It all started with the insight and a deep understanding of the market and the consumer.

The objective, as Leigh rightly points out, was to re-position and re-invigorate the brand.  To do this the team needed to understand the competitive landscape, the perspective consumers had of the brand, and the territory they had to play in. The market was saturated with female unfriendly AXE advertising, and as women are the primary consumers for male scent gifts, turning that into an advantage would have been mandatory for Old Spice.

With that as the starting point the Old Spice team (with a receptive client) decided to do the obvious: appeal to women without alienating men.

Old Spice cast the perfect actor for the new positioning. A former NFL player, a nice guy, and someone who wasn’t so perfect that men would feel threatened. Genius casting. Based on, I imagine, a perfect casting brief.

The next step was to create a seriously funny commercial that turned all the cliche’s of advertising and film on their heads. “Look at your man, now back at me”. “It’s now diamonds”. “I’m on a horse”. They made a commercial that was frankly better than 90% of the TV shows it appeared alongside. I first heard of it because my partner was watching TV and told me I had to see it. So what did I do? I went to YouTube and there it was. Word of mouth at it’s finest, but it would have been dead in the water if the team hadn’t thought to seed it online first.

They let that roll and roll it did. Everyone who saw the commercial started sharing it, and a character was born.

Now what to do with the follow up? The character was a success both online and offline and while they could continue to let it ride as a TV spot, the proof was there that they could take advantage of how much the spot resonated with the folks online.

The plan was to create a new TV spot, let that simmer for a bit and then pounce. The social media marketers did their homework and decided what the right outlets were to start spreading the character. The fact they took on 4Chan and won speaks volumes about how integrated and on the ball they were. While everyone talks about how they took over Twitter in a day, they really started seeding the campaign before that. They laid the groundwork. And it paid off. Big time.

It came on my radar with @jakrose tweeting that he’d received a video reply early Tuesday morning. “Fry it up and eat it down JakRose. Fry it up and eat it down.” The network effect took over and for the next two days it was all I cared about that was happening online. The social team did a brilliant job monitoring responses and working with the creatives to write compelling copy. They didn’t just target celebrities and “influencers” but responded to comments, Diggs, tweets and blog posts that they felt fit with the character as a whole. They were obviously fully immersed in the language and cadence of the social web because their video responses contained references only a geek would love (or get). They respected all the unwritten rules of the culture and tailored their responses to match the brand, and the mediums they were using.

They embraced the mash-ups and promoted them. They let the community roll with it. They poked fun at themselves (Old Spice responding to @isiahmustafa) And they set a time limit. Any longer than 2 days and it would have become tired. Any shorter and it would have been disappointing. The mash-ups continue to roll in, with the most recent being Mel Gibson calling the Old Spice Guy.

It was brilliance that came from the initial insights and work they did a couple of years ago. And deep understanding of how the social web works.

The challenge will be what they do next and if it moves the needle at the top of the purchase funnel (awareness & consideration). But I have faith, and am looking forward to every moment of it!

[Update August 13, 2010] W+K just released their case-study of the campaign: Old Spice is now the #1 brand of body wash for men, with sales increasing 107% in the last month alone.

Imagine that you were commissioning the development of a new home for you and your family. What would you look for in a bid from a contractor? Would you be satisfied with one option, one price? A quote that lays out averaged costs in the most generic of terms? Boiler plate descriptions of process and procedures that fail to address your specific needs and desires?

Buying a Web site (or any user experience) design shouldn’t feel like this—and yet, consider how we often pitch, scope and quote on projects.

We put together a statement of work that estimates the costs on an “average per-square-foot” basis (e.g. number of templates). We talk about us: our process, our people, our proven track record. If we’re placing a fixed bid, we typically propose one option and one price that studiously and reflexively attempts to cover off everything in the brief.

A couple of weeks ago, Jon posted up some thoughts on why we’re switching from costs-plus to a value-based pricing model. This generated a very lively discussion, which—if I were to summarize it—really boiled down to a sentiment of “that’s great, but how do we do this?”

Since then, we’ve experimented with a number of pricing options and strategies. I’d like to share one that we think shows a lot of promise.

A tiered model for value-based pricing

A tiered model lays out multiple options at different price points and empowers purchasers to make better, more informed decisions that feel less arbitrary. I wish I had a simpler name for it, because it really is a very standard and straight-forward way to price things out. Here’s a template that we developed for a recent client:

Each of these options also got a one-pager that provided more detail. Here’s why we think this approach works better than a more traditional costs-plus estimate:

Measured response

Very rarely are you presented with a purchasing decision where there’s one option and one price. In fact, if you were, I bet you’d have a hard time judging whether or not the price was worth it. We’re not wired to make absolute evaluations in a vacuum. We need points of reference to help set expectations, anchor and compare.

Laying out options gives clients a clear way to compare, contrast and ultimately be more intentional about who they decide to award their business to and why.

What are we actually selling?

Each fixed-bid option focuses on outcomes rather than costs. Clients don’t want to buy 20-30 templates. They do want to buy a digital experience that delights customers and gives them a competitive edge. It’s up to us to understand how this maps onto specific requirements and outcomes, and reflect the perceived value of those outcomes in our pricing. Clients need to have confidence in us and understand how we will execute the project. But ultimately, they care more about how they can derive value from the end result.

Meaningful choice

Rather than pandering to a brief that asks for everything at once, multiple options let us de-couple conflicting requirements (e.g. fast delivery time and lots of features). This means that from the start, we’re setting ourselves and our clients up for success.

We want each option to have a purpose and represent a viable option for the client. We can state exactly what problems we’re going to solve and what trade-offs these solutions will entail. For example, in this case we proposed one option that optimized time-to-market, a second that set specific parameters around certain kinds of innovative features and functionality, and a third no-holds-barred, multi-channel approach.

Final thoughts

The American philosopher John Dewey once said that “a problem well-defined is a problem half-solved.” The goal here is to creatively and conscientiously define problems well, right from the outset, and empower clients to make purposeful choices about what they really want. One thing I didn’t expect to get out of this process was that it was actually fun. Quoting and scoping projects doesn’t have to be a dry, automatic process. It can and we believe should be part of the value you bring to the project.

This acts as a proxy for understanding the minimum level of resources and process it takes to do something. The larger the company, typically, the longer it will take them.

Lately, I’ve been using Joi Ito’s quote as an adjunct to my empty box test. He states:

“Want to increase innovation? Lower the cost of failure.”

This is the simplest and clearest articulation, I’ve read, on what large companies need to do to innovate.

When most companies realize that it takes them X weeks to ship an empty box, their reaction is “we must become more efficient”. What they need to do is lower the cost of failure.

To figure out what to charge your clients, you estimate the hours to do a job and apply your billable rate. If you’ve estimated hours correctly and your billable rate properly encompasses your costs and profit you achieve your business model.

Under this model companies have a billing capacity, which is a formula to determine the revenue your company can make in a year. Cost plus billing assumes labour is the primary unit of value in the system. You can only bill as many hours as you have. This means professional services firms can only ever add people or increase their rate to grow.

Very early on Geoff and I struggled with some of these ideas. For starters, we never tracked time at Teehan+Lax. We learned a long ago that time sheets were a fiction. People just made them up. I know because for years I made mine up. What’s the point of a time sheet if the data is false? It’s not telling you anything. Don’t do them.

Secondly, we created a simplified rate card. We only had two rates: one for Partners and one for Associates. We did this because we were sick of agencies having these long rate cards that confused clients and created unnecessary complexity.

But since we started there was one idea that we could never reconcile. There was very little relationship between the time we spent on our projects and the value we delivered. We could see things that took very little time having big impacts in client’s business. Our business model wants projects to have more hours since we are financially motivated to do so. But, we are a company that values being nimble and very efficient. There is very little incentive to be the latter when your business model is the former.

At the very first Toronto BarCamp, Jay Goldman, Michael Glen and I discussed these issues on how to get clients to pay not for the time but for the value. We couldn’t figure out how to do it and the discussion died.

Without a better solution we relied on cost plus billing and estimating hours to determine pricing.

Late last year I stumbled across the writings of Ron Baker. Ron is a former CPA who is one of the most vocal and main proponents of a movement in professional services known as value pricing.

I read his blog and then bought his book Pricing on Purpose. The book was a revelation to me.

Ron lays out a compelling argument as to why cost plus billing is not only wrong but economically flawed. While there are many reasons it is a flawed system, the biggest reason is that it misaligns the incentives for clients and agencies. In any system where hours are used to determine the price of work, its your incentive to convince your client it will take many hours and their incentive to convince you it won’t take that much.

If you are cost plus billing you are selling time. We didn’t get into this business to sell time. No one at teehan+lax became a creative professional to sell time.

Last Wednesday we sat with Tim Williams of Ignition Consulting to begin the process of moving away from the hourly rate in our business. It was an amazing day and we learned a lot.

The next day we removed our hourly rate from our site, our marketing materials and our vocabulary. We do not sell hours here and clients will no longer be able to buy them from us.

The event this morning was sold-out but for those who missed it (and wish they hadn’t) we’ll be doing this again in early March. There are a few tickets still available. If you’re planning on attending make sure to say hi!

My slides (minus my witty chatter around them) are available to check out as well:

Corporate reputation in the social world

View more presentations from Tamera Kremer.

]]> http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/managing-your-corporate-reputation-in-a-2-0-world-presentation/feed/ 4 http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/stand-up-and-be-counted/ http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/stand-up-and-be-counted/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:13:56 +0000 Jon Lax http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/?p=2371 At this weekend’s Digital Media Camp one of the most interesting topics was proposed by Justin Kozuch of Refresh Events.

He asked what, as a community, we could do to assemble quality data on the Digital Media industry in Toronto? There is currently no good accounting of how many companies exist in Toronto or how many people work in the field or what value we are adding to the economy.

He cited A List Apart’s survey as an example of the type of information we require.

Why is this important?
So first off why would we bother trying to assemble this data?

For one, we need to understand what impact we have on this city’s and province’s economy. While we may have been a cottage industry in the past we are a legitimate industry now. We create jobs, we support local landlords, local suppliers like ISPs and computer retailers, we need to quantify this.

There is currently no good information on this. StatsCan data is terrible and trying to get the government to collect it will take forever.

If we are able to quantify this, we can begin to have a voice in shaping policy on issues like Net Neutrality, HST and other issues that affect us as an industry.

Once we know how large we are and what we are comprised of we can begin to align together. One of the mandates of Digital Media Camp was to identify “How can we work together to propel Toronto’s technology, content and design communities into the future and make Toronto a globally competitive hub of digital media entrepreneurship and innovation?” Arguably this is impossible without being able to actually identify who the community is.

What are the barriers?
The most obvious barrier to me is how we self identify in this community. For example, is someone at IBM in the same industry as someone at a 3 person open source based dev shop? We may not identify cleanly with each other. I know whenever I have to pick from a list of StatsCan industries I can never figure out where to put us. Are we marketing, are we technology are we content? This is a big issue that needs to be defined.

DigitalMediacamp defines us as…

Digital Media is most simply defined as any information that is created and shared virtually, rather than physically. It has growing applications in all industries, including:

- entertainment – film, TV, games, visual effects
- healthcare – diagnostic imaging, collaborative care, health IT
- education – immersive learning environments
- finance and insurance – modeling complex data sets
- minerals and mining – seismic exploration

Uhm, not sure about this definition as it is extremely broad and our company would not fit cleanly in those examples. Some work definitely needs to be done on this issue.

Next steps
I slipped out before the end of the session on Sat but I’ve heard there is an action item which is to continue this discussion on Jan 18th in Toronto. There will be info forthcoming.

I believe this is an important issue that we need to take care of as a grass roots initiative. It is up to us to stand up and be counted.

]]> http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/stand-up-and-be-counted/feed/ 4 http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/twitter-business/ http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/twitter-business/#comments Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:34:52 +0000 Dave Stubbs http://www.teehanlax.com/blog/?p=1387

3beat

Talk to anyone in marketing these days and they seem to be saying the same thing, “how can we leverage Twitter”. It feels like the early days of Facebook all over again. And no one wants to be the kid at the party who isn’t tweeting.

I think marketers are missing the point. Twitter is not a magic bullet. It will not instantly increase top-line revenue. And it certainly won’t have customers gushing with brand love just because you send out what you want them to hear. That said, I think Twitter is full of marketing potential. If you use it correctly. If you accept it as a tactic in your marketing mix. And if you give it the attention it requires.

So, what exactly is Twitter? The team that created it provides a great history lesson. But essentially it is an instant message format that allows you to publish in 140 character bursts. It allows anyone to follow you, read your messages, and publicly reply to them. And if you choose to follow someone back, you can share private messages. Oh, and all your public communication is on-the-record.

But in marketing terms, Twitter is an extremely efficient access point directly into the mind of your consumer. It’s self-subscribed. The communication flow is 100% controlled by the consumer. And your success or failure is completely up to you. Create the type of relationship your customers crave and Twitter can change your business.

So, where to start:
# Decide if Twitter is right for your company. But know that using it to extend your offline ad campaign as 140 character soundbites could be a recipe for disaster. Twitter isn’t advertising. It’s a conversation. You need to respect your consumers’ views, and understand their relationship to your product(s) and brand. If they want information about retail sales offers, do it. If you sincerely want discussion about a product, ask for opinions and consider the feedback. [UPDATE: and as @thirtytwoteeth suggests, "provide useful/insightful updates."] But most of all – determine your voice. This is likely the most intimate conversation you’ve ever had with your customer. Don’t squander it.
# Make Twitter part of your communication plan. And this really means you’ll need to find someone in your company to own it. At this stage of the game it’s not something you can pass off to your ad agency, PR company or digital partner. It’s fast becoming a critical component of your social media mix, and potentially, more important than your advertising. If the US Army has a social media strategy, so can your company.
# Most of all, embrace failure. The best way to find your voice is to start talking and listen to what your followers say. Engage them. Ask questions. And don’t be afraid to change. Twitter is extremely cost efficient experiment, so don’t let budget stand in your way.

These three tips are by no means the only way to get into the Twitter game, but they will get you started. And no matter what your objective is, Twitter can help you define your social media approach. This is only going to get more important as consumers continue to become more savvy. So, get in there and figure it out.

p>. Follow *3beat* on Twitter.

Here is the script of the presentation I gave last night at Refresh Events in Toronto.

In 1980 IBM executives met to determine how they would respond to the very rapid growth in the personal computer market. As a late comer to the market, they asked how long it would take for them to bring a PC to market. After much research they determined that using their normal processes it would take them 4 years for get a PC to market. In fact, their internal workflow and processes were so complex and bureaucratic that it would take them 9 weeks just to ship an empty box.

The prospect of not being able to get a PC to market for several years was just unacceptable. So IBM chose to take a small group of engineers operating outside of IBM’s processes to develop the first PC. At this point this story goes on to have a bunch of implications, it branches off into the creation of Microsoft, the creation of Compaq and the other clone makers and generally is the start of the PC’s rise to dominance in the 1980s.

But what I want to talk about today is the empty box problem. What I hope to convince you of today is that the problem of the empty box for IBM is the same problem that enterprises face when trying to deliver great user experiences. The modern process of creating great UX sits counter to the modern operating processes of large enterprises.

So why did it take IBM 9 weeks to ship an empty box? Quite simply it is a matter of physics. The mass of IBM was so large that the energy required to move anything through it equaled at minimum 9 weeks.

Large enterprise clients have similar problems with doing anything. Just to wrap their hands around a problem requires the problem to be of a certain size.

Let me give you an example of this in the context of a UX dilemma. A recent project of ours had designs that required the dynamic resizing of images. The same image would appear in various sizes throughout the site.

While everyone agreed that the new design was a better UX, they lacked the technology to do this. No problem we said, modern image libraries with a few lines of PHP could solve this problem. Well this client had committed to using JSP.

Still not a problem there was freely available JSP out there to do this very basic resizing task. Well this created some problems for them. What would the performance issues be for resizing all these images? Would it create security holes? Would it compromise other functions? Did they really want to deploy custom code, maybe they should examine an image server software?

Suddenly what was a pretty straightforward problem to us, was an extremely large IT decision. One that would require audits of existing technology. Something simple like dynamic resizing an image didn’t exist.

The problem was too small. A simple solution just couldn’t work because it was, well too simple.

In another client of ours, to make a change more substantive than a text change to body copy requires a UAT process that takes 6 weeks, minimum. That is their empty box problem.

“We have learned that trying to be highly predictive as to the success of designs at the start of a project is very difficult, bordering on impossible.”

Now here is where the empty box comes into conflict with user experience design. Modern UX design is favoring a model of constant improvement. We have learned that trying to be highly predictive as to the success of designs at the start of a project is very difficult, bordering on impossible.

The best UX design seems to be coming from designers implementing a release early, release often mind set. People like Jason Fried at 37Signals preach a sermon of simplicity and getting real. Build it, release it, watch it, refine.

It is a good methodology I think it yields over time a good UX. It favors responsiveness and nimbleness… and for most enterprises incredibly difficult to do.

The modern notions of UX design run counter to the processes and legacies of the enterprise and it is one of the major reasons that it is so difficult for large companies to deliver good UX.

A recent home page redesign project we worked on really highlighted the delta between modern UX processes and Enterprise’s challenges with it.

Our client needed to refresh their home page. Like many clients they wanted us inside of this project to design not only what was to go live ifirst but also design for a handful of future releases of the home page. Each successive release had fuzzier and fuzzier requirements. Some of which depended on us knowing how users were reacting to the previous version.

I suggested that we take an approach where over the period of months we incrementally redesign the home page. Releasing features every few weeks. I figured we could design and have them deploy a new home page in about 8 weeks. An already long time but about the shortest they could do anything. They would then create a new project that would release an upgrade 3-4 weeks later. And then another refresh a few weeks after that.

Our client agreed and then immediately began adding the scope back that we had removed with a continual improvement model.

At the same time new pages somewhat unrelated to the project were being added to our work load.

Now it wasn’t scope creep in the sense that home page was getting more and more features but rather other pages were suddenly being attached to this project. It was like a Bill going through congress and receiving ear marks as it goes through the process. I kept pushing back trying to de-scope it so we could focus on the challenge of the home page redesign.

I couldn’t understand why this client wanted to keep adding scope (that they were prepared to pay for) and making a simple easy project into a complicated project. What I finally understood is another aspect of the empty box problem, and it deals with resource allocation.

Companies have demands for resources. When I say resources I mean not only the people but also capital resources. In this economy demand will always outstrip supply.

Determining how resources will be allocated to one project over another is different in every company but essentially it requires managers to assemble teams for the duration of the project. After that project is completed those resources will be allocated elsewhere in the enterprise.

Companies tend to like to allocate resources for longer periods of time. It’s just easier to say these 30 people are unavailable for the next 6 months rather than allocating resources every two weeks.

Project teams have a team leader, PMs, day to day contacts and then a host of business analysts technical people, legal etc… Once you are assembling a team you might as well optimize the amount of work they are doing while they are allocated to you. Because, god knows when you will get them again.

So what this client was doing was increasing scope just to get the project done. Just doing a home page was too small a project to wrestle the resources she would have needed. So they made the project larger. The paradox of this is that now the team was dealing with solving 5 or 6 related but unique UX problems. Since we had expanded the scope of the project, more departments were being affected by the designs and as a result we needed to get their approvals. Now we were managing consensus which has its own toll on UX.

Our attempt to release early release often was just impossible to do inside the processes of this client, even though it was widely agreed it would have gotten them to market quicker and yield better results. Small projects often mean small returns in large companies. They just like things to be bigger.

The financial allocation model doesn’t help the situation. Companies like to allocate budget through a CapEx process. Typically this means that managers go in front of C level execs with their projects and request funds to develop those projects. It would be insane to go and request anything less than several hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions. This tends to bias towards large multi-year projects where costs can be written down over several years.

In fact, in many companies the code for projects will come as a capital expense, no different than if they bought a forklift or a printing press. It gets accounted for as an asset of the business. But the design is often considered a operating expense. It’s treated as marketing which has very short term value once it is released.

If I were to describe modern UX design process one where we were constantly tweaking the designs for continual improvement, they would probably set up an operational budget rather than a CapEx budget. But at the same time they would want aspects of the project to exist as an asset on their books so it would not be a straight loss. Now you are back to their CapEx allocation process… we move between scaling up and scaling down.

“in some clients things we designed over a year ago are just getting to market. In many ways the design is obsolete as it hits the market.”

If you scale up a project where the design process alone takes 90 days, then building takes 180 days and then UAT another 30 to 60 days a project that is designed say between Jan and Feb goes to market in in Sept or October. That is being generous, in some clients things we designed over a year ago are just getting to market. In many ways the design is obsolete as it hits the market.

OK, so those are all challenges of scale and we haven’t even discussed the more traditional challenges of delivering great UX.

If you ask most designers what makes for successful client projects they will tell you a senior decision maker. For years we as an industry have sought to gain C-level access.

The reasons for this are not only budget and to have interactive projects taken seriously but also because when someone very senior is interested in the project decisions get made but I would argue that the real benefit is that having a senior person involved is that often fewer compromises get made in the design.

The further down the ladder you are, the more the job becomes about consensus building. In a large enterprise, managers are often valued for their ability to gain consensus among multiple disparate stakeholders with opposing interests.

We’ve all experienced watching a great UX slowly erode in the name of compromise.

The existence of what I call a “design dictator”. A singular designer with a distinctive voice who makes absolute and final decisions about what the UX should be. This role rarely, if ever exists inside the enterprise.

Hired consultants lack the authority to impose autocratic design decisions on clients, while corporate design directors are often just brand cops managing the operations of design services rather than making absolute product decisions.

The majority of UX decisions are left to “The Team”. The team needs to come to consensus and consensus means compromise.

We in the UX community have tried to manage this type of erosion of UX with tools like user testing and personas. While these tools are valuable for working out ideas their real value comes in their ability to gather consensus in the enterprise.

The fact is that a small team of designers and programmers with the authority to define the UX of a product will accomplish more in less time with less money than a typical dev team.

The classic iPod/iTunes example is primarily due to the vision of Tony Fadell. A team was isolated for its development from the rest of the company.

The original IBM PC was ultimately built by a team of 12 operating outside the confines of the existing structures in Armonk or White Plains. It was designed in Boca Raton Florida.

So I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture about why it is very difficult and maybe impossible to do truly great UX inside the enterprise. So how do we fix it?

The quick answer is that if you really want to do great UX in the enterprise, you probably need to identify and isolate a rogue team. When we’ve been able to get the client to do that, it really improves the work.

If you can work with the COO or CFO to try to understand the financial allocation process and the figure out how to explain to them what you need, they may be able to open new processes for them. One client story, a client was in their CapEx process and was asking for dollars for a Web project.

The CFO asked “didn’t I just fund a Web project, when are we going to stop funding the Web?” Luckily the CEO said “Never” before our client could answer. But the CFO, was used to funding IT. Big spend, long time to implement, depreciate it.

They had never considered that there was an alternative. We sometimes take for granted that the way we think is the way others think. As soon as the CEO said “never” the CFO was forced to think about funding the Web entirely differently. “Oh, it goes in this column”.

So changes in thinking like this are evolutionary but to wait for an entire generation of CFOs and COOs to die is a little too slow for my liking. There are a few things are happening in the enterprise that will begin to accelerate change.

Firstly, business timeframes and windows are collapsing at a rapid rate. Business understand that the pace of change has accelerated and that time frames of the past are no longer acceptable. Responsiveness and nimbleness are desirable attributes in the business world. As these business imperatives come to bear on the market, business will face increasing pressure to retool processes to get products to market faster and more frequently.

Second, the commoditization of technology continues. Businesses are able to offer UX features by utilizing Web services for low cost or free. You need a picture gallery or video gallery? You no longer need to build from scratch. Widgets, APIs, hosted solutions all lower the weight of delivering great UX.

I’ve seen quality increase while, time to market and cost drop significantly when the enterprise uses hosted solutions.

“You cannot overcome a dysfunctional organization with wireframes.”

Finally, I think this recession is going to benefit us. As spending contracts, the desire for smaller projects that show value quicker will become more palatable than large CapEx projects. This descoping of projects can benefit the overall quality.

I know I haven’t provided specific tools or tips and tricks to help solve some of these problems but I think that as an industry we spend an inordinate amount of time debating, what is the role of an IA or are personas worth it instead of looking at the context within which great work can occur. In my experience the best documents or skills will not overcome fundamental organizational barriers. You cannot overcome a dysfunctional organization with wireframes. Not going to happen.

Hopefully the story of the empty box will help you identify some of those barriers and inspire you to find new solutions to breaking them down.

Design Director for NYTimes.com, Khoi Vinh, speaks his mind on why small, focused design shops produce better work than their larger counterparts.

Well we couldn’t agree more, Khoi.

In what alternate universe does Air Canada exist? I can only imagine the internal rationalizations as they came up with this idea.

“Customers will love this”
“We’re giving them choice”
“The price is fair”

(Sidenote: The title of this blog post is a direct quote from an Air Canada employee at Toronto’s Pearson Airport that I overheard while waiting to check-in for a flight)