Website Thumbnails

Want to make a thumbnail capture of a website to embed within your content?

You do? Well try either of these nifty little free services: webthumb and websnapr (I seem to be queuing though for ages in websnapr – demand must be high). The latter also offers a smart hyperlink bubble script.

Here’s one I quickly prepared earlier using webthumb for our ghd homepage

Suspect I can make good use of website thumbnails.

thumbnails Websnapr WebThumb

Elizabeth Arden & Hummer – A Strange Brand Mashup

I’d forgotten I’d kept a cut out press article relating to a very strange brand mashup between the cosmetics and fragrance company Elizabeth Arden and the manufacturer of very large cars Hummer.

Arden have struck a rights deal to the Hummer fragrance and have plans to produce eau-de-toilette and deodorant and market them using the Hummer name. Doesn’t really sound like a winner to me. Why would anyone want to wear a fragrance that has a name associated with a fuel guzzling, eco unfriendly, muscle jeep?

Sweaty chaps in the UK that are in need of industrial strength deodorant can look forward to using Hummer under their arms in the near future !

Branding Arden Hummer

Pink For A Boy?

Why is pink for girls? Well, google answers that here.

In recent years, it appears to me, that the colour pink has rapidly taken off as a brand phenomenon in its own right. Pink is now synonymous with breast cancer charities (along with the pink ribbon). Girls can now buy just about any item they want in pink, from a Motorola mobile to a pair of ghd straighteners (a brand I have commercial involvement with). Sometimes, a pink product is associated with a breast cancer charity and a percentage of the sale is donated to the specified charity (the aforementioned ghd’s being an example). Okay, so maybe there is an element of brand building by associating with a good cause, but research in to breast cancer (or any cancer) is only a good thing.

But what about boys? As far as I’m aware, an equivalent colour branding and associations with “male” charities don’t exist. Are there products for the male market for which a percentage of the sale proceeds goes to a testicular cancer research charity? Is it because testicular cancer does not have the media coverage? What colour would fit the bill anyway? Would it be blue?

Perhaps Lance Armstrong got the branding mix right for everyone? The colour yellow and the inspiring motto LIVESTRONG

Branding Pink Cancer

BBC 1 Turns one

If you watch the BBC at all you’ll have noticed the new between programme clips and the revised lower-case ‘one’ logo.

The new film clips, or idents as they are so-called, went on-air on October 7th and will be aired about 14,000 times in their lifetime. So out go the tango dancers, street hip-hoppers and wheelchair bound basketball players and in come swimming hippos, stunt kites and Mexican surfers (a dude called Carlos ‘Coco’ Nogales).

The branding gurus who devised the new idents suggest that they all feature a circle within the imagery. Circles apparently have resonance…we come together in circles to watch things so the circle imagery feels like a symbol of togetherness.

The cost to us TV licence payers for this rebranding exercise? Only £1.2 m.

Branding BBC Circles

David Cameron And Clouds

I had a quick nose at David Camerons’ blog – a beta version apparently for some reason? If it was me, I’d have made sure that it was more-than-ready before going very public. Maybe the Tory Party leader is attempting to lure the tech heads with this beta label?

Anyway, I’m not publicly expressing a politic preference here (though I admit, I share his interest in wind turbines and The Smiths), I just read about it so thought I’d go take a look. However, as I often do, I start following links and end up finding something that does interest me. I followed a link to this and then to this.

Now, I’m interested in tag clouds (for a little idea I’ve got on the backburner) and although I know little about zoomclouds right now I can certainly see myself utilising the facility on this blog and on my personal running blog too.

Something else to add to my ever increasing task list.

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