Prescient Media

Well, even Google nods from time to time.

From Salon.com’s Scott Rosenberg, a fairly hilarious case that’s bound to encourage all the worst in the phony-content-creation world.

Now, most folks with a conscience—and an understanding of how Google crawls the web—maximize their Google search ranking through good, clean code and substantial, regularly updated content.

Then there’s the so-called “content farms,” of which Associated Content is one of the most notorious: online sweatshops that churn out junk text all but unreadable by any actual human being, but loaded with keywords and search terms designed to capture high spots in Google search returns, i.e., to game the system.

Generally, Google’s very good at catching—and punishing—attempts to gain the system. But not always.

Rosenberg described his amazement at Googling to read about the recent n-word-loaded primetime self-destruction of Dr. Laura Schlessinger.

Now, it may have been my choice of search term, or it may have been that the event is already more than a week old, but I was amazed to see, at the top of the Google News results, a story from Associated Content. … Gee, maybe Associated Content is getting better, I thought. Maybe it’s producing some decent stuff.

Naturally, he clicked through and read (errors preserved):

The Dr. Laura n-word backlash made her quit her radio show. It seems the Dr. Laura n-word controversy has made her pay the price, as the consequences of herbrought down her long-running program. But even if it ended her show, it may not end her career. Despite being labeled as a racist, and despite allegedly being tired of radio, the embattled doctor still seems set to fight on after she leaves. In fact, the Dr. Laura n-word scandal has made her more defiant than ever, despite quitting.

Rosenberg jumps to a pretty dire conclusion pretty quickly: that Google’s lost its touch for good:

I still feel lucky to be able to use Google a zillion times a day, and no, Bing is not much use as an alternative (Microsoft’s search engine kindly recommends two Associated Content stories in the first three results!). But when Google tells me that this drivel is the most relevant result, I can’t help thinking, the game’s up. The Wagner tubas are tuning up for Googledammerung: It’s the twilight of the bots.

That’s going far too far, for my money. More likely we’re at a temporary high tide of junk content in the endless ebb and flow of junk and control. There’s plenty of us out here hoping so. And none of us work for Associated Content.

For further reading, a great link Rosenberg passes along: “The Google Sewage Factory” by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand.

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Some months ago, in a great little bookstore in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn—the kind of place that stay open later than some of the local bars—I was stopped in my tracks by a shelf of beautiful little paperbacks that looked like a novelty letterpress imprint from some local basement publisher:

Upon closer inspection, I learned it was about as un-boutique a publisher as you can get: Penguin, in a new “Great Ideas” series—the Russians, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Adam Smith, etc….a sort of brainy undergraduate’s dream team. At least it had been for me. Minus the Adam Smith.

Only this week did I run across the designer of the gorgeous, highly tactile covers: Mr. David Pearson, a London-based designer who specializes in book design and branding.

Aside from his portfolio, very definitely worth a look is his Flickr site, where he shares delicious scans of some of the original old-school sources of his inspiration, including these vintage Russian matchbook covers:

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From designer/illustrator Eric Carl, a great Flickr set of vintage logos from a mid-70s World of Logotypes collection.

Lots to learn from a more innocent, Illustrator-free era, when you could be damn sure that the logo was going to reproduce well in black and white.

Some highlights:

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When I studied typography with the legendary Ed Benguiat — type designer extraordinaire, with some 700+ typefaces to his name (and a second career as a jazz drummer) — he said that there was one project he’d always dreamt of: branding an airline. The scope, the scale, the range…what’s not to get excited over?

And if you like that idea, what about branding a city?

Start researching the competition at Stadtlogo Design, a huge and endlessly fascinating gallery of logos designed for cities. It’s heavy on European examples, since the site is the work of German economist Wilfried Weisenberger (and is in German), but there are plenty of U.S. examples too.

The work ranges from the lovely…

…to the hideous…

…from the somewhat too abstract…

…to the definitely too literal…

…from the Abstract Expressionist-inspired…

…to the 60s-inspired…

…to the Clip Art-inspired…

…to the…well…uninspired…

…to the just plain bizarre:

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Just back from Animation Block Party, a three-day festival of short animated films in Brooklyn — many of them BFA thesis projects, some of them stunning.

The standout for me was Marvelous Keen Loony Bin, the 2005 senior degree animation project by RISD grad Lizzi Akana, now a Brooklyn-based animator and illustrator. Like all great art, it speaks for itself best…I’ll say only that the wild, grim humor in as much in the spirit of the immortal Nikolai Gogol as anything I’ve ever seen onscreen:

“Marvelous, Keen Loony Bin” from Lizzi Akana on Vimeo.

The utterly individual style brought to mind two other artists I love: Mr. Joe Sorren, whose work he graciously allowed me to use in a cover design for the literary magazine Meridian some years ago (the below is a more recent work) —

— and Gail Boykewich, who was featured in a July issue of the New Yorker and has an incredible wall-to-wall show at Mad One Jack’s in Hoboken until September:

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Too good not to pass on: the Grey ad agency’s campaign for Pilot extrafine pens. A taste:

Click through to the full campaign on the DesignBoom blog. In the meantime, we’ll leave you with the equally hilarious and disturbing Lego thong and tramp stamp:

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From Julian Hansen, a very clever, very young graphic designer in Copenhagen, a big old-fashioned flow chart that tells you all you need to know about picking a typeface. Especially if you cried watching Terminator.

Click on the image for the full-sized chart.

Julian sells a poster version here.

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Prescient Media loves WordPress. Prescient Media is in Brooklyn. Brooklyn loves Jay-Z. Jay-Z lives in Brooklyn. And now Jay-Z’s on WordPress.

At last all is right with the world.

Well, almost. Having the great Jay-Z, a/k/a Sean Carter, a/k/a Jay, a/k/a J-Hov, a/k/a Hov, a/k/a Hova, a/k/a Jigga, a/k/a Jigga Man, choose WordPress is a great validation for the onetime little-blogging-platform-that-could — now a powerful, flexible content management system that drives a stunning array of websites by an impressive roster of users, including (Technorati says):

* CNN
* Fisherprice
* Wall Street Journal
* Forbes
* National Geographic
* Arena Magazine
* PopWatch Entertainment Weekly
* Nikon
* Pepsi
* Nokia
* Best Buy
* Ford
* Coca-Cola

On the other hand, for a man who makes videos like this –

– his current site is a little…basic.

We’re happy to help any time, J.

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Gail Boykewich, a Prescient Media client and all-around brilliant artist, is the subject of a (brief) profile in this week’s New Yorker magazine. Congratulations, Gail!

The piece, in the magazine’s Talk of the Town section, highlights Gail’s work with the Inflatable Crowd Company, which provides inflatable extras for movie crowd scenes — most recently Angelina Jolie’s spy vehicle Salt. It’s hard to believe an inflatable doll could fool your eye, even in a crowd scene, but it can thanks to Gail’s hand-painted masks:

They’re just the start of her amazing work. There’s a great selection of her paintings in her online gallery, but the best way to see her work is in person — which you can do at a place called Mad One Jack’s in Hoboken, NJ.

They’re going to have an opening reception for her soon, and the info will be posted here as soon as we have it. We’ll see you there. Don’t forget your New Yorker!

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For those of us who remember waiting online in a Macy’s to play one of the first-ever PacMan machines, who roamed the caves of Zork in their minds on sleepless nights, who felt a roller-coaster thrill the first time they played Pitfall Harry, there is a magic in the 8-bit video game that will never fade.

Here, an almost incomprehensibly painstaking video project combining the three greatest things in the world, or at least three things without which our lives would have been a little darker: Legos, 8-bit video games, and Swedish electronica:

And check out the mind-boggling making-of, courtesy of Design Boom.

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