Home / About / Projects / Blog / Contact

There are a certain number of opposing views on the importance of a website’s ‘fold’ (the first content displayed in the browser’s viewable area – usually the top section of the home page). Depending on what source you rely on, this is usually seen to be anything between the first 500 pixels and 1100 pixels and beyond depending on screen size.

One view is that this is what our friends over the pond would call ‘prime real estate’ – all your call to actions, key messages, logos, navigation should be crammed into this area as to not to lose the visitors’ attention. The other view (and one we would like to align ourselves with) is that the first theory is outdated and misinterpreted. The web is now mature enough for the majority of visitors to have enough nous to work out that there is indeed more content down the page. Blogs are commonplace, blogs require scrolling. An outdated print-based term such as ‘page fold’ has no place in the cauldron of modern media browsing.

Of course, it would be unwise to fill the first part of your web page with ad banners with no branding that corresponds with your site. It’s up to the designers to educate their clients who may have preconceived ideas about the dreaded fold and tell them that the web has moved on. Content display has moved on. Scroll wheels rule the world!

…only in an online game but – hey – it’s a start.

Thanks to Brand Republic for this one:

Virgin Trains is launching an online game based on its current zombie ad campaign (you know, the one you see and think ‘that’s pants and actually quite disturbing’);

Presumably the Egomaniacal one wants to cash in on the current craze for all things vampire (clearly aiming at the teen market then; ‘hey kids, we have trains like the ones in those cool Harry Potter films – only ours are dirtier and slower – and we have dead people, like in those cool vampire films or Tuol Sleng) so if you’ve been wowed by the print ad – but can’t afford to buy a ticket as your surname isn’t Croesus – then you can satisfy your brand aspirations by going to dontgozombie (a call to action that includes negation…what will they think of next?) where you can…wait for it…

use an automated ticket dispenser to fire tickets at a zombie driver, saving them from traffic congestion.

Being able to find an automated ticket dispenser that works is pretty bloody amazing in itself (well it is only a game).  Surely it would have been more fun to have created an online game where you have to search the land to find an automated ticket dispenser that is actually dispensing tickets that are valid for the route on which you want to travel this side of Easter.  Then you have to defuse the broken machine, as it has seized up after becoming a repository for used kebabs, 10 cent Euro coins and wee, before the polyester-clad Platform Manager catches you.  Kind of like The Hurt Locker, just less exciting.

As for shooting drivers to put them out of their misery, one can only guess that this is more acceptable than showing a vet putting little Tiddles to sleep.

Let’s hope they’ve missed the conotation that shooting things at drivers – whether train or car – is a f**king stupid thing to do, kids.

The winning participants will be entered in a draw to win a first-class journey on a Virgin Train, something denied to the vast majority of the travelling public on the basis of a) there not being any first-class carriages and b) in the wider sense, it is nigh on impossible to have a first-class experience when you are sharing your carriage with a pramface, whose mini-pramfaces are determined the scale the north face of the seatback, and a toilet with a revolving door that opens as if revealing the prize on Bullseye.  Gee, a f**king speedboat…thanks Jim.

Sir Richard says the “campaign encapsulates our vision of liberating travellers from the drudgery of mind-numbing car journeys.”

Let’s hope that cars doesn’t include Virginracing (when I was a lad, virgin racing was a popular Saturday night sport after the pubs kicked out: winner stays one) in Formula 1, although it could explain their form so far this season.

.

The BBC is considering whether to move BBC Breakfast north.

Jan Mayen Island?

North Greenland?

Oh please.

.

Oh dear, they’re at it again.

Having wowed the British population with the fractal disaster that was the London 2012 logo, we now have the official mascots for 2012 (that’s the Olympics as opposed to the Mayan calendar’s end of the world, although you do wonder whether the agency got these confused).

Two one-eyed characters.  Presumably that’s better than one two-eyed character, on the basis that you still have one left after the first one catches sight of itself in a mirror and promptly blows its metallic brains out.

Did LOCOG or whoever was charged with spending lots of lovely taxpayers’ dosh, not consider when engaging with its stakeholder groups that creating anything ‘one-eyed’ might have just the slightest connotation with the one-eyed trouser snake (look it up here)?  Or perhaps they did but thought that the best solution was to create two characters that are synonymous with cocks.

So, was it worth the wait?

Er…no.

WTF springs to mind.

Wenlock and Mandeville look like the result of years of laboratory testing and inbreeding between a Smurf, a weather balloon and Kang & Kodos from the Simpsons;

Stephen Bayley, commentator on everything űber-cool in design and a genuine national treasure, summed it up beautifully in the Telegraph; “what is it about these Games which seems to drive the organisers into the embrace of this kind of patronising, cretinous infantilism?  Why can’t we have something that makes us sing with pride, instead of these appalling computerised Smurfs for the iPhone generation…If the Games are going to be remembered by their art then we can declare them a calamitous failure already.”

Lord Coe of Detached Reality said in response that “we’ve created our mascots for children”.   Are you sure that you didn’t mean “we’ve created our mascots to scare children”?

Surely if you wanted two hilarious caricatures with whom the deluded, stupid and bonkers could identify, they could just have let our old friends out of their room (the one that has mattresses on the walls and no door handle on the inside);