New designs for work.

I got a little rushed toward the end, so I have to go back and standardize the margins (which I just kind of eyeballed), but I’m pretty proud of these two.

Why do the French get so many good video game-related pranks? First Pac-Man, now this?

I’m just throwing these up here so I can reference them in a meeting tomorrow.

Logo 1
Logo 2
Logo 3

Have you ever wondered how some musicians are able to craft emotionally rich lyrics and pair them with emotionally moving music so perfectly? (Music is the language of pure emotion, after all.) Yes, it is an art that takes some time to perfect; but there’s also a physiological explanation, or at least a partial explanation. Musicians are more in-tune with human emotions than non-musicians. Studying music (crafting music, not just listening) gives people an advantage over non-musicians in detecting emotional changes through faint changes in tone and pitch that are missed by non-musicians. Musical training involves listening for patterns and nuances in music and knowing how adding something will alter the musical (and emotional) integrity of the whole, and musicians’ nervous systems are better able to identify and utilize relevant patterns in music and speech alike.

Not only that, but musicians are more easily able to filter out background noise to focus on a human voice, meaning that they’re doubly better at detecting emotion in, say, a crowded bar or restaurant. Musical training also involves picking your notes out from all of the others that are played, and identifying which notes are most relevant to yours.

Why is this? Studying music actually re-wires the brain to be this way. It makes us not only more adept at detecting emotions, but also at expressing and thinking about them. Going back to my point of music being a language of pure emotion, just like speech makers have studied rhetoric and know how to quickly and succinctly make their point with their words and their tone, musicians study the emotion that music conveys, and they eventually get much better at detecting subtle variations and manipulations in this emotion. It’s not a stretch to carry this over from music to human interaction.

The effect isn’t like an on/off switch—it’s a part of the brain that’s like a muscle in that it gets stronger or weaker depending on how much and how often you use it. People who play music regularly for years have much more highly developed subcortical sensory circuitry than people who don’t. So picking up the guitar tomorrow probably won’t have an immediate effect, although playing several times a week for a few years will have a significant effect.

I got home close to 6:30 tonight. Janelle was upstairs exercising, so I started cooking dinner. After she came down, she related to me that little Sherlock was hiding under the bed and wouldn’t come out. He’d been under there for at least an hour, since he was under there when Janelle got home. Nothing to be really concerned about, though, so we just shrugged our shoulders, said, “Whatever!” and went about our business.

Two hours and one long phone call with Mina later, I get off the phone and start talking to Janelle, and she remembers, “Where’s Sherlock?” It was 8:30 at this point, so I decided to go check on him in case he was hurt or anything.

Sure enough, he was still under the bed, looking around as if some fierce creature had been stalking him. I pet him for a bit, but he kept looking around. Then, I felt it: a rough patch under his arm that didn’t really feel like fur. No, it wasn’t poop that had somehow made its way up to his arm. My first thought was that it was dried blood from some sort of epic kitty battle. I pulled him out without too much protest and discovered that he had somehow wrapped a plastic shopping bag around his entire body. He was probably playing with it, got it wrapped around his body, and then started walking off when he heard a rustling behind him so he took off running and the rustling got louder and followed him everywhere he went. He was probably under the bed for at least four hours.

I tore the bag off of him, but not before Janelle and I laughed our asses off at his misfortune. I think he’s chowing down on food and water right now. I really wish I had some video of the events leading up to him hiding under the bed. This is why I need a video camera in my house.

I’m hooked on Anamanaguchi. They’re an electronica band from New York. Here’s a clip:

If they sound familiar, it may be because they did the theme song for the recent Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

If you think it sounds like an old Nintendo soundtrack, it’s for good reason—they actually use an old Nintendo to play their music. They actually program all of the electronic music, encode it on a chip, and then run the chip through the game system. They also go back and add some live guitar, bass, and drum tracks to thicken up the sound (the Nintendo only allows for five audio channels), but the core is always the Nintendo, which they actually have on-stage with them in concerts.

Something I really like in webpages is the functionality to have an input label inside the actual input. To be truly user-friendly, this would have to disappear when the user clicks or tabs into the input, and it would have to reappear if the user gets out of the input without typing anything. To avoid confusion, it would also have to look different than actual text put in by the user.

So here’s my easy jQuery solution.

First, you’ll have to define the style you want to use for the labels. The easiest solution is grey, italicized text, but feel free to define this however you want in your stylesheet. Let’s call this class unfilled.

Second, put this jQuery in your scripts file:

$(document).ready(function() {
  $("input[type=text]").attr('value', function(){return this.title}).addClass('unfilled');
  $("input[type=text]").focus(function() {
    if (this.value == this.title)
      $(this).val('').removeClass('unfilled');
  });
  $("input[type=text]").blur(function() {
    if (this.value == '')
      $(this).attr('value', function(){return this.title}).addClass('unfilled');
  });
});

All you need to do to implement the code in the HTML is to put a title attribute on each text input. No initializing, no calling JavaScript on focus or blur.

If you have a larger webpage, you’ll probably want to specify an element in which inputs should be affected:

$(document).ready(function() {
  $("#myform input[type=text]").attr('value', function(){return this.title}).addClass('unfilled');
  $("#myform input[type=text]").focus(function() {
    if (this.value == this.title)
      $(this).val('').removeClass('unfilled');
  });
  $("#myform input[type=text]").blur(function() {
    if (this.value == '')
      $(this).attr('value', function(){return this.title}).addClass('unfilled');
  });
});

It pays to keep tabs on your old projects.

One of my employer’s internal, lead-generation sites had fallen into disuse. We basically weren’t doing anything to send traffic there anymore, so we’d kind of forgotten about it. On the site was a toll-free number that you could call to help you search for a school. Well, when we stopped using the site, we stopped using the phone number as well.

Of course, the site was registered for a number of years, so it didn’t just go away; but the phone number… Well, when we stopped paying for that, it went back on the market. And someone else snatched it up. Now, the phone number (which was, until today, still posted on the website) is a gay sex chat line. So people in California looking for schools got quite a shock when they called looking for help in continuing their education.

So I think a new slogan is in order. Here are some suggestions:

• When we say we’re a full-service ad agency, we mean we are a FULL-SERVICE ad agency
• We bend over backwards to service you
• A full-service ad agency—with benefits
• Gaying up the Internet since 1989

First design of the new year.

Really, I just got bored during the onslaught of football games. I don’t even know that we need a design for the label, since we have an existing website. Granted, it is a template—but it’s a really good one.

Set this as your desktop wallpaper, then call them over to look at it.