I find such images appealing; lots of people do. I think the brain likes to be teased a bit. It’s fun.

For today’s post, I’m going to share some images of designs that make use of perspective-based illusions. These are interesting because they are spatial: a viewer stands in a particular spot and visual cues are exploited to form a 2D image.

On with the Show

This parking garage signage recently won a design award. The graphics are designed to be easily seen by approaching cars. Since they fill the driver’s viewshed – much larger than any sign could be in that space— I’d say they certainly fit the bill.

Human-scale typography is cool, but I think the effects in these interiors are even more impressive. Be sure to check out the rest of the images on this page.

They don’t have much purpose other than aesthetics, but they certainly liven up the space.

Earlier this year, Philadelphia used plastic decals of road obstacles in perspective to slow down drivers in lieu of speed bumps. The illusions proved quite effective—until drivers caught on.

I would slow down for a speed bump, but I would probably slam on my breaks if I thought I saw spikes coming out of the road. I wonder if they caused any accidents?

Lastly, this video of an iPhone application shows how, with a little perspective math, a 2D screen could be made to look like a 3D “hologram”.

The demo turned out to be a fake (the accelerometer is not actually that sensitive), but in principle, it should work. Figuring out the viewer’s angle would be very tricky, though.

In this respect, I find the lessons of comedy instructive. Comedy is built upon a foundation of doing the opposite of what people expect.

This is not to suggest that Steve Martin’s humor is cheap. He’s pictured here to illustrate what it would look like having an arrow in your head.

Stick an arrow in your head. Right away, you probably look foolish. People will laugh. The joke is on you, but at least you’ve got their attention. This kind of humor is cheap, but it works. All it takes is a little bit of courage.

Then there’s another kind of humor. Humor that is not merely absurd, but actually changes one’s perspective. It’s risky, but if it is successful, the comedian causes the audience to join him in thinking the opposite.

A recent example of this is Norm MacDonald’s set at the Comedy Central Roast of Bob Saget:

Click on the picture to be taken to a page with the full video. I can’t embed the clip for some reason and this is the only version online that has the full, uncut set.

In this clip, MacDonald invokes the opposite of roast: being deliberately un-funny and G-rated. It’s awful, but he endures. As a result, he ends up having the best routine of the night.

Some people don’t quite get it. The jokes aren’t the point; the whole routine is the joke. In a delightfully subversive (practically meta) twist, MacDonald is roasting the roast.

Channeling Arden:

Do the opposite. Keep doing it. Do it for a long time. People will still laugh at you, but then they will get uncomfortable. The joke is on them. Eventually, people will stop laughing and start moving in your direction. This takes a heroic level of courage.

The two schools, given by example in this case are:

The “Ritz-Carlton Customer Experience Philosophy” [which] creates remarkable customer experiences through extraordinary benefits at extraordinary prices.

and

The “IKEA Customer Experience Philosophy” [which] creates remarkable customer experiences by reducing the sacrifice and costs that customers incur to experience a company’s products and services.

Thinking about this, I started to wonder: How can you be the IKEA of web design firms? Working strictly from the definitions, it’s easy: The IKEA of web design firms is your client’s web-designing nephew. He’s cheap, the benefits are basic, and his relatively uneducated customer’s percieved value is high.

But, of course, that’s not the whole story, because IKEA stuff is well-designed, it’s broadly applicable, and (most importantly to the failure of my analogy) it’s contemporary. IKEA is, at least to some degree, premised on the fact that its customers have some aesthetic taste.

Wait a second. My client’s web-design nephew couldn’t have come up with this.

Taking a look, it should become instantly clear that if you want to be IKEA, having IKEA’s customer experience philosophy doesn’t cut it. You also have to be a good designer. And this is a problem, as most designers recoil at the de facto idea for a web design IKEA analog, a template-driven web design business.

Here’s what that tells me: templates are not the web design analog of what IKEA does. IKEA is based on customers combining cheap, well-designed elements to their own satisfaction. Which means there’s still potentially a good web analog out there to be found.

And you can be sure that when the IKEA-of-web-design-firms-to-come comes, there’s going to be a huge market right there waiting for them.

For my part, I must say, I think I might have chosen Hockney’s Pool with Two Figures for the shower:

Portrait of an Artist: Pool with two figures by David Hockney, as rendered in pixels by Cristoph Niemann

That said, I unequivocally applaud his shower choice, which he brilliantly reappropriates from one of my all-time favorite artists, Joseph Beuys:

Fettecke by Joseph Beuys, as rendered in pixels by Cristoph Niemann.

Via

This is how the ad reads: “YESTERDAY AT T5 AVERAGE TIME THROUGH SECURITY WAS 4.7 MINS. This picture was taken at 9:44am yesterday and shows Amanda Gemmill on her way to Beijing to watch her boyfriend compete in the Men’s Eight Rowing Final. 4.7 minutes was the average time the 842 customers we asked told us it took them to pass through Security yesterday, between 6am and 2pm. We had to stop at 2pm so we could make this ad.”

The purpose of this ad is to reassure travelers that Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 alleviates the airport’s infamously long security waits which often lead to delayed departures.

As Greenfield points out, the ad was created in what is soon to be “the old-fashioned way”: humans walking around talking to humans, rushing information to the printers, and fixing it to static sheets of pulp. In the near future, it will be possible do the same thing in realtime, with sensors and dynamic media.

Consider the implications of this “transparent advertising”. If BA is uses realtime data to taut better service, then to make their point they actually have to have better service.

Let that sink in for a moment.

If the data is not being manipulated and the ads aren’t taken down at the first sign of trouble, this is a ballsy move. If BA holds up their end of the deal, it makes a powerful statement: “We don’t need to be clever, we’re just good– and we’ve got the data to prove it”. However, if BA slips up, that same copy becomes a public dissemination of guilt. Transparency cuts both ways.

It’s an interesting angle in this age of jaded consumers: deliver on what is promised; truth, if not accountability, in advertising. I realize it’s naive to expect things to work this way, but shouldn’t they?

(Zingerman’s would do it)

When YouTube arrived on the scene, we responded by putting our TV spots on it or – better yet – creating spots that looked like they were made by amateurs. Little did we know that the real action happens in the comments.

He appeals in the article to the My Starbucks Idea idea, which in turn appeals to Starbucks loyalists: "You know better than anyone else what you want from Starbucks. So tell us. What’s your Starbucks Idea? Revolutionary or simple—we want to hear it."

So that’s the big idea. Ask people what you should do with your business, and let them vote and discuss their answers. This is, in fact, the big internet idea (qua advertising) in general, at least as it’s developed over the past five or ten years. But, looking at the My Starbucks Idea site, I started to wonder if it was really working at all.

Monday, when I was taking a look at the Google Insights beta, I noticed that by-the-numbers, the only important non-geographical search terms people were using when they looked up my particular business indicated that they wanted to get it for free. Let me analyze that fact for you. Based on my industry in my area, what people are interested in is as follows (in order of interest): Convenience (how close is it to home?) and Getting it for Free.

That’s it. That’s the secret. People want things for free, and when they can’t have that, they want them to be easy.

Now, of the six total top all-time most popular suggestions on My Starbucks Idea (all and only of which are currently under review by Starbucks), four (4) of them are ideas to get things for free. So, is Starbucks going to get any ideas there that they didn’t already have on the whiteboard? Nope.

But where this starts to get really head-spinning is that the number one most popular idea of all-time involves using technology to get better conversations going at Starbucks. Which seems sweet at first blush: If there’s something that people want more than Free Stuff, it’s good-old-fashioned human interaction. But, on a moment of further reflection, and in a dénouement so incredibly poetic and unsubtle it could make Machiavelli weep, this is exactly what My Starbucks Idea is. And on top of that, the conversation’s about Starbucks.

I’ll be hiding under my bed if you need me.

Imagine my utter shock when this ad was served up and would not leave my newsfeed:

Of course, when I saw this, I immediately made a blog post. Apparently, I am easily distracted.

Facebook, like AdSense and many other websites, uses contextual elements (favorite TV shows in your profile, for example) to serve up targeted advertising.

The ad in question is most likely just an unfortunate coincidence, but for a moment I thought I had been observed, morally judged for my behavior, and then given a sales pitch.

(In other words, I probably had a glimpse of the future.)

This is clearly an unproductive metric. (From top: Generic search term, generic search term, generic search term, generic search term, indicator that people are uninterested in paying for service, indicator that people are uninterested in paying for service, generic search term.)

All glibness aside, Insights could certainly be used smartly to provide agile firms with a real-time look at trends in their geographical areas. These trends could be used to indicate growth markets, and this information could inform rapid-SEO strategies (aka. blog post keywords). Here, for example, I noticed an incredibly steep rise in interest in the search term "social networking" over the past year in Omaha, while interest in "web design" has leveled out at around 20% of what it was in 2004.

Search volume increase for "social networking".

With fast, targeted and high-volume data like this, the right kind of companies can move quickly to fill niches as local interest in particular services ebbs. But not us. We’re committed to fixing advertising and reinventing search.