Noveltown talks to marketing company, Visual Resource about Flash animation for Adobe - By N.L. Belardes

Marketing gurus, Kellyann Lamb and Scott Gagner become
a visual resource to meteorologists everywhere...

Educational eye candy. I love it. When I think of flashy videos that can teach you, or that promote a marketing agenda in a fun way, I think of the stylized instructional film on the Indiana Jones Adventure ride. You walk through tunnels and ruins in a hidden archaeological dig, and, to help you buy into the idea that you are an explorer—and that you need to be safe on the ride—there’s a video about how you’re supposed to work the seatbelts on the mock jeeps. It’s a brilliant production and keeps with the theme.

Creativity in stylized films and animations aren’t new to the marketing world. It’s not just about Disneyland or Las Vegas where themes can be overbearing in a sort if Willy Wonka landscape of animated information.

Stylized marketing and creativity can even reach right into your home via the Internet. Noveltown has its own Flash intro page that we hope to expand upon. Ken Seward of Solomon Grundy Film from Savannah College is working on that. As long as you have the right kind of creative team, Flash can be a versatile tool to use when creating interfaces and productions that need some extra punch.

With the release of Acrobat 8 comes the stylized Flash piece, “The Ultimate Formula.” You can watch the instructional video on Adobe’s promotional page for their new version of Acrobat. Or you can go to the site of the marketers who developed the video: Visual Resource.

What’s the animation meant to do? Teach people that Adobe 8 can help streamline marketing processes along with Acrobat Connect. Connect documents, people, ideas…



The Adobe site reads:

Whether you're in product marketing, public relations, brand development, or corporate communications, you face pressure to work faster, juggle multiple projects simultaneously, and generate high-quality work on tight deadlines. Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional software can help by streamlining and expediting many of the creative processes managed by marketing professionals, enabling you to gain control and finish projects faster.

Cool, but I wanted to know more about the creative process with Visual Resource… so I explored further.

Here’s my interview with Visual Resource President Kellyann Lamb and art director Scott Gagner:

Noveltown: Visual Resource had to create a Flash animation that captured the corporate world in a light-hearted way. Yet, this is a corporate product. How did you juggle ideas that some could deem offensive, and then storyboard those out?

Scott Gagner: When Adobe signed on they saw what we’d done was often over the top and pretty innovative. They knew what they were getting into. And that takes a lot of trust. They wanted us to have fun with our designs and were willing to take the ride.

There were subtle things along the way in the animation to make sure Adobe knew we weren’t poking fun or saying they were old fashioned. Really, those variations are barely perceptible on listener part. The character takes a specific tone in the voice-over when walking through the demo. It’s not as over the top in the wrapper section intros.



Kellyann: Adobe is pretty sophisticated in what’s going on in the marketing realm. It takes a lot to bedazzle them… from there we had a lot of creative license… We do have a relationship with Adobe brand information within their organization that was successful, so we were introduced to product marketers. Focusing on interactive media, they wanted something savvy and different. It became a great opportunity to be challenged and to wow Adobe and this vertical market…

Noveltown: Within the animation piece is the idea that PDFs have come a long way, yet the style is an overly nice 1950s science teacher caught on film. What’s the relationship with progressive knowledge and marketing style?

Scott: We were showing modern innovation with drastic contradictory old style. A juxtaposition of old and new creates something unique. We wanted something timeless and unique… The style of the piece is very rich. There are a lot of elements you can draw from and build in the humor factor. Everyone has seen these kinds of films in Driver’s Education and Heath Education classes…

Noveltown: How important is Flash? Does it revolutionize the Web, or is Flash just fancy eye candy for information?

Scott: The way we look at Flash is it’s just another tool. It comes down to the big idea, in the case of Noveltown or anybody. If you only needed three panels with an animated gif, then you don’t necessarily need Flash. There are nice advantages. Low impact as far as bandwidth and crisp edged vectors…

Kellyann: We’re innovative… it’s most important to come up with a solid concept to get clients results. It’s more of who are you trying to reach and how are they going to respond. We do Flash quite a bit, but it’s not a prerequisite.



Noveltown: Who is Doctor Arnold modeled after? Is there any secret science teacher information here, or is the doctor one of the Visual Resource staff used as a cut-out animation? Any info on the artistic process?

Scott: We didn’t make it an in-house joke. The piece needed a universal relevance. We cast it to find the right person, a guy who could fit the character, and hearken back to their old math teachers.

Artistically there are subtleties of collage and cut-out.

We tried to embody with nerdy scientific values. We used different proportions of head to body ratios to accentuate brainy. That includes the way we cut his jaw out as we used collage styles. We really associate with Terry Gilliam’s animations from Monty Python. That gave this character a stiffness—we didn’t want any fluidity. And so we sort of created our own world where physics and anatomy don’t apply: he sort of slides from side to side…

Noveltown: How will this animation be viewed culturally around the world? Will there be any problems interpreting the humor?

Scott: During the creative process the response was overwhelmingly positive regardless of cultural backgrounds. We’re internationally aware so that no offensive hand signal or anything like that was used. There’s an international universality…

Noveltown: What’s “The Ultimate Formula” going to do for Visual Resource in the long run?

Kellyann: Exposure in the marketplace about our creativity as a company. Today everyone is getting influenced by email, TV ads, and so on…We need to step out and have an outreach that is entertaining and effective. This was a great opportunity for that.


There's an apparent creative culture that exists with Visual Resource
that doesn't exist in many marketing and advertising companies/departments. Oops, did I say that? It's true. Just ask Kellyann and Scott about avocado art...

Noveltown: And your company blog? When is that starting up?

Kellyann: Six months…! There’s a diverse group at Visual Resource. We want a forum where different team members can post things like what they were inspired by…

Booksquare asks: “Do Publishing Houses have a future?” - By Melinda Carroll

Do Publishing Houses have a future? It’s an interesting question. With the wider range of publishing options authors have, Kassia Krozer of Booksquare talks about the future of big publishing houses and how they will have to evolve to compete.

Kassia Krozer writes:

“Most books simply aren’t marketed, at least in ways that impact the reader. Most books are dumped on the market and told to sink or swim.

Publishers will distinguish themselves with editing and marketing skills. Editing, we have decided will gain new importance in the future world — an about-face from today’s bottom-line, shareholder driven model. In a world where anyone can throw up their work, it will be the good stuff (or the most salacious) that attracts a wider audience. We might chide today’s youth for their casual approach to things like punctuation and spelling, but complete sentences and words that are not one step away from initialisms will continue to matter. Good editing will continue to matter.

Marketing, too, will be an asset offered by publishers. As we all know, today, most books simply aren’t marketed, at least in ways that impact the reader. Most books are dumped on the market and told to sink or swim. This is an inefficient way to run a business, but that’s how it’s always been done in publishing, and only the future — that future with more competition and more at stake — will change this. Once committed to the notion of fighting to acquire and retain authors, we believe that publishers will find new and creative ways to market the books these authors write.

Publishers must, necessarily, adapt to new processes to grab an increasingly fragmented audience… We are not sure that publishers — the big entrenched ones — fully understand how to go about this. Time and again, they miss what’s going on, they lack the key ingredient of today’s online culture: authenticity.”

(Read the full article)

Krozer brings up good points. I think this is why more and more authors today are turning to Indie publishers like Noveltown. Indie publishers work more closely with their authors, pay more attention to editing and find creative ways to market books and reach readers. Books aren’t just thrown on the market to sink or swim with Indie publishers like Noveltown. Rather authors and books receive individual attention to make each book as successful as possible when every dollar counts.

A Conversation about Community-Building with Lloyd Y. Asato, founder of the One Million Splotz of Glue Campaign - By N.L. Belardes

Lloyd Y. Asato in comfy chair at some coffeehouse

The civic-minded philosophers of the world. One such thinker, Lloyd Y Asato, has sat in coffee houses with his friends and colleagues to ponder not only his civic duty, but yours, mine, and even children whose ideas may be listened to, but not allowed to help fulfill. Such trust issues have bothered him as he has pondered such ideas for a half-dozen years or more: how can kids help, how can we learn to trust each other, how can we act on commitment, and help build community?

That doesn’t mean Lloyd isn’t a doer. And no, he doesn’t just sit in coffeehouses. Recently, Asato started a project called “The One Million Splotz of Glue Campaign”. His website states, “It begins with a question. What do you do to build community? Your answer, the action that you do to build community, is what we call Splotz of Glue.

“Splotz of Glue are the key everyday actions that we do to be better informed, to connect with others, to build trust, and to get involved. Splotz of Glue, when done together and in abundance, have the cumulative effect of improving the quality of life in our neighborhoods.”

I met Lloyd through another philosopher, a trade magazine editor who somehow discovered Lloyd’s campaign. I never asked how. I quickly found Lloyd’s thoughts to be invigorating, passionate and honest.

The conversation that ensued makes for one of the best interviews I’ve ever had here on the Paperback Writer blog. The deeper question for me is how do I take Noveltown further into the community-building process? What can we do to help invigorate civic vitality here in Bakersfield and beyond through what Noveltown is doing on a national level through its forthcoming magazine? Such philosophic pondering is meant not for inaction, but action. I’m hoping this is just the first in a series of interviews with Lloyd Y. Asato.


Read our conversation:

Noveltown: We at Noveltown are definitely community builders. We started with an idea, moved to creating one book out of many to come, a media blog, and now we’re moving to a print magazine as well. It’s more than a literary community, it’s a community of people who read, who are active, who believe in cultural arts, who are thinkers, and more. Lloyd, you have a unique idea in building community called Splotz of Glue. It seems to be a seed that will grow with many branches and leaves. It has to potential to grow tall from all the leaders (community builders taking part). How do you think we can apply your ideas to what we’re doing here at Noveltown?

Lloyd: I think I need to move to Noveltown. You have just described the perfect neighborhood for me, one full of culturally and politically active readers. I was lucky. I grew up surrounded by books and without a television in the house. I do not think we owned a television until I was in middle school and by then it held little interest for me. I was also lucky in that I had a mother and mentors who lived community service. They worked very hard to improve their neighborhoods and it became an assumed lifestyle for me.

I am very careful to clarify that the "community" I want to build is the neighborhood. The geographical area around where you live and work. And that "building community" is the process by which we increase or enhance social capital. When we "build community"; we increase knowledge or support learning, we connect with people, we get to know them and hopefully build trust, and then we act.

What Noveltown and its denizens can do is reflect on these four cornerstones of community - Learn | Connect |Trust | Act. Learn about the issues and politics that affect literacy, and speech, expression. Learn more about the systems and people who support or challenge what you believe in. Connect with them. Learn about what is working in other places and do it in Noveltown and then do it in your own neighborhood.

One of the joys of Splotzing is watching how people unpack these cornerstones (Learn | Connect |Trust | Act). So, I challenge you. How do you think you can help people learn, connect, trust, and then act? What simple everyday things can you do to build community? Maybe it is starting a book loan club or participating in reading programs? Maybe it is doing a television for books swap like they do with guns? Books for guns also works. What do you think?

Noveltown: You’ve just given us a lot to think about and ponder: How does Noveltown fit into the different senses of community. We must ponder our own physical interaction with community, and then act!

We’re talking about starting workshops here at Noveltown for bloggers and for fiction/non-fiction writers. You recently wrote on your site, “What I originally wanted to do with The One Million Splotz of Glue Campaign was to use it as framework for facilitating community building workshops.” Tell me more about workshops, especially about “Silly Workshops.”

Lloyd: I should explain that the name "silly workshops" came from my Department Chair at the University. He thought that the idea of using resources to do community building workshops for young people was silly when people were dying from hunger. I was not able, at the time, to tell him that they were not silly and that I believed that these silly workshops would develop a team of leaders that may one day go on to end hunger. I am able to say that now.


Lloyd: This is how we can save the world. Silly workshops with young people and old.

The idea for the silly workshops came from a coffeehouse discussion. It started as an exercise to describe a preferred neighborhood. Then someone jumped in with, okay what can we do to build this place? I started to reflect on that. I became convinced by the research on social capital, that showed neighborhoods with high levels of trust and civic vitality were neighborhoods that residents described as having a good quality of life.

I began wondering. If we identified simple everyday activities that increased trust and civic vitality, then deliberately tried to do them in abundance, could we build the kinds of communities we wanted to live in? This became the foundation (Learn | Connect |Trust | Act) for The One Million Splotz of Glue Campaign.

The workshop design is based upon classic facilitation. Brainstorm, clarify, organize or prioritize, commit, then do. Then come back a few months later to reflect, celebrate, adjust, and do again.


Lloyd: We need to stop doing conferences and start talking to one another, face to face, and engage each other in discourse and action

Ask the question, "What can we do to increase trust in our neighborhood?" List the ideas (brainstorm). Ask people to clarify and expand on their idea. Organize the ideas (affinity grouping) or prioritize them. Then ask the group to build a to-do list. Make a commitment to do one or more of these actions then do them. Have a follow up workshop in a few months to track progress, adjust, and commit again.


Lloyd: This is a protest march in Madison. I love a parade.

Noveltown: I think Noveltown has to understand where and what its neighborhood really is. But you gave me an idea. A workshop that teaches as well as has a community spirit. Now there would be something unique. For instance, teaching people how to write fiction, and then that same group, with all its diversity then decides what it can do to create that civic vitality within what it can affect: a literacy organization? A library? Who knows. A ‘silly workshop’ must take place before that can happen.

Where is Spotz of Glue based? Do people have to live near you to take part?

Lloyd: Splotz of Glue is based at www.BeTheGlue.org. Learn from the site. Contribute ideas and ask lots of questions.

I think that the workshops need to happen in your neighborhood. My hope is to encourage people to build their own community by engaging in their neighborhood. We can connect and learn from the website but then we need to act locally.

I live in Arizona. But I have broadband and a car so I can be a cheerleader and ally to anyone anywhere.

Noveltown: Splotz of Glue is moving toward connecting to one million people. How will you do that? Will you be on MySpace.com as well? Here at Noveltown we recently pledged to connect to 10,000 people on MySpace. It’s a much smaller number, yet still daunting to us…

Lloyd: Well, as of this interview I have collected three Splotz so it is not a challenge yet.

I have no idea. I trust that an AJAX jedi will show up and offer a better way. Do you know of any?

I get asked this question a lot and I have no answer. I share the idea and hope others will share it as well. If they reflect on it and think it does not suck maybe it will travel.

A quick answer is that we have to start doing the silly workshops. That is where we can generate lots of Splotz of Glue.

We are not on MySpace yet, but I will set that up. I did toss an ad on Craiglist. I should also do a YouTube video of me putting actual glue splotz all over my body then painfully tearing them off.

Noveltown: You are definitely a philosopher, a sharer of ideas and a sacrificial glue-covered lamb for your community building dream. I think we could use a Jedi too. They tap into the mythical, heroic, and tragic humanness we all share.

Describe a community builder…

Lloyd: The best resource I have found is from the Wilder Foundation. Their book, Community Building: What Makes It Work: A Review of Factors Influencing Successful Community Building (ISBN 0-940069-12-1) has shaped my community building process.

They describe the characteristics of successful professional community builders. These include having knowledge of the community, having a sincere commitment, being trustworthy, and other factors. It is a great read.

My hope is that we will see that we all have roles to play. That our individual everyday actions accumulate to build community, so let us do more.

Noveltown: You mentioned on your site that you’ve had this idea for six years! We had ideas for Noveltown for several years before we jumped in too. We have to ask… how did you come up with the idea and why?

Lloyd: The idea for the workshops happened as I described above in a coffeehouse. The motivation to engage young people happened as part of the work I did with a community benchmarking initiative.

It was a great project with, what I saw as, a tragic flaw. It started with a question to 6,000 children. "Describe the (name of the state) you want to live in?" A team of young people from local high schools, community colleges, and University then organized these 6,000 responses into the Children's Vision.

It was a wonderful vision statement for a preferred place. Then the tragic flaw.

The young people were then asked to present their vision to a blue chip collaboration of business and civic leaders. The adults accepted the vision and pledged to work together to make it happen. There was a nice reception. They thanked the young people and went off to do their work.

I watched as the young people were placed off to the side so that the adults could get to work. I watched as the young people fidgeted and got frustrated because their role in this process had ended. I watched as professionals came in to clarify and quantify the vision into policy areas. I watched as the life and spirit of these young people, who had invested a lot of time in reflecting on how this place could be better, wandered off to do other things.

I watched and realized that we could do better.


Lloyd: More saving the world stuff. This time with a buddy at a coffeehouse near UVA in Charlottesville.

Noveltown: There is a blindness in such tragedy that seems so clear to some, and yet not even visible to others. It’s almost like being color blind. A civic blindness. We see it in Bakersfield, with civic leaders often blind to common sense, clouded by politics, favors, and big money transactions.

What can people reading this do to be a part of your campaign?

Lloyd: I want them to do three things.

1) Read the site www.BeTheGlue.org, reflect on what you read and engage in a conversation with us.

2) Take a minute to reflect on who in your family or friends can provide feedback, be an ally or a mentor to this project and have them get in touch with me.

3) Think about what they can do to build their community. Make a to-do list then do it. Then tell me about it so I can add it to the Splotz list.

Noveltown: Thanks for talking to us today…

Lloyd: Thank you. It was my pleasure.

The squiggle that wouldn’t die: Bakersfield City Council shows off grand display of zero creativity - By N.L. Belardes

Sign design 1: welcome to our field/subdivision


Sign design 2: welcome back to our Southpark "dead man" squiggle


Is Bakersfield city councilwoman Jacquie Sullivan a designer now? Does she have experience in sign and logo design? I read an article in the Bakersfield Californian that reeks of her inability to understand design.

Noticeably absent from the article is any input from a designer. What’s the background of Sullivan and the rest of the council? Artists?

No.

This entire debacle started because a Bakersfield city engineer designed the redesign of the old squiggle signs resting on the outskirts of Bakersfield along Highway 99.

Now, I attended one meeting where the very non-creative Jacquie Sullivan called for the hole on the old Bakersfield sign to be filled in. A mosaic had been offered. No go. Looks like Sullivan got her way with two terrible designs I pulled from the Bakersfield Californian news site.

And now that terrible old Bakersfield city squiggle is back.

Don’t these people have any marketing/creative background? You don’t have two logos for the same product. You don’t spend thousands of taxpayer dollars for a new logo, and then later, incorporate the old into the first after the new logo has been adopted.

Sure, the new leaf logo sucks ass. But it was adopted. Phase out the squiggle then, right? Wrong. Apparently bad design just opens opportunity for worse.

I will say the first new re-design with the mosaic was way better than the two monstrosities being proposed.

The first newly proposed Sullivam design makes welcoming those to Bakersfield look like everyone happily hangs out in fields a plenty. It kind of looks like it was designed by an architect, not a designer. And it’s terrible. There’s nothing in the sign you wouldn’t see in the very unglamorous subdivision architecture outside Bakersfield's newest gated communities.

But please, an open field? That’s the one symbol that Bakersfield can't live without (Like the way some people can't live without "dead man" squiggles? Can’t people already see fields from their car windows? They’ve been passing open fields for the last 25 minutes heading north through Bakersfield, and for hours, if driving from the north…

Noticeably absent are migrant field workers toiling in the sun.

The second sign makes Bakersfield look like a Southpark cartoon horizon. I’m sure it can be made out of felt and every once in a while a new big-headed city councilman’s noggin’ can appear… maybe even have entire scenes to depict holidays, or when Schwarzeneggar is in town. I’m sure he’d like the publicity. A wireless radio device tuned into an open FM channel can beam voices into cars and nearby homes: something with Sullivan’s voice would be perfect…

Perfectly boring.


"Oh my god! They killed the Bakersfield sign!" (with clip art!)

And let me also point out that the Southpark crayon design isn't even using the correct new Bakersfield logo. It's a different font altogether. If you're creating a mock-up, shouldn't you be using the correct logo? Just look at the "B" and the "K". Wrong font. The first sign is closer. But with a careful examination, even that has minute differences. The leaf is slightly off. Sorry, that's ticky-tack of me. Goodness!

There’s something I like to tell people about more than half the corporate artwork you see on signs and billboards around Bakersfield. It’s no comparison to the creativity you’d find in larger cities. I call it the “yes” man problem. Too many times, conservative non-creative business people want advertisements. The ad companies instead of arguing for the sake of creativity become “yes” men and women, and give in to the boring, far too conservative ideas of the folks with the money. Yes, the folks with the money are often the non-creative type.

In this case, it’s an unimaginative city council adding to the unimaginative aesthetics of promotional Bakersfield.

Marketing 101: you don’t have two logos. If you have a new one, don’t be an idiot and blend two past logos into a sign.

"I can't see why anyone cannot like this," Sullivan said in an interview with the Californian.

I don’t know what she’s talking about. I can.