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NOTCOT points to a pre­sen­ta­tion by designer Chip Kidd who is respon­si­ble for, among other things, some of the loveli­est book jacket designs I’ve ever seen.

In the talk at Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, Chip takes the audi­ence through a num­ber of his designs. He talks about the reac­tions they received from his clients (both good and bad), the com­pro­mises and the end results.

As an insight into the cre­ative busi­ness, it’s price­less with some laugh out loud moments.

The pre­sen­ta­tion is avail­able free for down­load via iTunes (sadly not on YouTube so I can’t embed it).

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Like many peo­ple, I’ve owned and used a suc­ces­sion of lap­tops over the years – not to men­tion sell­ing them on behalf of a vari­ety of clients. Over that time the screens have got big­ger (and bet­ter) as have the hard dri­ves and per­for­mance for most tasks is com­pa­ra­ble to a desktop.

Of course the price we pay for this is that the orig­i­nal computer-on-the-move idea behind lap­tops has been largely lost from many mod­els. They are increas­ingly designed to be taken from room to room not coun­try to coun­try. Many are full-on media cen­tres able to store all your DVDs, CDs and pho­tos. Up to a point it seemed that this trend was unstop­pable.

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The world of the RSS reader has become a hotbed of com­pet­ing prod­ucts. Whether you opt for read­ers built into your browser, AJAX desk­tops or a stand­alone pro­gram, the options are almost bewildering.

Into the fray steps Spec­tra, msnbc’s very pretty effort that allows you to select from a range of colour-coded chan­nels. These then build into a slow-moving tor­nado of news (or a tornado-speed tor­nado if you set it in the prefs). You can then flick through your selec­tions to get an overview of what’s hap­pen­ing and click to get a pop-up with the full story. So far, so pretty.

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Today’s prob­lems are rarely sim­ple (even decid­ing what to have for din­ner can gen­er­ate a bewil­der­ing array of options). And many of today’s mar­ket­ing chal­lenges present prob­lems within prob­lems. A lack of vis­i­bil­ity is endemic. See­ing the actual prob­lem is dif­fi­cult let alone find­ing a solution.

Tricky prob­lems are, of course, par for the course for the world’s spooks. And when they are not devel­op­ing nuclear deter­rents in the shape of wrist­watches, they also come up with some pretty nifty approaches to prob­lems in gen­eral.

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How much trou­ble is Vista actu­ally in?

Just lately it seems to be one thing after another. First there were the sto­ries of peo­ple “upgrad­ing” Vista to XP. The the whole Vista-ready deba­cle and the result­ing class-action law­suit. And now we have panic set­ting in over the end-of-life of XP.

To get around the end-of-life prob­lem accord­ing to a report on Silicon.com, Dell and HP are prepar­ing to use the down­grade rights that come with Vista to carry on sup­ply­ing XP pre­loaded on new machines. If this receives sig­nif­i­cant take-up it could be a real blow to Microsoft – new machines are the main route to upgrade for the vast major­ity of users and the one that will deliver the best Vista expe­ri­ence.

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Some microsites are lit­tle pieces of joy. Some are func­tional ‘more info’ affairs. Then there are those that turn you from being pos­i­tive and excited to being frus­trated and annoyed.

Nam­ing no names, but take the Canon 450D site. Now, to declare my alle­giances, I own a Canon 300D (in fact it is my fourth Canon) plus a bunch of lenses and I am begin­ning to think about upgrad­ing. As such, I’m pretty excited about the brand spank­ing new 450D.

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Don’t say I never give you anything.

You can now down­load your free, gratis, for-absolutely-no-money copy of Cracked: a small guide to big ideas. Orig­i­nally cre­ated as a printed book for inter­nal and client use, Cracked is a guide to cre­ative prob­lem solv­ing. In it I cover some ways to approach mar­ket­ing prob­lems, a bit on audi­ences and then a bunch of cre­ative tips, tricks and tech­niques. I’ve refor­mat­ted it for screen and it weighs in at 472Kb.

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Viral mar­ket­ing is often pre­sented as the Holy Grail of mar­ket­ing. The story goes some­thing like this: cre­ate a clever/funny low-budget video, whack it up on YouTube and watch the hits roll in as peo­ple send the link to friends who them­selves for­ward it on in turn. The num­bers are cer­tainly seduc­tive, YouTube’s all time most viewed video has to date racked up over 82m views.

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Over the years I’ve man­aged to hold a range of con­tra­dic­tory views about cre­ative awards. My cur­rent default stance is to be firmly against them but then every now and again, there’s a piece of work that I feel deserves wider recog­ni­tion and a nice tro­phy on a small plinth seems as good a way of achiev­ing this as any.

The plus-side of the awards argu­ment goes some­thing like this: Awards set a bench­mark of cre­ative excel­lence. They help agen­cies recruit new, tal­ented peo­ple and raise morale inter­nally. And they give prospec­tive clients the reas­sur­ance that they’re buy­ing into a qual­ity agency.

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I was passed a link to this by a col­league (thanks Simon).

It’s a quadruped robot devel­oped by Boston Dynam­ics. Make sure you get at least half way though when they give it a shove from the side and watch it get its bal­ance back. Scary.