection of our banalities that make them become completely fascinating. Having photographic proof that some dude in Manila is putting cream in his morning coffee somehow creates a little more balance and order in the universe. While I was there, I noticed that a frequent collaborator to ten:15 is Michael Surtees, the man behind the lovely “New York City Colour Project”.

Uploaders can create their own user portfolio and the site and link it back to their personal site, making it a great way to search for new photographers or just to voyeuristically photo-creep on other people’s lives. You can search the archives by photographer, date, or location. There’s something about the casual nature of the photographs, that sort of laid back moment where someone picked up their camera or phone at 10:15 and just snapped, that creates some really beautiful shots – with an inherent spontaneity that can’t really be faked:

David Y. Lee – Brooklyn, NY

Verna Pitts – Minnesota

Barry Choi – Toronto

Jody Sugrue – Toronto

Here’s my first submission, sent in today. It’s my bonsai tree, Mr. Miyagi…

Via Gerry Mak @ Lost At E Minor

dear god.

I’ve never seen anything at all like this before. Dear God is a non-denominational web-based prayer project – people email their personal prayers to whatever they deem their God to be (and a picture, if you’ve got something that represents your prayer visually) and the prayers are posted onto the site. Categorized in a multi-colour sidebar, prayers are searchable by topic: Belief, Confessions, Death, Faith, Family, Friendship, Hope, Humour, Joy, Love, Money, Sex, Work, and Stress.

Maybe it’s my own stereotype of religion on the web, but I can’t get over how good this site looks. At the risk of seeming like a design-trendster, it’s just so well put together that at first I had a hard time believing it was real. Conceived by the creator of The Coolhunter and designed by excellent UK shop Something Somewhere, the site is seamless, modern, and, even though I despise the word “trendy”, it’s just… so trendy. Usually we’re used to seeing stuff on the web this slick dedicated to expensive organic juices, and designer kicks, or electing Barack Obama. But God? Really…?

Just look at how sick this logo is…

There is such a hyper-modern balance of kistch and reality going on here. If you want to sign up for the e-newsletter, you’re invited to “Get on God’s Mailing List”. Am I the only one who thinks that sounds like a joke? Do I have a heart of stone and just can’t accept that something can be this in tune with what I normally like things to look like, yet still so out of synch with things I normally read about? Like “God”.

Yet the visual gloss of the site is weighed out by the truth in people’s words. With soul-bearing stories that remind me a whole lot of Frank Warren’s iconic PostSecrets, the prayers are honest and touching. The site is still new and so most are addressed to “Dear God”, but I did see a “Dear Allah” and a “Dear Universe” in there, so clearly they are open to anyone’s interpretations of who their prayers should be going to.

The prayers themselves range from “Truth Be Told Most Of Us Quit Listening To You A Long Time Ago” to “I’m So Sick Of No One Noticing That I Don’t Eat” to “All I Really Am Is A Kid Desperate For A Hug” to “Maybe The Only Truth We Can Really Understand Is Our Own”.

One thing is indisputably clear. People have things to get off their chests.

Like most blog posts, readers can leave comments for each prayer, literally giving you a direct line to support anyone whose story touches you. Most prayers have dozens of comments – complete strangers from who knows where in the world commiserating and telling you it will all be alright. There’s something undeniably powerful about that, no matter what your religious beliefs are.

In a way, it’s simple and brilliant. In another, I’m terrified that Starbucks or that guy that wrote “The Da Vinci Code” or Bill Gates is somehow secretly sponsoring it and doing data capture. Yet I can’t deny that I keep on reading more and more of it. I’ve spent an hour reading everything on this site now. I’ve been a little bewildered and one time I cried. I’m compelled to feel grateful that I don’t feel a need to write in a prayer right now, and maybe creating gratitude is part of the point. Or perhaps it’s just knowing that no one is alone: No matter who or where in the world you are, someone somewhere else will reach out to you through all the little zeroes and ones to say that they’ve heard you.

david horvitz: “things for sale that i will mail you”.

This is the sort of bizarrely whimsical thing that’s just strange enough for people to say “why not?” and roll with it. It reminds me of Kyle McDonald’s One Red Paper Clip, where he documented online how in 14 consecutive trades he went from owning one red paper clip to owning a house. That’s right… a house.

On Things For Sale That I Will Mail You, artist David Horvitz lists all of the various tasks he will perform and then mail you proof of… if you pay him. The list is so randomly romantic and his descriptions of exactly what he will and will not do for you are so earnest that the whole thing becomes very appealing. Plus, he’s conscientious enough to make sure there’s something to fit everyone’s budget. He’s got a variety of sublimely ridiculous things he’ll do for you for only $1.

For just a buck he will look at the Pacific Ocean for you for one minute. As he so mathematically points out, if you send him $345 he will look at the Pacific Ocean for you for 345 minutes. For $1 he will also “sit in silence and think about you for one minute”. For proof, he’ll email you when he starts and then email you again when he’s done. There’s something about the assumption of trust here that I love – what more proof do you need?

Some of his offers are also a little more legitimately practical. Having been accepted to Bard University for his MFA, Horvitz posted up all of his tuition expenses and promises that all the artwork he creates during the amount of his schooling you pay for will become yours. His explanation is simple and universally understandable to anybody who went to college: “It is expensive. I am poor”. How much do I love this guy? We need to get him on Oprah… this is totally the kind of thing she’ll pay for, and then give the art to South Africa or something.

He gets more exploratory and treasure-hunty as it goes on. For $1,626 he’ll go to a small Okinawan island called Taketomi and send you an enveloped filled with this (admittedly quite pretty) star sand. If that’s a bit rich for your budget, for $20 he’ll send you an envelope filled with sand from Coney Island. Again, in what is either a feat of brilliantly laid-back copywriting or just his own intrinsic whatever-ness, Hurvitz says “It’s not star sand, but it’s still Coney Island”. He’s a little bit genius.

A lot of the offers consist of going to the edges of continents and taking a picture of the sea for you. For $1,335 he’ll go to Tiera del Fuego, for $917 he’ll go to the eastern most point of Newfoundland, and for $3,143 he’ll go to Perth, Australia. The down under trip is clearly his preference, saying “I’m a little sad right now and I would kind of like to escape, so if you are thinking about getting one of these and not sure what you want, please take in consideration my emotions and pick this one.”

Amongst his many other offers are baking cookies and handing them out on the street, buying food for homeless people, reading “The Little Prince” aloud in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and writing down a memory and mailing it to you.

He’s got a concisely compiled list of everything he’s sold. Reading through it is almost disturbingly fascinating…

There is one offer that really appeals to my idealist, emotional side. For $10 he’ll take a picture of the sky, laster print it, and mail it to you. Then he’ll delete it, meaning you will have the one and only picture of that exact patch of sky at that exact moment. This might fit into the whole “get a star named after you” category of atmospheric and celestial ownership that’s actually impossible, but there’s something I just love about the idea of it.

If you find this sky thing as appealing as I do, then Horvitz also has an on-going photo project called I Will Send You A Photograph Of The Sky For Everyday In 2008. There is something so carefree and whimsical and lovely about this that I just appreciate that he thought to put it out there into the universe. His offering is so matter of fact and direct that he comes across as some sort of random-photographic prophet:

“I will mail you the prints intermittently depending on how I feel. I may mail you one at a time as a post-card. I may mail you a whole weeks worth in one envelope. By the beginning of 2009 you will have 366 skies. Each print will be stamped with the date on the back. A list of locations with their correlating dates will be printed at the end of the year. I want you to keep them in a pile so that they become a slowly growing sculpture, which I think would look nice.”

I’m seriously thinking of getting in on this. There’s also a free-email only version, where for no charge Horvitz will email you the sky picture every day, and his site claims this is part of a larger project he’s working on where he’ll take a photograph of the sky every day for the rest of his life.

craig geffen: humancalendar.com + humanclock.com.

I wish I’d found out about this on, oh… say January 1st, but I’m only about two months late.

The latest in Craig Geffen’s duo of photographic time-keeping sites, the inspirations for Humancalendar.com came to him while riding his bicycle around Australis and wondering about the re-design for his already existing site, Humanclock.com.

His Brady-esque take on the calendar was completely conceptualized and coded by Geffen himself. Everyone in the 3,992 pictures (and I shudder to think about how he would have had to keep them all organized, facing the right angles, to make this thing work…) are all friends of his. I go there every day – almost not so much to see what day it is (I already know that) but more just to see if he ever fucks it up. He never does.

Humanclock is the site that started it all. Created in 2001, you just pick your timezone and the site shows you a photo representing the time. The pic changes each minute, and each minute has several photos sent in from all around the world. Here’s the one I got, sent from Tel Aviv, at the minute I started writing this post. Clearly, it’s fate, and I’m a big fan of anything involving what appears to be some kind of Tropical Skittle (or the Israeli version, at any rate):

Humanclock gets really addictive really fast, and the inventiveness of the photos never gets old. Price tags, license plates, people lying in the middle of the road – you never know what you’re gonna’ get. Similar to other personalized user-contributed photo sites (like the amazing You Are Beautiful), there’s something about the easy straight-forwardness of all this that I really enjoy. We’re dealing with some pretty quantified concepts here, and yet they seem so organic and happy on his sites.

cookthink.

Cookthink is a lot like Musicovery for your food. Instead of the music-radios site’s colour and emotion based searches, Cookthink asks the simple question “what are you craving?”. Then you can enter in specific ingredients, dishes, cuisine styles, or “mood” and the search engine will bring up recipes to satisfy you. The moods are pretty entertaining unto themselves, ranging from experiential ideas like “festive” and “hangover-friendly” to more enigmatic choices like “resinous”, “minimalist”, and “oceany”.

shape + colour on she does the city.

How cool is this? My li’l ol’ blog got featured on Cyber Stalker at She Does The City.

Thanks to righteous babe Rachel M. at She Does The City for making me seem much cooler than I actually am.