Marie-Lynn Richard

Now that Xrumer 7.0 Elite can make sense of most CAPTCHAs, we need a new completely automated public Turing tests to tell Computers and humans apart.

Why are we making humans prove they are human while it is much simpler to catch robots being robots? Let’s create a completely confusing UX for spambots and be done with most of their shenanigans!
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Last week I was flabbergasted when a colleague was offered a list of my friends and (OMG!) friends of friends, after signing up and adding me on Facebook. Why did this happen? I wasn’t able to replicate this ‘feature’ exactly, however, I was able, without much effort to retrieve my own friends list anonymously, even though it is purposefully hidden from everyone. Add this unintentional feature to the ‘real name from email’ vulnerability and you have a powerful information tool in Facebook.
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If you look through the amazing book, World of Logotypes, The Trademark Encyclopedia by Al Cooper (Art Direction Book Company, Inc., 1978) you will find many logos that look similar. Back then it was a bit more complicated to make sure your logo, an image meant to visually distinguish you from the competition, didn’t infringe on someone else’s trademark. Or maybe not, because there are still so many similarities between logos in the book.

CBC’s iconic logo has a nuclear cousin in Seattle, WA.

One of the ways to make sure your logo is original is to pay a company millions of dollars to come up with a logo so crappy, there couldn’t possibly be a similar one out there. But that has its own PR issues.

As a consumate generalist I am not a logo designer. That being said I have designed about a dozen logos which were happily adopted. I just do it because I can’t afford a logo designer.

My strategy for creating something that is unique: Be weird and/or cheesy.

I created the PingCognito logo in Picnik using the basic clip arts. I think that might have been the program used to create the new Gap logo as well!!

For Atomic Rave, I completely ripped off a traditional music symbol signaling the player to take his foot off the pedal, and colored it purple. Why purple? Because it is the color of glowing Helium, the inert gas whose atoms are photo-displaced to generate movement and therefore power. Because an Atomic Rave Engine cannot be stopped, it requires no ‘gas’ pedal and it doesn’t deplete fossil fuels… It’s also similar in design to the internal components of the generator which is particularly well suited to create propeller driven vehicles. Could it be more obvious as a logo?! Therefore it falls into the cheesy category! One of the requirements of the logo design is that it will be used for many related projects, so we need to make it ‘iteration-friendly’. It’s a work in progress.

One of the biggest pitfalls of logo design is sticking too close to a one letter design. But then again, if your company starts with an S, it makes it easier to query and research companies which MIGHT have a similar logo.

The following two logo gaffes bend my mind because they copy the design of very well known Internet properties.

Ohhh, Democrats!

Haven’t you ever stumbled upon anything?!

I have been tinkering with Pivot graphs over the past year to present expertise held by us programmers. It’s not easy to represent expertise and experience of a programmer over time because we accrue so much obtuse knowledge. The end result will likely be a 3D environment representing platforms, frameworks, programming languages, projects and positions over time. When filling out the programming language database, I came across more than 400 but will likely stick to the major ones for starters.

I am of the opinion that resumes are absolutely useless. Having hired so many Web workers, I know that they are hardly accurate. As a polymath overachiever with a short attention span, my cv is full of awesome experiences in so many areas which leaves recruiters bewildered. Not having applied for a job in years, I don’t have a recent resume. When pressed by event organizers or head hunters for one I lazily supply them with my LinkedIn profile. Who has time to update a resume?

But recently I was inspired by David McCandless to do a simple visual resume of my experience over the past 16 years based on activities and responsibilities with a little extra thrown in. While it’s a very partial and succinct listing of my experience, I like how tidy it turned out.

The CV was created with MS Excel and screen grabbed into a graphic software. I briefly fantasized about doing this in HTML5 :P

It is so interesting to read and learn from other designers who are building game dynamics into life tasks. Most of these thought leaders come from the world of gaming rather than the world of business. Building good game dynamics into life tasks is not simply a brilliant idea, it’s an imperative because it is how people under 30 are used to doing things. The merging of gaming and the rest of our lives is the most promising concept of the next decade.