Write a Bike

By Juri Zaech

The Independent's i

The Independent's new i newspaper - launched today. The first UK national daily newspaper to be launched in a generation

Beautiful

Matchstick Art of the Day: Pei-San Ng’s “Passion”. 2,500 matches glued to a piece of reclaimed plywood.

via the Cool Hunter

Pop up Book of Phobias

All kinds of phobias just pop up in your face

Via Design Fetish

Mr. President, sign my iPad

The more you like on Facebook, the less you pay with Skoda

Skoda Belgium has certainly been doing some clever things with Facebook recently. On a microsite and a Facebook page, for each Facebook ‘Like’ received, the price of the car drops. This group buying power is an interesting way to drive fan growth and gives the fan instant gratification.

It also goes some way to answer the external problem of how much a Facebook Like button is worth. Two Euros, according to Skoda. Of course, the catch is that only one fan will get the car at the ‘Facebook Price’ but it’s a compelling and shareable idea – upon liking you are encouraged to invite more friends in the interest of driving the price down.

This is a strong and simple idea that makes great use of Facebook functionality. While previously, brands such as Burger King and iTunes have offered coupons and tickets in exchange for tweets, it’s interesting that Skoda is one of the first major brands to step up and attribute an actual monetary value to a Facebook Like.

Source: The Wall

MySpaces's new logo

Set to be the next brand to get the crowdsourcing peeps going nuts is MySpace who have just unveiled their new logo which is, get this, the word “my” in Helvetica and then a symbol delineating a space. Heavens above!

I smell a PR stunt

Having stirred social media up over the past week with a much-hated new logo, Gap is right back where it started—announcing last night that it's ditching the new mark and returning to the old one.

Gap North America president Marka Hansen says in a statement: "Ultimately, we've learned just how much energy there is around our brand. All roads were leading us back to the blue box, so we've made the decision not to use the new logo on gap.com any further. At Gap brand, our customers have always come first. We've been listening to and watching all of the comments this past week. We heard them say over and over again they are passionate about our blue box logo, and they want it back. So we've made the decision to do just that—we will bring it back across all channels."

The language there is almost too perfect. Perhaps this about-face—and not the now-ditched crowdsourcing idea—is what Gap had planned from the beginning. You know—get people to talk about you for a week, admit your "mistake" (in essence, underestimating how much people love you), and have the last laugh by appearing to listen to your customers and then giving them their precious logo back—a logo they never even knew they loved.

Source: Adfreak

Unintentionally brilliant satire

Daily Mail prints their horoscopes today using dummy text.

Mark Ronson's Record Collection ad

This stop-motion ad for Mark Ronson's new album Record Collection features a variety of his musical collaborators in toy form

Great execution, lo-fi in style but polished and performed so skillfully it is pure charm.



And here's the 'making of'