TreeWorks Blog

The idea for this post came to me from Gentlesmen Agreement, a post I’ve written on my personal blog.

I was writing there that it is immoral to work as an employee as well as a freelancer in the same field (actually illegal – the unfair competition being legally sanctioned) if it is not notified to the other parties (the employer and the client). What sucks is that practice destroys or at least widely decreases the value of an industry.

Therefore all the creative industries in Romania (design, internet, branding, advertising, software) are highly affected by this issue.

This creates the impression of amateurism picture for outsiders. “Man, these people are a sort of plumbers or electricians, nothing more. Not even repairmen, because those use more tools”. “Why should I buy the whole hog when I could have just the hamburger?”. “I’ll do only what I need, and I’ll see after a few months if I need to make some changes.

“Gratifications” keep prices to a low-level (“That much?”), unsustainable for companies, they decrease professionalism level (Well, Ghita told he could do it in a couple of days \”), and employee’s dedication.

The big problem is not when the x shop asks the y student: “Hey, make me a poster, a web page or a thing for printing tickets” That’s an ordinary process to learn the ropes and satisfy some basic necessities of small companies.

The real problem is when big companies resort to this kind of solutions. And they don’t ask students, but industry specialists, with  know-how and stuff.

I thing this is a loss-loss situation:

1. Companies tend to undervalue work in order to become more competitive. That implicitly declines the quality.
2.  Clients get the work done but not strategy/ consultancy/general ideas. There will be no long-term commitment.
3. The clients get home made services (of a lower quality and for sure more problematic in terms of turnaround time).
4.  The clients regard these industries as a sort of manufacture, amateurs job.( I hired the best man and I’m still not satisfied”).
5. Those who stoop to this level are affected by burnout and have no time left to experiment, to develop their own projects or relax.
6. My opinion is that for long-term you won’t make much money (because if that kind of gigs weren’t practiced, creative industries would grow quickly and salaries would be higher.
7. If somebody in this dual condition of freelancer/ employee wants to start his own business, he will have difficulty explaining why his prices got so high (additional costs + only one income source instead of two).
8. Only a few people from the industry would accept the assignment of educating clients.

Attention, I don’t say that companies are good and freelancers are evil. I just say that the half human and half rabbit condition tends to be harmful for everybody. Moreover, I agree that there are some projects which can be made under such circumstance and which actually need to be encouraged: nonprofit ones, those for friends and for the soul, but not when it comes to high-stakes corporate projects.

Other things which undermine these industries are, in my opinion:

• strategy/ consultancy./ general idea isn’t paid or is ambiguous
• variable geometry requirements
• free proposals for everybody
• creator/inventor compulsory certificates issued by the state
• the human resources rarity (the state’s strategy (or it’s lack) when it comes to the educational field)

Or…that’s the idea beyond the Vista Industrial Design Toolkit – a set of suggestions that transforms the Wintel hardware into objects similar in terms of design with Apple products.

The big question is who will take the plunge to this direction? That would simplify hardware much more. I can’t see the people from Dell, IBM, HP biting the bait. On the other hand, if I was with Alex, Flamingo or UltraPro, I would launch a more luxurious line based on these specifications.

After being introduced in two dictionaries (Merriam-Webster- transitive verb: “to use the Google search engine to obtain information […] on the World Wide Web” and Oxford English Dictionary), “to google” started troubling brand protectors, who asked mass media representatives to stop using company’s name as a verb.

The reason? Naturally, the brand’s erosion. The fear that this phenomenon could translate brand’s name (and implicitly it’s value, of around bil. $12.4) from the company’s ownership to the public domain, and that “to google” might become synonymous with “to search”, and not with / instead of “ to search using Google’s services”

After ridiculing appropriate and inappropriate usage examples (’Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie’) you realize that this fear is somehow justified. If “to google” means “ to search”, who’ll be interested in word etymology over 50 years ? Who will credit Google company from Mountain View, CA for it’s accomplishments?

For example, who knows now that Google derives from “Googol”, which represent the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros?

I xeroxed my courses with a Canon

This Touareg is one hell of a jeep

If you take a good look at my examples you’ll notice that xerox” and “jeep” are written with lower-case letters, while “Canon” and “Touareg” are written with upper-case letters. So, it makes sense why a company which defined a product category isn’t comfortable with becoming the class name next to the proper noun.

It’s not the first time when a company having become a verb or a noun has such a reaction. Another known example is Xerox which (if I’m not mistaken) had protested at a given moment against the official speech of a White House representative who stated that he had “Xeroxed” some acts.

Even though one of the branding “laws” provides that a brand should fight to detain one word in the consumer mind, it seems that the problems appears when that word is actually the brand’s name. Although this denotes the brand’s utmost recognition, there is also a flip side to that coin. In other words, it is grateful for Volvo to detain the word “ security” or for FedEX to detain “overnight”, but when “to google” becomes “ to search”, the brand might suffer.

Google makes a deal valuing 900 million with MySpace- exclusivity for search/publicity on MySpace and other Fox domains for a period of 4 years.

Google deals with MTV concerning video-content distribution. Some would say that Microsoft got the start with Urge MTV deal, but they forget that the most of audio content belongs to the recording industry (which - apparently - don’t work on the basis of an unique distributor). And if Google will see it works, it will immediately get into iTunes, for sure!

Therefore, Google has now the space as well as the product for selling them to the young generation. With a 4 years deal they will feel very comfortable in inventing specific algorithms for MySpace, algorithms that will be able to exploit very well the characteristics of the service (networking, profile section, collaborative filtering etc). Especially because they have enough experience with Orkut as to know from where they should start.

From Microsoft’s ”where do you want to go today?”, it will get to Google’s “today you want to buy a vintage album with the B-sides of Dr. Dre, and a pair of Converse shoes, red with black sole. We know it because we can read your behavior and demographic patterns”.

And if we also add the deal with Associated Press, I think that the business model will be gradually changed. Or they will rather complete it. Besides contextual advertising, I think that they’ll add up the distribution of intangible goods (music, video, articles, books) in the same contextual style. And with an action base distributed to all the major partner sites (AOL, MySpace) and to those from AdSense network. Especially because they already have a micropayments engine by Google Checkout.

For the next show I’ll burn my own suitcase. Is anyone from the public willing to assist me?

I remember the first website that I’ve done. Its name was Aeronave and it had free hosting. Don’t rush to click, let it rest in the sites’ heaven, from where it looks at me and smiles. It’s better if I tell you its story.

• The menu was created using a buttons generator
• I created an intro that I used to claim it was “Flash”, but it was actually created using timelines with Dreamweaver (my intention wasn’t to cheat the world, I just had no idea of what Flash was and I associated it with anything animated).
• There were no 2 pages looking alike. Each of them was an independent exercise of creation and imagination
• Using a tiny “morphing” software I created a 2Mb animation with a Spitfire that used to transform itself into a F-22. I placed it on the page as a design element so that everybody could enjoy my exaltation. I couldn’t understand why it used to appear so late.
• None of the page elements remained where I would have loved to, because I didn’t even discover the tables then (Even from those times I was table-less. And I was also clueless, sleepless and penniless)
• As a background I had images with planes and - here and there - it was no chance for one to read something.
• I created a sort of an animated logo with a bullet that passes off the word “Aircraft” and breaks it (Pixar who?)
• Any pictures went through 3 (three) to 100 (one hundred) special Photoshop effects. From them, let’s recall the planes changed into basreliefs, images garnished with 5 lens-flares (these were irresistible, one was never enough) and -my favorite - motion blur.

But there was something at this website! It had content. I had collected for weeks everything I found on the Web about aircrafts. Serious things, no nonsense. Drafts, specifications, history, air-raids, investigations, hypothesis, experimental projects. I even had audio recordings with a veteran who witnessed the Red Baron crash. 

As a conclusion: it was a web site full of high quality content, which - unfortunately - [the content] suffered the abuses of one child of the web-design stuff [that’s me] who dressed it into clown clothes, covered it with jam, pulled its hair, locked it in the closet and knocked it out with the toy-car. As a client and content provider I should have fire myself.

It happened in 1998 and I had the same keyboard I have now (no-name, for those who want to buy one). But many things changed since then. Today I don’t dress the content with clown clothes anymore. I don’t constrain visitors to bear my creative aberrations. I try to lead them exactly where they want. I want them to tell me “See you soon” instead of “Farewell” at their depart. I don’t let them to exude, to cross their eyes, to develop tears, to screw up their eyes, to turn up the eyes over the had, to blink frequently (I was an ophthalmologist in another life)… I don’t let them to frown, to scratch their heads for surprise, to swear my name, to loose their time. Now I don’t let them do stuffs that didn’t worth at least 2 pennies for me eight years ago.

Maybe one day I’ll remake it. And after another eight years I’ll laugh again. I hope my keyboard won’t leave me, because I intend to make the same joke.