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I love 826 Valencia. Here are a few samples from their gallery of signs, which marketing idea I also love. Good copy, clean typography. Hallelujah.

Via

CNN ran a story last week about deceptive practices some retailers pull on Black Friday. It’s worth a read if you (or someone you know) is thinking about hitting the sales tomorrow, especially for those “doorbuster” deals.

Turkey print by Karen Faulkner

I agree with the interviewee in the piece, if the deal is good enough to put in on the front of a store’s ad, they should have more than four or five in stock. Online deals can be trouble, too. You might get a good price, but the product might be out of stock and unable to ship for months. This happens to me almost every year.

It’s a recession, so the desire to save money is stronger than ever. But instead of hitting the big retailers, may I suggest buying less?

Consider buying local, doing things with your family, or go homemade. It’s more satisfying way to show you care. And you’ll be much warmer and well rested come tomorrow.

Sick of those whiter teeth and fitness ads that seem to be everywhere these days? They’re not only annoying, most of them are scams designed to charge people’s credit cards for fraudulent services and subscriptions (a business model we’ve discussed many times on BlogLESS).

Until last week, Google’s policy was to remove the offending ads and their associated pages. Of course, this didn’t do much good as spammers simply put up new ones faster than they could be taken down. Now, Google is attacking the source of the problem, banning the companies that generate scammy ads.

Fewer awful ads, now that’s something to be thankful for.

In October, William Shields wrote a blog post that I think we need to take seriously.

His view, in a nutshell, is this: Many popular websites that provide free services (such as Stackoverflow) are supported by advertising. These sites cost money to run and administer, and so if users value these sites, they are morally obligated to defray these costs by subjecting themselves to the advertising that the site administrators use to pay for operations (i.e. not to use ad-blocking software).

This is the case, according to Shields, because the advertising is the only form of revenue production for a website that is known to work. So, if sites need money to survive, advertising is the only known way of getting this money, then if you value the site, you should subject yourself to the advertising.

As you can see if you browse the comments, this does not sit well with many people’s intuitions about what they are entitled to in using websites.

I am sympathetic to both Shields and to those who decry his argument.

On the one hand, it is clear that popular sites can and do cost money to run. On the other hand, it is wholly offensive – even if you don’t anticipate ever clicking through an ad – to be constantly subjected to advertising-style attempts to disrupt and/or penetrate your cognitive goings-on. Frankly, the current practice of advertising in general is intrusive and disrespectful, if not downright offensive on a moral level.

Ramsay’s Maxim. Regarding cases where two opposed arguments seem internally sound but where their conclusions are incompatible, the great Cambridge mathematician Frank P. Ramsay wrote: “It is a heuristic maxim that the truth lies not in one of the two disputed views but in some third possibility which has not yet been thought of, which we can only discover by rejecting something assumed as obvious by both the disputants.” That is, given two incompatible arguments (e.g. it is morally good to subject yourself to advertising on behalf of an organization that needs it to survive, and it is morally offensive to subject oneself to incessant cognitively-invasive messaging), we may only reconcile the two or refute both by finding that they have a common false element.

What exactly the common false element is here is unclear, but there’s good reason to think that it has something to do with the state of affairs in advertising. On Shields’ view, we learn that (a) advertising is the only tenable way of supporting websites, and we know, given most of our common-sense views, that (b) advertising is cognitively disruptive and generally unpleasant.

We are clearly in a situation that needs solving. And this, of course, is a design problem. Something underwriting both of these propositions has got to be wrong, and it is the job of designers to figure out what this is.

In the meantime, of course, there’s a more practical concern. It seems unclear what we should do, given the current state of affairs. But dilemmas are characteristic of ethics. Finding a view that clarifies a dilemma is no small matter, but this is just more evidence in favor of continuing to work toward a tenable theory of design ethics.

Via.

1. Facebook Now Accounts For 1 In 4 Internet Pageviews(?)

Database marketing firm Drake Direct claims that Facebook represents 1 in 4 pageviews in the US. By comparison, Google gets 1 in 12 pageviews using the same dataset.

The data sounds questionable, but it made me think. These days, I probably visit Facebook at least as much as Google. I wonder how that traffic breaks down in terms of Facebook applications vs. socializing? How much of those numbers are games, for instance?

2. The Art of Jim Campbell: Seeing In Pixels

Can you tell what this picture is?

Boing Boing has a great article on Jim Campbell, an artist who works with extremely low resolution images. This particular piece is a video played on an LED board. From the still image, it is difficult to recognize, but add motion and it becomes legible.

Designers use gestalt effects all the time in logos, but we don’t often think about the pattern-inducing properties of motion. Interesting stuff.

3. Know Your Meme

Love them or hate them, Know Your Meme is your one-stop shop to learn about Internet Memes. Considering the subject matter, I found it surprisingly well designed and informative. I wish Wikipedia looked this good.

4. Choose Your Own Adventure

Call it old-school interactive fiction. In a Choose Your Own Adventure book, readers followed a story and made decisions by turning to different pages (e.g. “If you want to follow the troll, go to page 35″). Growing up, I used to read them all of the time.

This CYOA website not only hosts a lengthy article about the books, but full texts with interactive visualizations, as well. Neat!