Friday, August 28, 2009

The hotel I didn't choose

Just back from a few days trying out my new boat on Ullswater. We stayed at a nice hotel, but not at the one in the picture. In reality, it is perfectly fine, and right next door to a place I could keep the boat. But I couldn't bring myself to book it. Great art, poor ad.




Top: The hotel
Below: The Munsters' house

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Grumpy old man's thoughts on channel strategy

Companies who deal with the public have something called a channel strategy. One effect is that you can go online very easily to add stuff to your Sky TV package but not to cut it back. To do that you have to join a phone queue, press buttons, listen to the Four Seasons and finally talk to a specially trained crack salesperson who knows all your weaknesses and trains their finely honed neurolinguistic programming weapons on you until you relent.

I 'joined' Experian to get a copy of the file they had on me, but it seems I have to call them to cancel. They have a machine that read my email and spotted the word 'cancel'. So now I have written again, mis-spelling it - the automatic reply now says a human being will deal with it in a day or two. We'll see.

When we moved house recently I wrote to BT, but they ignored my letter and carried on charging me. I thought writing things down was the safest way, but apparently not. I called BT and was told 'der, we are a phone company you know'.

By the way, 'der' isn't a mis-spelling of 'dear' but my attempt at spelling that word teenagers say: derrh? de-ergh? Any suggestions?

Monday, August 10, 2009

Ghost signs



Hats off to the History of Advertising Trust (HAT) who are calling for contributions to a ghost signs archive. Ghost signs are those fading ads painted on old buildings. If you see any, they'd like them for their collection.


Thursday, August 06, 2009

Two ideas for typefaces


Cooper Black Peeling: I'm sure the food is fine, but this sign isn't very fresh.




Stickynote Sans: Beth Shepherd sent me this - from a conversation by post-it notes with the office across the road.