Personally I’m not a fan of smoking and I’m not endorsing Camels product but credit where credits due, these are a series of great advertisements.

Each advertisement, designed by Saatchi & Saatchi features a splash, spill, silhouette or other device portraying the well known icon, while not specifically mentioning the brand or product.

In Australia it has been illegal for manufacturers to advertise cigarettes in any fashion for a decade or so now, though early on loopholes where exploited by manufacturers to continue advertising there product. Continue reading...

What a day… I started this morning in a bit of a daze. Woke up, had breakfast, put the cereal in the fridge and the milk in the cupboard ( you heard me… ) and set out for the day.

After checking the mail to find a speeding ticket, I climb into the car and manage to drop and smash my GPS.

After salvaging the meeting which I was obviously late too after getting lost, I head to the bank to deposit a cheque only to find that one I previously deposit has bounced, sticking me with the penalty fee.

All that’s left is to fall over in the shower tonight and break a hip.

*sigh*

Had one of these days lately?

Any graphic designer knows the basic of intellectual property. To sum it up, any original ideas you move from your head to an actual medium, such as paper or digital web page belong to you.

When it comes to the finer details however, unless you’ve really done your research there’s no doubt some grey areas still to be explored.

Trademark, copyright and entertainment Lawyer Amy J. Everhart recently posted over at Design Sponge a fairly comprehensive explanation on the subject covering basic copyright, registering designs, notices, employee rights and fair use when it comes to sharing ideas.

As a designer, your designs are your lifeblood. Just as a jeweler keeps his jewels in a locked display case, you should safeguard your designs. I don’t mean the physical product embodying your designs, but the intangible right to them: the copyright.

Yet maybe because a copyright isn’t something you can see or touch, creators often neglect to safeguard it. An understanding of the copyright basics goes a long way toward protecting why you’re doing this in the first place: the art.

Amy has also been kind enough to write it simply enough that you wont need your own lawyer to explain it to you.

Simple!

If you’ve been looking for more on the subject without having to wade through pages of legal mumbo-jumbo, Amys post is an informative read.

Googles Matt Cutts recently posted an article on pagerank sculpting whats currently considered best by Google for gaining PageRank for your website or blog.

Keeping your site optimized for search engines is seemingly a full time job now a days, the latest change on the cards seems to be that using the nofollow attribute is now “out”.

From Matts post:

Now let’s talk about the rel=nofollow attribute. Nofollow is method (introduced in 2005 and supported by multiple search engines) to annotate a link to tell search engines “I can’t or don’t want to vouch for this link.” In Google, nofollow links don’t pass PageRank and don’t pass anchortext [*].

So what happens when you have a page with “ten PageRank points” and ten outgoing links, and five of those links are nofollowed? Let’s leave aside the decay factor to focus on the core part of the question.

Originally, the five links without nofollow would have flowed two points of PageRank each (in essence, the nofollowed links didn’t count toward the denominator when dividing PageRank by the outdegree of the page).

More than a year ago, Google changed how the PageRank flows so that the five links without nofollow would flow one point of PageRank each.

Matt continues with his recommendations for nofollow usage, PageRank tips and some good Q&A with his readers regarding his recommendations. Read the rest of Matts article here.

Below is a small collection of great logos featuring hidden symbols. Some are less hidden then others, but all are clever designs which deserve a mention.

Amazon.com, everything from A – Z while putting a smile on your face.

Baskin Robins 31 flavors slogan incorporated into their logotype.

Elettro Domestici’s logo is a great use of negative space. A simple power plug forming the companies initials.

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