div|whisperer

Thanks to AdFreak for this find. Thailand and China are internationally renowned for two things within the advertising world. Making horrible ads and stealing ideas from North American and European agencies - hoping that nobody notices.

Which itself is a pretty hilarious notion. Producing ads you hope some people don’t see.

This latest effort from Young and Rubicam’s Bangkok shop qualifies as terrible. As AdFreak eloquently put it:

“Have you ever wanted to soothe your aching muscles by piercing your fingers through your own skin and rubbing the sinewy flesh beneath?”

Agency: Y&R Bangkok
Client: Harnn Massage Balm

Some fantastic pro bono work for Vancouver-based Looking Glass Foundation by DDB Canada. There’s two others in the campaign as well.

The web site for the campaign is also well done and there are some print components as well that I hear were well done as well.

If I manage to find the print pieces online somewhere I’ll update this post to include them. If anyone has seen them, please add the link to this post in a comment - I’m lazy.

Thanks for the tip AdFreak.

Client: Looking Glass Foundation
Agency: DDB Canada

For the past few weeks or so YouTube has offered the ability to switch between Standard Quality and High Quality when you’re viewing a movie on YouTube. If you watch YouTube with any regularity the constant clicking on the High Quality button has probably already become about as annoying as you might expect having the last name Gay would be throughout middle/high school.

Luckily there is a little advertised but easily accessible solution for those of us who have YouTube accounts. If you don’t have one you can easily register for a free one if you are willing to forget that your personal information will be stored by a site whose all time most popular video is a song full of pop angst by Avril Lavigne.

Here’s the 2oz way to get ‘er done:

Continue reading View High Quality YouTube Movies by Default

The Discovery Channel has launched a new channel image for what used to be their Discovery Home Channel. The new network, called Planet Green is supposed to be all about sustainable living.

It sounds wonderful until you learn that the makers of Hummer are the exclusive automobile sponsor. Swing and a miss.

The security guard in the ad however is really, really funny. His delivery of his line makes this entire ad worth the price of admission.

Client: Planet Green / Discovery Communications
Agency: Amalgamated LLC

I can’t tell you how nice it was, after Youtube suggested I kill myself, to log in to MySpace after months of neglecting that site, to see this message waiting for me:

It’s refreshing to be desired by someone who wants to have fun under the sheets and also keenly appreciates the effort it took to create those sheets in the first place.

This is a great ad parody of the Coal industries recent efforts on U.S. network television. The group behind it, Wisconsin/New York based comedy group freeloveforum, are probably best known for their very funny MS Paint parody.

One of the biggest complaints that I hear from designers who have moved from Transitional (sometimes even no doctype at all) to XHTML Strict or 1.1 is that the TARGET tag they’ve relied on for so long doesn’t validate anymore. And lets face it if you’re going through the effort of using standards compliant web site code, seeing that green validation cue is the equivalent of a nerdgasm.

Both the HTML 4.0 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict recommendations from the W3C have both eliminated TARGET completely. The justification is that it should be the user, not the web site, who decides whether or not a link opens in a new window, a new tab or the same window. I personally tend to agree. Forcing a new window to open essentially “breaks” the back button.

Luckily for TARGET diehards there is another way if you’re not enlightened enough to free yourself from the new-window shackles. The DOM 2.0 standard, which was published well after the HTML 4.0 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict recommendations, still includes the target attribute.

Continue reading New-Window TARGET Attribute Doesn’t Validate XHTML Strict

For the past year or so I’ve been using desktop wallpapers from 2Advanced - they’re awesome but after a year you start to want something a little different.

I came across Desktopography today, great wallpapers for all screen sizes. Making great wallpapers is difficult. It’s a big canvas and you have to take into consideration that people will be actually interacting with their iconography on top of it. The Desktopography tend to be more artistic than functional but they showcase some fantastic photoshop work.

I came across an awesome site for wasting time today called One Sentence. The premise is simple, post a true story in only one sentence. There are some horribly awkward social rants but luckily the vast majority are humorous anecdotes like this really short one titled “Loving Mother“:

Unconditional love is when you take the batteries from your vibrator to power your child’s favorite car.

Other favorites include:

I knew I was going to fail the class when the professor pulled me aside and asked, “Do you have a learning disability I should know about?”

Of course there’s some legitimate literary contributions as well that don’t include being stupid or vibrators but personally I don’t find them as interesting.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my willingness to go streaking at a Christian school in the middle of the night was probably one of the strongest indicators that religion and I didn’t have much time left together.

This is an older ad, from french shop DDB Paris. I first saw it on various ad boards back in April but I think the campaign started running in May. Nicely done.

Client: GQ Magazine
Agency: DDB Paris