April 29, 2011 - Comments Off on The Thinking Mechanism – 4/29/11

The Thinking Mechanism – 4/29/11

The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

• Let's get it out of the way, today was The Royal Wedding. Some of us care, some of us don't care and our London office had to suffer through a bank holiday because of it. It broke streaming records, beating the World Cup. Most significantly, it was a catalyst for a real juxtaposition of the past and the future. I witnessed many people on a train platform waiting to get into New York watching the ceremony on iPads. An event happening thousand of miles away, in very old buildings, was casually watched in real time by people simply waiting to go about their days. We live in the future.

• Those iPads used to watch the wedding, they know where you are. This week Apple responded to an iPhone location-tracking controversy. On their ten part response and on interviews they strongly reiterated "Apple is not tracking the location of your iPhone. Apple has never done so and has no plans to ever do so." They admit there are bugs they have promised to fix in a near future update to iOS. But let's not forget, all mobile devices always know where you are relative to GPS, Wi-Fi and cell towers to provide you with quick service when location-tracking is relevant to your use of the device. Without that constant location-tracking, the use of Maps, Foursquare, Groupon, all the apps that take advantage of your location, would take minutes to launch.

• Issues of privacy and information sharing have to remain in the forefront of conversation as mobile use continues to grow. As of this week, thanks in large part to the millions of iOS devices purchased in the last year, Apple is more profitable than Microsoft.

• Lastly a non-tech thing we are loving this week: a close look at the classic work of Saul Bass for the movie Vertigo. "When Bass worked for film studios he offered them a package: main and credit titles, a symbol or trademark, a screen trailer, posters (half sheets, one sheet, three sheet, six sheet, twenty-four sheet), an insert, lobby cards, a window card, trade ads (six different versions, three colors) and magazine ads (at least 10 different versions). The Vertigo movie poster that’s become a landmark in graphic design and cinema history is the one sheet poster. Bass also designed other posters, each with a slightly different design, to match the proportions of the sheet they were printed on. Below you’ll find the half sheets and three sheet poster. I haven’t been able to locate quality images of the six sheet poster (which features the same handmade lettering as the Vertigo trailer ) or the twenty-four sheet poster."

Published by: antonioortiz in The Thinking Mechanism

Comments are closed.