Hearken Creative – the blog

It’s simply a funny headline. We were just there with the kids a few months ago…

My wife always tells me to stop printing things out at home. That way, her toner cartridge will last a little longer. (But I just print it out at the office anyways, right?)

So some enterprising people at Spranq created this wonderful new typeface entitled Ecofont, based on the open-source Vera Sans, except with lots of dots in it. The dots ensure that you will use significantly less toner when printing out all those important documents on your laser printer. They designed it “to avoid unnecessary wastage in ink” and toner, and to “increase environmental awareness.”

Cool. I’ll try to use it sometime and report back.

There’s a new commercial for the 51st Grammy Awards that’s out, and it features Stevie Wonder talking about his musical influences. As he is talking, an illustration of Wonder is coming into focus through the use of floating song titles — all in different typefaces. Great execution by TBWA/Chiat/Day!

There’s also a Thom Yorke ad, but it doesn’t work as well as the Stevie Wonder. It’s not as subtle…

Have you ever heard of Maryland Sound International? Well, they just pulled off what they think might be the “largest amplified event ever. Period.”

Pro Sound News covers the requirements for a presidential inauguration: JBL VerTec rigs hung on custom motorized portable poles dotted the National Mall. But the coolest thing (from a scientific perspective) is the time-delay required to make sure everyone hears the same thing:

Given the vast expanses needed to be covered, it took more than nine seconds for audio to travel from Obama’s microphone to the last loudspeaker, requiring that video fed to the many portable screens on hand be delayed to match the audio. Accordingly, MSI spent the last week working onsite, checking wires, listening to mixes and interacting with a government sound architect.

From what I can tell, everything went off without a hitch. Congratulations to MSI and all of their people for making a historic event sound great!

Leatrice Eiseman is a color goddess. She has made it her life’s work to understand how color affects us on a visceral level. She had a great post in December, about choosing gifts based on people’s coloration:

Taking a bit of extra time and thinking about the personal coloring of the gift recipient can be a vital clue to your success in gift selection as most people tend to prefer colors that blend with their natural coloring. For example, have you noticed that redheads, people with golden blonde or brown hair with amber brown eyes invariably gravitate to earthtones?

This struck me because, as I was riding home today, I realized how much the things I put around me really do follow my color likes, which actually do follow my coloration. I’m light-skinned, have brown-hair and gray-blue eyes. So I’m drawn to earth-tones, greens, and blues.

The bike is green. As I look around the office, there are candles in green and blue, the desks are rich honey brown (the old IKEA office furniture color that was the best they had until they discontinued it), and the lighting is all incandescent/halogen (no fluorescent). I have subconsciously surrounded myself with things that scream my colors.

Now Eiseman says give gifts based on people’s coloration. I’ll have to give that a try…

Have you read the Terms and Conditions for Facebook? Before you start posting all of your photos, know that within the T&Cs, Facebook makes it clear that they reserve the right to use anything uploaded to Facebook on their pages, in their advertising, or anywhere else they think would be fun to use it. Carolyn Wright, an attorney who works with photographers, flagged this issue one on her blog.

Just be careful, people. I don’t post any personal photos to any service, because I want some amount of ownership and privacy.

Wildwood School in West Los Angeles asked us to come up with some cool spirit merchandise for the parents to 1) use as a fundraiser, and 2) make everybody look cool. The fundraiser was such a great success that they had to re-order the apparel within a month of taking delivery of the first batch. Here are some photos:

We’re really proud of our collaboration with Jennifer Rowland and the entire team at Wildwood School. And we can’t wait to get these new photos up on the website!

The L.A. Times had an interesting piece run a few weeks ago about the declining availability of funding for film projects. It’s not pretty, and with the current economic crisis, it’s not going to get better anytime soon. So how do we fund new films? Dawn Hudson from Film Independent was interviewed in the story:

Hudson’s group advised one filmmaker who was discovered later to be financing his film with the profits from his hydroponic pot farm and another who was trying to raise money from the Russian mob, though she declines to name them for obvious reasons.

“We had a filmmaker who mortgaged his grandmother’s house. That’s a sad story,” Hudson says, but not uncommon.

“We do a whole forum around these cautionary tales.”

The only other option for small filmmakers is to push the budget lower and lower. But, speaking as one of those people who have to work with the lower and lower budgets, at some point, I throw in the towel. A low budget usually means people work for free or drastically reduced salaries, and that doesn’t put food on the table. Again, from the article:

Hits made for less than $1 million dollars include “The Blair Witch Project” and “Napoleon Dynamite,” not to mention cult and art-house favorites. But the financial failures are too numerous to count, particularly because many of these films never get distribution.

So with The Fair Trade movie, we have cleared one hurdle: we actually have (home video) distribution. But how do we market the thing, when we are working off even less than a shoestring budget?

I’m spending the rest of the year attempting to figure out our (HCS‘s) business model. Because this past year hasn’t worked. Books I have been reading are Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business. Made to Stick is encouraging, Crowdsourcing is completely discouraging because essentially every industry that I have taken the business into is being invaded by amateurs. And, while I don’t necessarily think that the word amateur is a bad word, I still hate the fact that people are giving away services (design, photography, film, music, etc.) for free (or almost free) while I am attempting to make a living for my family from those same services. Hence, it’s time to figure out HCS’s new business model.

Okay, this is kinda fun. I can set up my own Amazon store. Check it out here: http://www.rosecityfilms.com/

The possibilities for this are myriad. I’ll have to see where I can go with this…

I just read an interesting blog post by Sage Lewis over at Search Engine Watch, in which he describes a rather curious action by Wal-mart over early linking to their “Black Friday Deals:”

Wal-Mart told SearchAllDeals and TechCrunch to immediately take down links to Black Friday deals that weren’t supposed to be out before November 24. SearchAllDeals and TechCrunch didn’t publish the content. They just linked to it.

Okay, so Wal-mart is upset that someone jumped the gun and linked to their Black Friday page early. The easy solution would have been to make sure that the infringing information never leak in the first place, and definitely make sure that it’s not on a publicly-available web page. And, last I checked, every retailer in the country would love to have the kind of press that Wal-mart got when those sites broke the story about the cool, incredible deals that Wal-mart was planning for Black Friday. I have always believed that Apple actually wants the bloggers to try and find out what is going on in secret at the Apple labs just because the press those leaks generate is so beneficial to the company.

But even more more disturbing is that this is not a case of plagiarism or copyright infringement, at least by most people’s standards. SearchAllDeals and TechCrunch did not publish the content — they only linked to it. Since I’m not a lawyer or a DMCA expert, I don’t know if Wal-mart’s claim is legit or not. But if it is, that would have a chilling effect on the web as a whole. I link to lots of things — from my blog, from my website, in comments on other people’s blogs — and I’m sure most of them have a “©” copyright line at the bottom of those pages. In fact, most blogs have a copyright line, and for good reason. Someone has written that blog, and it should not be plagiarized. And when I quote someone’s blog, I always make sure to credit the author as well as link to the original piece. Look all over Facebook: half of the news on my homepage are links and comments on outside website/pages/blogs/videos. Are those links legal? If not, we’re all in big legal trouble.

What Wal-mart doesn’t get is 1) free publicity is good (duh!), and 2) the “social media” segment of the web is based wholly on links from one copywritten work to another — there must be a way to legally link and quote sources across the web. If not, a large portion of the fastest-growing segment of the web, the social network, will shrivel up and die.

Solutions? Only one: define infractions/re-write the DMCA to be more specific and reflect the current online climate. It wasn’t written very well when it was enacted anyways, and the web has seen a sea change since the DMCA was passed (Clinton signed it into law in October 1998).