On the mark

I’ve been extremely busy of late, and I’d like to offer my apologies (to all three of you who I estimate actually care) to anyone annoyed by the lack of activity on this blog. In addition to running my business, two very time consuming activities have emerged in my life, which have made it increasingly difficult for me to find the time to blog as actively as I would prefer.

At the december board meeting of the Southern California American Marketing Association, I was appointed President Elect of the chapter, replacing someone who had resigned midway through the fiscal year. Being President of an American Marketing Association chapter is normally a three-year commitment, consisting of one year as President Elect, one year as President, and one as Immediate Past President. In my case, it will be a two and a half year commitment, but the result of this is that several activities I would ordinarily have a full eight months to perform have been compressed into less than two…

The other time constraint affecting me is my increasing interest in Free and Open Source Software. This is an exciting field at the moment, and I intend to get Integral Identity closely involved in branding and design activities in this area. I started using Linux on one of my desktops in October of last year, and have since fallen in love with it (and also have been enjoying another open source operating system, BSD). I had been involved, back in late 1999-early 2000, with an experimental open source content venture, which sadly was proven to be ahead of its time.  Now, however, I feel like the market is beginning to accept the concept of open source, and it seems like an increasing number of my friends and colleagues have either made the switch to Linux, or are planning on making it, within the next few months.

In spite of the formidable time constraints the above pose, I am hoping to continue to blog, as I enjoy it, and feel that it provides a really useful forum for stimulating discussions. So, hopefully within the next week or so I’ll find the time to post again. Exciting times, indeed…

There is no gentle way of putting this. The Design Management Institute conference that wrapped up last week was nothing less than the best conference-going experience I’ve had. Period. End of story. AIGA Gain was also quite enjoyable, and, as one would hope, had the best graphics of any conference I’ve seen. It made me proud to be an AIGA member.

I’m glad to be back from my road trip, and am quite exhausted. I have another conference coming up in late November - the American Marketing Association’s mPlanet. I’ve had quite a lot of AMA activity of late, as the local AMA chapter where I serve as VP of communications asked me to moderate a panel on brand strategy on October the 19th. That was also a really fun event for me, as I was privileged to have on my panel William Engler from BrandLogic, Christie Henricks from SiegelGale, and Sasha Strauss-visionary figures in my field, with highly diverse opinions. Interacting with them on the stage was a blast, and we had 67 or so attendees at the meeting, so there was also a nice bit of scope for audience participation. I’m hoping to moderate another SoCalAMA panel, perhaps focusing on design and business, at some point in 07.

I’m one of a handful of people in the design and branding world who does not use a Mac in day-to-day professional activity. Much as I admire Apple’s flair for creativity and innovation, their steadfast support for the concept of design as a business discipline, and their superior operating system, I (and my company) have used Windows systems. The rationale for this decision was twofold: first, it lets us use a broader range of software applications, allowing us to have more mission-specific functionality, and consequently, higher productivity, and second, using Windows machines keeps us from being tied to a single hardware manufacturer. Of course, the trade-off when using Windows as opposed to OS X is simple: higher maintenance costs, in terms of increased expenditure on security software and the additional time and money required to fix any problems which may arise. I would prefer to be able to use Linux, which would save us quite a bit of money both in terms of licensing and maintenance, however, none of the major software suites that we rely on support it (and the open source alternatives, while impressive, aren’t quite there yet).

I had been intrigued by the new Macs for some time, however, and today I finally worked up the courage to buy a Mac Mini. This will be the first Apple product (other than iTunes) that I will have used with any regularity since the days of the Macintosh SE/30. I was particularly delighted by the exceptional quality of the packaging in which the machine came, and by the design of the accompanying documentation. The superb quality of Apple graphics design has been discussed to death, but I found it even better than expected. I would love to see some of my other favorite OEMs (such as Dell and Lenovo) adopt such a high standard of design in their packaging and documentation, and considering the huge leap we’ve seen in PC design in general since 2000, I would not be suprised to see this happen.