Dream Jacob said:

“The best brands fulfill an emotional need.“

He continued:

“We all use certain products in our day-to-day. The products that we decide to use have passed some kind of internal cost / performance ratio. If the product performs well and was at high cost OR has low cost and performs adequately, we see value and we use these products.

I think what Dream Jacob was getting at is that well designed products with the right kind of branding can invoke emotion. We go from using products to needing them, experiencing them, wanting them.

Dream Jacob continued standing in my bathroom talking about soap,

“Someone buys a bar of soap. If it passes their cost / performance threshold by successfully washing their bum for under a buck, the product now has the opportunity to make an emotional impact. Maybe the  fragrance, texture, color and name of this soap helps me feel fresh and re-energized enough to tackle another monotonous day at the office and plow through all my to-dos.”

This dream made me think about the fine line between good product design and good branding. Companies have choices where to put their money when trying to help the bottom line. If I had to rank those efforts from most honest and effective to least honest and effective. It would look like this:

Public Facing Efforts To Improve Product Sales

(ranked by integrity)

1. Product Design (most honest / effective)
2. Branding
3. Marketing
4. Advertising
5. Gross Immoral Shady Stuff, Spam, etc. (least honest / effective)

Now you could probably point at some Forrester research that says, “72% of people buy crap-in-a-box if it has a yellow smiley face on the package” or similar. That may be, but I’d like to think Dream Jacob would argue with the ethics of that.

Download audio file (star-light-star-bright.mp3)

From the book I learned that the actual animal used for the model lived a sickly caged circus-type existence in New York City. Not exactly the symbol of adventure and wide-open prairies it evoked for me as a kid, but a perfect metaphor for the relationship bison had with North American settlers.

These are the output from a little Flash experiment.

There were 6 bays total and each one highlighted areas of cultural interest in the city. We installed 3 touchscreens behind a glass bay that included an interactive fireworks display and served as an information kiosk for activities available at the arch grounds.

Here is a video that shows a little bit of the preparation and the finished product. It was a really fun project!!

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, ideally there would be a setting for 480×720 with a 1.1 pixel aspect ratio. Unfortunately that doesn’t exist. I thought I’d share how I got the best results in respect to .9 pixels in NTSC.

Here are some tips:

1. Work in 480×720 square pixels.
2. Setup one master comp that has all your nested content in it. Set your master up for 720×480 with NTSC .9 pixels.
3. Rotate your content 90 degrees (You’ll still have some content handing over the edges)
4. Reduce the scale of your nested comp so that it is 90% height (which is really width now after rotation) and keep the 480 portion (the height in vertical mode) at 100% b/c NTSC only squishes the with width.
5. Now your content should line up with the NTSC height and width. It will look squished in After Effects, but if you have correct for pixel aspect ratio turned on it will look fine, and most importantly it will display correctly once you get it on a DVD and on a vertical television.

Side Note: Make sure you make TWO versions before you go test your DVD onsite, b/c you never know  how the monitor will be mounted. You could end up with upside down content if you guess wrong. Found that out the hard way:(

I’ve got some other projects in a similar vein that I will be trying out. They will all have a nature/animal theme, and they will be built with hand drawn elements positioned by code.

The twigs are all positioned and sized w/ code. The eggs shape was made by hand, but positioned w/ code. In the future I plan to further randomize the shape, color and characteristic of each twig.

Behold, my very first generative comp. The image of a neon hot pink, scribbled, slightly-rotated square popped into my head one day. Maybe I’ve been listening to too much Justice. Made w/ Actionscript 3 and the Bezier curve fitting function built into Tweener.