No absence of colour

Welcome to Idealog Weekly, the free email newsletter for New Zealand commercial creatives, entrepreneurs and anyone rich with ideas.

No absence of colour

A friend returning to Auckland after a longish Spanish sojourn remarked that Kiwis dress like Ford Model Ts. That is, in one colour only: black. In Europe they don’t apparently don apparel in the mourning hue, my friend tells me, unknowingly echoing the thinking of export-oriented designer Cybele Wiren.

Her eponymous label is winning awards and popping up in Harajuku, Tokyo. And even on New Zealand women, despite Wiren’s liberal use of colourful, well-cut cloth. Read how Wiren does it in the latest issue of Idealog magazine, out now.

Acid reflux

DJ Funk’s “Omega”, for no reason other than it’s tough and from 1995.

Board of your skate?

Get some inspiration from the likes of Billy Apple, Ben Buchanan, Wunderkammer, Liz Maw, Rainbow Monkey and Ed Fella who are some of the artists, graphic designers, typographers and fashion designers who are collaborating at the Interstatte Artist Longboards exhibition held at Webb’s, 18 Manukau Road, Auckland, between Nov 6 and 14.

Gesundheit

CAPTCHA sounds like a sneeze but is in fact a reasonably effective way to keep spambots out of blogs’ comments sections, for instance. You’ve probably seen CAPTCHA on online forms before: an image of distorted text that you have to decipher.

But that’s not all CAPTCHA can be used for. The ReCAPTCHA project is borderline brilliant actually: Carnegie Mellon University has “overloaded” CAPTCHA with the secondary important function of helping digitise scanned texts, one word at the time. Like spambots, optical character recognition software can’t read fuzzy, distorted letters like humans can, and misses a heap of words during digitisation. Now you can get a free CAPTCHA service for your site while you help archive literature on the Internet. (Via Longnow)

Sledging Aussies

TVNZ does election debates on YouTube, and Australian broadcaster ABC promos Dark Black Knight and Barack-rolled mashups. Hmm. Come, Patsy—never gonna give you up!

Obama mixed-up

DJ Z-Trip (is that “zee trip” or “zed trip”?) reckons he’s “one of the biggest DJs of our time”. That may be so, but what’s cool is his Creative Commons-licensed Obama Mix. Get it now. It’s worth the 85MB download.

The secret to Flossie’s success

Flossie.com founder Jenene Freer is one of our leading online entrepreneurs, netting a big investment from the founders of TradeMe to build a $200 million online business. Come and hear her secrets at the AUT–Idealog Innovation Series Plus.

ASME what cover won?

The American Society of Magazine Editors is a picky lot, judging by their taste in covers. They do seem to like The New Yorker a lot though.

This is The End

… my little friend. And a Fin collection it is too, on Flickr.

Visualise, and you shall find

Pictures speak louder than words, but without using words, it’s hard to find the right ones. Idée Inc has some multicolour ideas how to fix that. It’s probably not immediately usable, but hugely fascinating for exploring online photo sites nevertheless.

Dr Ron’s musical Balzaak

“In his continuing effort to promote creative harmony and healthy literary ecosystems, Dr Ronald Chevalier has produced a brand new video about the role of music in his creative writing processes. Enjoy!”

And here’s Dr Ron being a bit stressed out after writing, and showing you the art of relaxation. Grasp your ankles!

RoGR that pumpkin

Halloween is a holiday of horrors, imported by the Warehouse from the US and involving bands of children roaming streets in stupid costumes in search of sugar highs.

On the plus side are the pumpkin (and sometimes mangelwurzel) Jack O’Lanterns. Lumenlab does it amazingly well, with a little (actually, a lot) of help from RoGR.

Over rolls under

This experiment by Andrew Hedges goes straight to the heart of the debate. Nobody knows why, but over is now proven to rule.

Finest of the Commons

In this age of endless Copyright War, with media conglomerate shock troopers conducting dawn raids on infidel infringers supported by police and government ministers, it’s a pleasure to come across resources like Wikimedia Commons that you can use without fear of ending up in jail or being bankrupted by legal costs.

Use and contribute freely.

Quote of the week

“Each market needs a solid plan and solid representation. It’s important to get people who understand your brand to represent you.”

— Cybele Wiren on doing business in different countries.

More at Idealog online

Read more on our website: web exclusives, opinion, creative directory, Idealog TV, the Idealog blogs and the Idealog podcast. See you at idealog.co.nz.

  Juha Saarinen
  Ideologue, Weekly