For those of you that don’t know me in person (which’ll be most of you!), I thought that it’s about time I introduced myself properly. I’m Alex Murrell and I’ve been curating DailySlandered (still not happy with the name) for 3 or 4 years now. By day I work with the super talented folks over at Epoch Design in the beautiful Queen Square, Bristol, and every now and again manage to squeeze in a little outside-of-work project. This branding project was one of the smaller, more recent, briefs I’ve helped out on in my down time, and it’s with this project that I have dipped my metaphorical toe into the creative pool that is Behance. If you use it, drop a link into the comments and I promise to check out your work. In the mean time, if you’re interested, you can see my full project here, oh and any appreciations will of course be… well, appreciated.

For most of us, being a designer/illustrator/educator/parent would be more than enough to fill our waking (and sleeping) hours. Not so for the tireless and prolific Ryan Feerer, who in early 2012 added restauranteur to his resume. After several years of living and working in NYC, the native Texan returned home to the small town of Abilene and realized he missed the dining experience he had in New York. Feerer wanted his fellow Abilenians to enjoy not just great food, but also a unique and beautiful atmosphere. Once a space was acquired in the heart of downtown Abilene, Feerer called on his friends (and fellow Texans) in New York, Jeff Rogers and Dana Tanamachi, to come help realize his dream.

Find out more here.

I’ve read a few articles recently that seemed to employ the terms User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) somewhat interchangeably. Although their definitions aren’t a million miles away from each other, there is an important distinction. With this in mind I thought it might be useful to share an interesting analogy to help clear the misty grey area that exists between the two terms.

Imagine your website is your favourite Italian restaurant.

The UI is the classical Trajan Pro branding, the bespoke gold-leafed wallpaper and natural stone flooring. It’s the modern silver marked cutlery, the embroidered napkin, the ambient lighting and the gladiola display at the end of the bar. It’s the waiter’s crisp white shirt, the clean porcelain ramekins of oil, the spotless glassware.

The UX is the concierge that greets you at the door, takes your coat and leads you to your table, it’s the beautifully laid out menu and the informative, personable waitress. It’s the comfortable seats, the generous space between tables and the subtle background music. It’s the perfect wait between courses, the open kitchen, meals arriving together and plates being cleared when everyone is finished.

The UI is how it looks and the UX is how it’s experienced.

There was a time, when the public discourse around brand behemoths was led by the the brands themselves. When Guinness announced that their product was good for you or Coca-Cola claimed that feeding babies with their product promoted an active lifestyle, it positively affected the consumers’ perception.

Over time advertising regulations ruled out such spurious messaging and brands resorted to spinning positive conversations by emphasising product benefits and burying the rest. In the following decades, technological advances allowed for faster and more direct news distribution causing the true effects of companies’ practices to be exposed. Banks were boycotted for supporting tyranistic regimes, clothing companies were embroiled in labor practice class action lawsuits and energy companies lambasted for environmental damage.

Later, social networks provided a platform for opinions, emotions and reviews to spread organically amongst friends and communities. The savvy, connected generation of the information age were deluged with data that, in turn, informed their purchase decisions, often opting for brands whose ethical policies aligned with their own values.

Trying to stay relevant, companies began to tack on socially responsible sidelines, temporarily swaying public opinion in their favour but failing to cause any lasting effect.

As more and more consumers gain greater access to information and the ability to share it, I believe brands that have social responsibility at their core will prosper ahead of those don’t. Their solid environmental policy, financial transparency, respect for human rights, investment in employees, and avoidance of animal testing will prompt positive social media conversations. In the short term we’ll see brands continue to shift marketing spend from bought media to earned media and in the long term towards bringing ethical practices to their core. Morality will be the new marketing.

Emporium Pies is a boutique pie shop in the Bishop Arts District of Oak Cliff Dallas. Whilst testing the market with pop-up shops the Megan and Mary worked with Foundry Collective to craft their visual identity for the upcoming bricks and mortar shop. Find out more here.

Over the last 12 months or so I’ve been gradually learning the ropes with the 3D modelling and animation program Cinema 4D. So when Adora shared the Making Glass Cows video, by production house Assembly, embedded above, I was absolutely blown away. The resulting ad by New Zealand’s ColensoBBDO is also beautifully crafted, presenting a single-minded proposition through a clever, memorable and humorous concept.

With the past few upgrades, Apple’s desktop operating system (OS X) has seen a set of new features that help align it, both in terms of look and experience, with their mobile platform (iOS). While many of these features (including Notifications Centre, full screen apps, Launchpad and reverse scrolling) have been slammed by some commentators for diluting the brand’s core product, their implementation feels sound to me.

As a designer, part of my role is to think strategically in order to produce the best creative for a given market and much of that strategy can be distilled into three words: insight, aim and action. Apple’s insight is that, for many consumers, the iPhone will be their first interaction with an Apple product, their aim is to aid migration throughout their product range and their action is to align their products’ hardware aesthetics and software UI and UX. It surprises me however that Apple has fallen at the first hurdle by not unifying their boot screens. OS X sports the off white screen with flat grey logo whilst it’s little brothers offers the black screen with glistening motif.

Surely it would make sense to set a Mac newbie at ease from the off by giving them something familiar, something they’ve seen and used before. With this in mind, I suggest that Apple adapt their desktop OS boot screen to align with the mobile counterpart as the mock-up I’ve made shows below. And Apple, if you want this idea, take it. It’s yours. Free of charge. Although a new MacBook Air would be lovely.

A recent Suzanne Moore article in the Guardian’s G2 supplement entitled “We distrust so many of our institutions, so why do we take Twitter at its word?” got me thinking about 140 character journalism, it’s pitfalls and a possible solution.

In 2013 it is a reasonably fair statement to say that many of the news stories we read, even those printed on the most trusted of newspapers, will have originated from a Twitter source. In fact, Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere recently said that “Mail Online try and turn around stories from Twitter in about three minutes”. While I realise that the Daily Mail cannot be used as a barometer for the entirety of the global news industry it is indicative of a sea-change redefinition of  journalism. Thus, in a sense, directly or otherwise, we are all on Twitter, for it is the global newswire, collectively and inevitably spreading the story first and fastest.

Unlike traditional sources however, it is unrealistic to expect Twitter, as a platform, to be governed and its users have no collective obligation to report with any degree of precision. This flaw became almost palpable when, despite a chasmal lack of evidence, users incorrectly identified the Boston bombers. Mainstream outlets took this source and hashed out articles; the rush to be first overwhelming the need to be accurate.

The challenge for professional journalism now, is not to compete with Twitter but to coexist with it; to add weight to its brevity, to moderate its emotion with impartiality and to connect the disparate dots with the clarity of an arbiter. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking but, if Twitter is to recognise their influence and realise its responsibility, it could do worse than applying the same vigor to verifying trending stories as it does to validating the accounts of the famous.

Generative logos are brand emblems that change their appearance according to a set of preordained variables. The best examples tend to focus on an elegant simplicity, managing to keep a coherent look and feel despite having hundreds of potential versions. When executed well, they can provide a richer more engaging identity, appealing to the modern instantly gratified, tech savvy breed of the information age.

Visit Nordkyn identity by Neue

The Nordkyn peninsula accommodates two municipalities in the county of Finnmark, Norway, and Neue were given the task to unite and promote them as one tourist destination. In a place where nature rules, the result is a generative logo that changes with wind direction and temperature. Their systematic solution works so well because the logo adaptions are tied to the location that they promote. This makes them meaningful, relevant and interesting. The styling is also clean, consistent and highly own-able.

COP15 identity by okdeluxe and nr2154

The United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 held an open competition to design the logo. The wining entry by okdeluxe and nr2154 visualises a globe made of a network of lines, one for each UN member nation.The logo’s lines visually interpret a range of data garnered from the conference, depicting the mood and movements throughout the event.