The Objective Blog

Keep up with what we're thinking, reading, and doing.

Fusion Radar: October 29, 2014

October 29th, 2014 - by Objective - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.

Tips for Waking Up

For the productivity obsessed, squeezing a few more minutes out of every day often means getting up earlier or staying up later. Kevin Roose has been testing out various morning routines and research to figure out how to become more productive earlier in the day.

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Norway’s New Bank Notes

Learn more about the design process behind Norway’s new bank notes. The seventh paragraph is especially important because it acknowledges that constraints can often inspire creativity, which is counter to what many less experienced designers may believe (i.e. to be creative, there must be no constraints).

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Pulse

Pulse is an open source project, similar to BitTorrent Sync, which allows you to sync files and data without using proprietary technologies.

Pulse

Persistence

Too many would-be entrepreneurs these days seem to believe that quick success is the norm. In spite of the stories of overnight success, most success is requires persistence. For that reason, we love this article about the inventor of disposable diapers. It’s a good reminder that persistence pays.

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Bézier Curves Game

Master your Bézier curve skills with this game.

Play the game

The Big Idea Is.

October 27th, 2014 - by Dallas - Salt Lake City, Utah

This is an inspirational post. It is directed to those marketing directors and business owners that believe their advertising should do more. It is directed to those of you who felt something the first time you walked into your advertising class. Or when you saw Don Draper command a room with his cleverly creative concept.

But this post isn’t about advertising. It’s about the big idea behind effective advertising. It’s about how constructive creativity can change the game for your company.

Here are a few examples to illustrate my point:

Jiffy Lube

jiffy_lube_logoIn 1982, Jiffy Lube—then an unknown quick-oil-change company with a handful of locations in various states—approached ad man George Lois. George saw a future for Jiffy Lube that the current owners didn’t yet believe. He wanted to run a national TV campaign. He told them to change the logo and showed them what he had in mind. He gave them a new slogan, “Jiffy Lube Changes The Way America Changes its Oil.” He was convinced enough in this new direction and plan that he boldly stated that by doing these things, Jiffy Lube would grow its business to 1,000 locations in 3 short years.
Jiffy Lube agreed to the proposal. They changed their logo and launched the TV campaign.
But George had been wrong–at the 3 year mark, Jiffy Lube could not boast of having 1000 locations.
Rather, in 3 years, Jiffy Lube had doubled that estimate with over 2,000 locations across the United States.

Perdue Chicken

perdue_chicken_logoIn 1971, Frank Perdue, owner of Perdue Chickens, decided to take 10 weeks to learn everything he could about advertising. As part of his quest, he interviewed 66 different ad agencies. He eventually selected Scali, McCabe, Sloves, an agency that had been in business five years. McCabe, the copywriter for the project, quickly realized that whatever selling point he came up with, a competitor could quickly copy. Except one: the persistent, driven, quality-focused Frank Perdue himself. Once he was able to convince Frank of this, the campaign based on “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken” was born. Or hatched.
Some headlines that supported this concept were:
‘Freeze my chickens? I’d sooner eat beef!’
‘My fresh young chicken is cheaper than hamburger. Good for you, bad for me.’
‘Everybody’s chickens are approved by the government, but only my chickens are approved by me.’”

In 1967, yearly sales had been $35 million. By 1972, with a budget of $200,000 and a year of the big idea, “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken,” sales leapt to $80 million.

Jauntaroo

jauntaroo_logoSalt Lake-based Jauntaroo takes a new twist on a familiar industry. Their vacation travel match product is a little bit Travelocity and a little bit Match.com. Jauntaroo recommends lines travelers up with destinations tailored to their interests and budgets. But as clever as their product is, it wasn’t getting noticed as quickly as they would have liked. And, being largely self-funded, there wasn’t much room for large advertising campaigns.
So they mined a big idea. Something that resonated with their audience. Something anybody would want, and something they were uniquely positioned to offer: a chance to win a job traveling the world for a year. So they launched the Best Job Around The World competition and gave participants a chance to become the Chief World Explorer for the company. Not only would the winner get to travel the world and write about it, but they’d get a sweet salary of $100k.
The story was picked up by morning news shows, travel sites, job sites, and soon this little-known company received more than 3,000 entries and 4.3 million unique site visits.

The moral of the story is this: If you’re fighting against commoditization; If you have a small budget, but a great product; If you are committed to growth without a guarantee of how to get it; Discover a big idea and give it everything you’ve got.

Constructive creativity is a currency forever rare and always in demand.

Fusion Radar: October 15, 2014

October 20th, 2014 - by Objective - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.

Acorns

Acorns is a mobile app (web app coming soon) which claims to help you invest your spare change by rounding up every purchase.

Acorns

Visualization of 15 Sorting Algorithms

A sorting algorithm is used to put a list’s elements into order. For example, a sorting algorithm can take the following list of numbers and figure out how to arrange them in order from lowest to highest: 10, 2, 17, 22, 104, 54. The following YouTube video provides a visualization (with sound) of 15 different sorting algorithms at work. Each algorithm runs until it is done ordering the list, which you’ll know has happened when the white bars all turn green.

View the video

Inspirograph

If you grew up with the excellent drawing toy, Spirograph, you’ll appreciate the Inspirograph’s digital version. Try your hand at creating a work of art, or view the gallery to see what others have created and submitted.

Inspirograph

GitHub for Windows

If you use GitHub for Windows, learn more about the open source projects that power it.

View projects

Final

Payment is a hot topic. Apply Pay, Coin, and now Final are all aiming to make it easier and more secure to pay for your purchases. Final allows you to use unique card numbers with each merchant, which in theory “sandboxes” each merchant in the event of a security breach.

Final

Oh My Zsh

If you’re using Zsh (Z Shell) you’ll want to check out Oh My Zsh, a framework for managing your Zsh configuration.

Oh My Zsh

20 Under 20

Flickr is featuring their 20 most talented young photographers.

20 Under 20

Wayfinding for Mobile

Achieving mobile usability can require a different approach than designing for full-screen devices.

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Programming Sucks

If you know a programmer/developer, this post might give you a bit more appreciation for the complexity of their job. If you are a programmer/developer, this post might help you stay sane just one more day knowing that someone out there understands your pain.

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Segment

Hat tip to our friend Brian Bond for turning us on to Segment, a single hub for gathering your site data/analytics and importing it into multiple tools like Google Analytics, Marketo, MailChimp, Salesforce, and more.

Segment

3Things Lecture Series Update

October 14th, 2014 - by Objective - Salt Lake City, Utah

3Things Lecture SeriesOur next 3Things lecture series event will be Tuesday, October 21st at 4:00 PM. We’ve got an incredible lineup of speakers that you really shouldn’t miss!

Steve Swensen | Founder, Last Advisor
Finding Success Through Self Discovery

Paul Mayne | Founder, Bloom Built
Passion to Profit: Key Ingredients to App Store Success

Stuart Eyring | Chief Operating Officer, Orbit Irrigation Products
3 Marketing Lessons Learned on 3 Continents

We finally launched a site so check it out to get more details.

Fusion Radar: October 8, 2014

October 8th, 2014 - by Objective - Salt Lake City, Utah

Keeping up with technology is a lot of work. Luckily, we enjoy wading through the noise just to find the gems of awesomeness sprinkled throughout. Fusion Radar is our gift to you, Current or Potential Client, so that you can enjoy all of the awesome without any of the drudgery. Unwrap it each week, and know that you’re loved by the geeks and pixel-pushers at Agency Fusion.

Nobody Knows What The Hell They Are Doing

A recent 99U article provides a good reminder that, in spite of appearances, other people don’t necessarily have things more figured out than you do. From the article: “I have written 11 books,” said the late Maya Angelou, who was renowned as a novelist, poet, and memoirist, “but each time, I think ‘Uh-oh. They’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.’”

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The HTML Picture Element

Get some insight into how the new HTML <picture> element came to be.

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10 Fonts for Code

Need to display some code snippets on your site? Use a font that makes the code most legible.

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The Term ‘Designer’

‘Designer’ is a broad title that could imply or encompass many very specific designer roles. This article by Pixelapse is an excellent read that does much to clarify the different types of designers you may encounter or need to hire. If you aren’t sure what the difference is between a UX Designer, a UI Designer, and a Visual Designer…this article is for you.

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Coding in Virtual Reality

This is trippy. Brian Peiris uses Oculus Rift, Firefox WebVR, and JavaScript to create objects in the same environment in which he’s coding. In other words, he’s both creating and viewing the objects in real time, in virtual reality. It’s a long video so skip ahead if you don’t want to spend a full 10 minutes watching.

Watch the video

TinyScreen

If you’re a hardware person, you may need TinyScreen for your next tiny project. It’s a $25 screen about the size of a postage stamp.

TinyScreen

Autojump

Autojump is for command-line junkies who want to move through the filesystem more quickly. Shortcut commands let you jump to commonly-used folders, or even open a folder in Finder/Explorer from the command line.

Autojump

Map Glyphs

Ted Grajeda created a CSS map font that includes 301 different vector map icons. This is fantastic.

Map Glyphs

CMS Training

If you create websites, you’ve surely handed off a masterpiece to a client only to have them mess things up via a content management system. This article from A List Apart suggests that training for how to properly use a CMS should be located within the CMS.

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Font Size and Line Length

We often take legible, easy-to-read text for granted. Learn more about the complex interactions between font size and line length and how they need to be addressed in responsive web designs.

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Isometric JavaScript Apps

The dev team at Airbnb published an article about their experiences moving from a single-page app to using isomorphic JavaScript for increased performance.

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