richardr has a photo of Broadcasting House on Flickr. His photo is titled “White City”. That would be an easy mistake to make since they’re both BBC buildings, so I left a comment simply saying the photo seemed to be mis-titled White City, rather than Broadcasting House.
I thought I was being helpful. He replied by private message:
Your rudeness
Before you leave patronising comments on other accounts you might care to read the comments trail explaining why a particular title has been chosen.
I’m surprised that he’d consider my comment to be patronising, and slightly offended that he’d title his reply “Your rudeness” and block me on Flickr! Talk about over-reaction! I get comments like “DUNB CUNT GO SUK UR MOMS MILK NOOB” daily on YouTube (that particular gem was left for me yesterday) and I don’t respond at all.
I admit I didn’t read the 350-word essay he’d left in the photo comments, which now that I look explains in depth why the photo is titled as such. But I wouldn’t say it’s uncommon for people not to read huge swathes of text on a photo sharing website.
Oh well, at least he brought the smile of incredulity to my face. And the chance to trump his over-reaction by blogging about it. I dunno, some people!
Of course, I wouldn’t want to encourage you to leave a similar comment as if you’ve just stumbled upon it, explaining that he’s got the title wrong. That would be bad, and not funny at all of course. *snigger* (if you get there and there are no recent comments, that’s because he’s deleting each individually - I know at least three people have commented in the last hour!)
These photos of White City and Broadcasting House are by Stevec77 and Speedwaystar respectively. richardr’s photo isn’t licenced for me to republish here, unfortunately.
In the UK Heinz have pulled a TV ad showing a kiss between two men, after it received over 200 complaints that it was “offensive” and “inappropriate to see two men kissing”.
The advert shows a morning family routine - dad is getting ready for work whilst mum prepares sandwiches for the children. Because the sandwiches contain Heinz Deli Mayo, “mum” is visually represented by a stereotypical male New Work deli owner for comedic effect.
This advert does not feature a gay couple (as has been misreported in some cases) - it is a metaphor. The joke is that Heinz Deli Mayo makes sandwiches taste as if Mum’s kitchen has been transformed into a genuine New York deli.
Seemingly a fraction of the population didn’t understand that, and Heinz apparently agree with them that a parody situation where a man gives another man a goodbye peck before heading to work is offensive. That being the case, it rather strongly implies that they would consider any kind of genuine homosexuality to be even “worse”!
If offending 200 people causes them concern, I think they’ve just hit a PR disaster by offending the entire gay community. Not to mention straight people like myself who are offended that Heinz took the opinion of 200 bigoted complainers to be representative of the views of the entire nation. Wake up Heinz - this is 2008, not 1908!
Every summer the Clearleft office buzzes with the excitement in the lead-up to dConstruct, the web design conference we organise here in Brighton. Preparations are well under way for this year’s event, which is on 5th September, with two days of exclusive workshops leading up to it.
For the last few weeks I’ve been designing the new website, which was then lovingly built by Natalie. Being intimately familiar with the brand, I really enjoy designing the dConstruct site each year, but as an in-house project we never have as much time to devote to it as we’d like. The site is normally an evolution of previous years’ designs rather than anything completely new, but this year I took the move to highlight the excellent list of speakers in huge type right there on the homepage. It’s they who ’sell’ the conference, so they really should take pride of place, and the treatment used is quite striking and bold.
For any typophiles reading this, the font for the main speakers list is Alte Haas Grotesk bold, a kind of distressed, slightly weathered-looking Helvetica Neue bold.
One thing I’m particularly fond of with this year’s site, is that we’re encouraging people to mash-up their own photos with the dConstruct buttons. I’ve made this really easy to do, and you don’t even need to open Photoshop! Just insert the web address of one of your own photos into one of the code snippets provided towards the bottom of the buttons page, replacing http://url.to/photo.jpg. Your photo will then slot itself neatly behind the conference info. You can see this in action at the top right of this page, where I’ve used a photo of Toby at the play park.
The theme of the conference this year is ‘Designing the Social Web’, so rather than go the predictable route of giving the site a ’social networking’ feel (think Facebook, Flickr, Edenbee, Last.fm), my idea was to extend the website beyond its boundaries into the social space elsewhere on the web. Our buttons are more socially inclusive, in that people could personalise them with photos of their friends or family, which they perhaps already share on social networking or photo sharing sites. The buttons can then be completely customised fit the design of any site. I can’t wait to see a wide variety of visuals used on dConstruct buttons across the web!
If you do use our code to create your own button design, please add a screenshot of it to the My dConstruct Button group on Flickr!
The conference itself looks like a real treat as usual, and I’m looking forward to it hugely. 600 tickets sold out in 6 hours last year, so if you’re planning on coming make sure you hit the site for your ticket as soon as they go on sale!
