Customers bring habits from other products, even when your design expects them to start over. I’ve gone from my iPad to my Mac, absent-mindedly touching the screen, then wondering why nothing happened. Apparently, my finger has been waiting for Apple to catch up. Yesterday Apple announced touchscreen MacBook Pros arriving November 6. Image: Apple For historical perspective, HP sold a touch-enabled personal computer back in 1983. Even compared to the iPhone Duo’s 7-year lag behind...
2 days ago • 1 min read
Casper gives a familiar mattress promise a character shoppers already know, right down to his nightcap. I get a kick out of Johnny Depp. Foibles and all, he’s one of our most inventive actors, and I’m looking forward to Ebenezer despite having seen countless regurgitations of the Dickens story I read eons ago. (Check out the trailer.) Casper has a theory about its famously miserable protagonist: maybe ol’ Scrooge only needed a better mattress. Its Paramount partnership runs with “The more you...
3 days ago • 1 min read
Turning a criminal archetype into a cough-medicine hero is a little weird. It also makes surprisingly good psychological sense. Robitussin has introduced Robby Tussin, a deadpan “cough hitman” who appears when a cough becomes unacceptable, reaches ominously inside his trench coat and pulls out… cough syrup. In one ad, a coughing man in a restroom tells him, “Do it quick.” That’s dark territory for a 77-year-old medicine brand. It’s also pretty creative. Haleon says this is Robitussin’s...
4 days ago • 1 min read
Halloween is one of those weird moments when putting barbecue sauce all over your face can qualify as brand engagement. I love me a good Halloween face painting. McDonald’s UK has taken that idea somewhere wonderfully ridiculous with Spooky Sauces, a limited-edition face-paint collection inspired by six of its dipping sauces. There’s Tomb-Mato Ketchup, Curry Cauldron, Boo-Boo-Q and Garlic MayOoOo, among others. The kits even come with fries-shaped brushes, a Chicken McNugget-inspired sponge...
5 days ago • 1 min read
Cricket Wireless found a really human way to turn one of our disposable digital files into something worth keeping. I have voicemails on my phone from people who are no longer with us, including my mother. I rarely listen to them, but it’s nice to know they’re there. And when I change phones or providers, there’s a little anxiety attached to them: will those voices still be with me? That’s why I love Vinyl Voicemails, a recent activation from Cricket Wireless and Argonaut. At a Brooklyn...
6 days ago • 1 min read
The coolest part of Apple Music’s new identity is how unnecessary the elaborate physical process was. Apple Music has a new visual identity built around an idea called Made by Sound. The obvious way to execute it would have been digitally. Instead, Apple Music, TBWA\Media Arts Lab, Fred again.. and NEST Acoustics spent MONTHS working out how to make sound physically shape the visuals. They broke an original composition into individual notes, played those frequencies through a transducer and...
7 days ago • 1 min read
Pocket Parm is silly enough to get attention and practical enough that plenty of cheese lovers will feel the need. I‘m a fan of every cheese from bocconcini to Limburger, and so the idea of never finding myself stranded somewhere without Parmesan has obvious appeal. Sure, I much prefer the real stuff. But we’re discussing emergency cheese here. Standards gotta be flexible. Photo: Kraft Kraft Natural Cheese has created Pocket Parm, a miniature version of its familiar grated-cheese shaker that...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Bentley is designing its new EV around something product teams tend to underuse: the senses beyond sight. Most brands obsess over what they LOOK like. You know, logo, colours, typography and industrial design. The usual, obvious stuff. Bentley is asking a broader question: what should a Bentley SOUND like, touch like and even put you in the mood to do? For its new electric Torcal, Bentley has worked with Sensory Experiences, a research and design lab founded by Russell Jones, to orchestrate...
9 days ago • 1 min read
Toyota’s Walk Me asks a useful innovation question: what if the limitation you’ve been improving around is the thing that needs replacing? Wheelchairs have been in slow evolution for a super long time. The earliest known depiction of one dates to about 525 AD, and Spain’s King Philip II had a wheeled chair built for him in 1595. The first recognizably modern folding wheelchair arrived in the 1930s. They’ve gotten lighter, faster, more comfortable and way more sophisticated. Yet their defining...
10 days ago • 1 min read
