Recent graduate Matt Keers from the UK with some pretty funky work and an updated site!

The map pins down nearly 300 of the most successful and influential websites to the greater Tokyo area train map. Different train lines correspond to different web trends such as innovation, news, social networks, and so on.

By the thoughtful fellas at Information Architects.

Check out some works from artist Merijn Hos in Utrecht, Netherlands.

From São Paulo comes a new, provocative pdf magazine Woof! Magazine, WARNING / NSFW & contains some disconcerting imagery (!).

Every once in a while I receive suggestions for logos to post on the blog. Talk logo is one of them and it’s a great example of what I’m after.

Talk is a marketing, advertising and PR firm. They get people talking about their clients’ businesses. Talk changed their name from Erickson Public Relations to Talk in 2004 and they spent about six months exploring name options. Talk quickly rose to the top.

As it happens often, it was too personal of a job for their own creative team, so they hired Morvil Design Group of Wilmington, NC to design the logo.

The only real direction I gave the designers was that I really loved pink and I thought it would work well since Talk is a woman-owned business. They were incredulous at first, but when the design team came back to us, they confessed they were now fans of hot pink.

The design options from the initial review.

The pink quote marks won their vote.

We also liked the fact that not everyone sees the icon as quote marks. Many see a mask, a martini glass, two elements facing each other, a mouth, etc. The pink works extremely well and has been a great conversation starter and attention-getter for our agency. We’ve had great fun with this name and logo over the years and it lends itself very well to creative marketing and promotions for Talk, Inc. Think pink!

Submitted by:

Shawn Smock of Talk

Credits:

Morvil Design Group of Wilmington, NC

A pretty awesome piece from Japanese artist Hisashi Tenmyouya which went for HK$4.8 million (!) at a recent auction in Hong Kong by Christies. View more works at Tenmyouya’s site here.

A couple of items hitting the blogosphere touch on the value of happy employees in delivering Long Wow experiences to customers.

From a New York Times article on Herb Kelleher, former CEO and Chairman of Southwest Airlines, comes this passage:

And yet, when you look at a company like American, with its poisonous employee relations and its glum customer base, and compare it with Southwest, with its happy employees and contented customers, you can’t help thinking that Mr. Kelleher was on to something when he put employees first. “There isn’t any customer satisfaction without employee satisfaction,” said Gordon Bethune, the former chief executive of Continental Airlines, and an old friend of Mr. Kelleher’s. “He recognized that good employee relations would affect the bottom line. He knew that having employees who wanted to do a good job would drive revenue and lower costs.”

And from Bill Taylor, on Harvard Business Online, comes Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too. It ends with this note:

It’s a small practice with big implications: Companies don’t engage emotionally with their customers—people do. If you want to create a memorable company, you have to fill your company with memorable people. How are you making sure that you’re filling your organization with the right people? And how much are you willing to pay to find out?

 

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