Two things I’ve liked

I haven’t posted for a while. I had a busy Christmas and January. But I’ve not been walking around with my eyes closed, and a couple of things have made me go ‘ooh, that’s pretty cool’. So here, for your pleasure, they are.

First is this cool video from CPG Grey. He tells us lots of stuff we already know about the UK, but he does it in a concise way that seems to poke fun at the ridiculous complexity of the whole thing whilst not explicitly doing anything that pokes fun at the ridiculous complexity of the whole thing. And it has a Venn diagram in it, which in my mind means it rocks.

Second is this nice little idea from Grey Stockholm and Ogilvy Stockholm:

They’re merging, dontcha know. They wanted to reveal their new name, INGO in a cool way. So they asked users to follow their page on Facebook, and then used the profile pics of the followers to gradually reveal their name. It took 2,922 faces and 4 hours to reveal the name, apparently. Pretty cool. Shame the name itself is a bit weird: INGO means ‘International Non-Governmental Organisation’ in English. They sort of know this – they refer to the NGO part on the website. But WHY dammit, if you know that the aconym is already taken? WHY? It’s like calling your agency WTF. WTF?

Anyway. Nice idea from INGO. And we’ll post more stuff we like soon.

This post originally appeared on my company blog, here.

Japan, the strange country

I love the style of this animation by Japanese artist and designer Kenichi Tanaka. The infographics are simple and easy and keep you engaged, and the approach and subject matter fit beautifully.

I’m not all that sure about his assertion that Japan is ‘the strange country’ though – he seems to concentrate on two broad themes: Japanese cultural peculiarities and generic bad stuff associated with almost all developed nations. So whilst it’s interesting to know about the issues of Japanese girls’ obsession with dieting and brands, food waste, wasteful water imports, disposable chopsticks, overfishing etc, I don’t think they’re all that informative about Japan as a nation – we Brits have similar issues, as do most industrialised (or post industrialised) nations. Things like shyness and love hotels and suicide are much more interesting, although even the suicide statistic comes with the phrase ‘a healthy economy doesn’t necessarily make a happy economy, does it?’, which comes across as a bit obvious and trite, even if it is meant to be knowing.

But none of this should detract too much from what is a great piece of work that we enjoyed. Check it out:

UPDATE (01 April 2010): since I wrote this post Kenichi seems to have taken down the English version of the video. You can see the Japanese version here – that it makes sense without the English voiceover is testament to the quality of the graphics.

This post originally appeared on my company website here.

Good

Good is a site devoted to helping people live well and do good. Which is all very well and good – but what we really like about Good are the brilliant infographics. Check them out!