Archive for January, 2012

Email Marketers Wake Up To Ideograms

Tuesday, January 24th, 2012

I was noticing in my email this morning that a few different pieces of spam had much more eye-catching, decorative subject lines:

Special Characters in Subject Lines for Email Marketing

As you can see above, one email note for “magicJack Plus” included a little telephone symbol, while another one for printer ink included a little fountain pen nib symbol at the begining of its subject line.

It appears that spammers have woken up to the same concept that I wrote about in “Special Characters Are Lucky Charms for Twitter“. In a list of text titles or status updates, adding a little icon-like picture to just a few lines is very eye-catching.

Of course, if this becomes too common, the notes won’t stand out at all, and they’ll risk (more…)

Google’s Geology Logo

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

I thought the Google logo commemorating the birthday of Nicolas Steno, popularly known as “The Father of Geology”, was a particularly effective logo treatment:

Google Nicolas Steno Geology logo

The 3-D letters which are made to communicate the concept of cut-away views of earth sections to show layers of rock and sediment were effortless-seeming in their execution. This is a really great example of typography and graphic art — it’s very nearly an infographic — and, it does all this without losing the recognizability of the Google name (which some of their special logos have done).

Very cool!