Health and medicine can be a confusing and overwhelming category, look no further than the health care reform debate as evidence. But not every medical issue is serious. Headaches, minor cuts, allergies, and blisters are small obstacles in our path to wellness, but pharmaceutical companies still treat these issues as serious business, aside from a few cartoon characters on bandages and overly cheery people in medicine commercials.

Help Remedies believes the best way to solve simple medical issues is to be simple. They do this with straight-to-the-point language and color-coded packaging, which also happens to be bio-degradable. Adding a little personality and fun to the equation makes Help Remedies an easy-to-love brand. And if you’re bored, they can help you with that.

on the web: Help Remedies

When IKEA recently mailed their annual catalog, eagle-eyed fans of the brand noticed something was a bit different compared to last year’s edition - and just about every other piece of IKEA branding ever produced. After 50 years, IKEA has replaced the iconic Futura-style IKEA Sans typeface with Verdana, a font designed for Microsoft in 1996. Typophiles were shocked (shocked!) IKEA, a company that built its brand with forward-thinking design, would choose what they felt was an inferior typeface.

The anti-Verdana group voiced their displeasure on blogs and on Twitter, while some cracked jokes elsewhere. There is even an online petition (serious business) that has received over 3000 signatures.

IKEA spokeswoman Camilla Meiby says, “Verdana is a simple, cost-effective font which works well in all media and languages,” something I guess they weren’t able to do with IKEA Sans. Verdana has an advantage over IKEA Sans in that it is designed specifically to be read on computer screens. With that in mind, maybe this move is a signal that IKEA will ramp up its digital marketing efforts, both on the web and with mobile phones, and perhaps Verdana is more practical than IKEA Sans in accomplishing those goals.

In a similar rebranding move, when Tropicana changed their packaging last winter, complaints from customers they deemed too loyal to upset forced them to switch back in a well-publicized debacle. IKEA, on the other hand, is brushing off the initial criticism by saying they “don’t think the broad public is that interested” in the typeface switch. For their sake, I hope they are right, and I hope the switch doesn’t cause more harm than good in the long run.

via idsgn

Personas is a project created by Aaron Zinman for the Metropath(ologies) exhibit at the MIT Museum. When you enter your name in the dialog box, Personas attempts to build a visualization of your online identity using information accessed by the internet and natural language processing. The result is a color coded diagram that “shows how the internet sees you.” Mine is above.

It’s a neat idea even if it isn’t entirely accurate. There aren’t too many people with my name, so I imagine the results are mostly related to me. However, if my name was John Smith it would be a different story. But perhaps that is the point. We can’t always control what results pop up in Google when someone searches our name, so how the web views us (and others who share the same name) influences how others see us as well, for better or worse.

link: personas


Speaking of unconsumption, PSFK introduced me to the phenomenon of “hand-me-ups.” The concept of handing-up was even featured as the word-of-the-day at Urban Dictionary and defined as:
“Where the young generation in a family adopts and purchases new technology product at a fast rate, and old versions (that are in working order but are not up to current standards) of that technology product are given to the parents or older generations of family.”
What I find interesting is how younger generations are giving their parents and grandparents out-dated iPods and digital cameras while simultaneously discovering older technology like vinyl turntables and Polaroid cameras. They’re handing-up while getting hand-me-downs. Maybe the overall concept is “tech trading” and in each case, both generations are dealing with technologies that are largely unfamiliar to them and helping each other master the learning curves on these devices.

via PSFK
photo via flickr (graciepoo)

Some time ago I came across a wonderful blog titled Unconsumption. If consumption is the act of acquiring an object, unconsumption is anything that happens to that object after acquisition. In short, the blog is about recycling, reusing, and creative re-purposing of items that would be discarded otherwise.

Some recent highlight from Unconsumption:
- a TIE Fighter made of Starbucks cups and coffee stirrers
- Dumpster pools in Brooklyn
- a trivet made out of wine corks
- packing materials transformed into a play area
- old playground ball made into a hanging planter

photo via readymade blog