Joel Hladecek

No Animated Gifs? You Must Be Lame… Again

If you have a computer machine that’s connected to the interweb this week you have probably been sent a few messages from excited web enthusiasts containing links to compilations of subtly animated gifs. Some of them are very nicely done. Some less so. They generally involve pseudo-cinematic scenes looping at, gasp, reasonable frame-rates. The art [...]

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Why Teenage Users Do Not Indicate Your Technical Future

So I had to sit through yet another meeting today where some breathless 30-something expert urgently asserted that email and blogs are going away because, as we all know, “teens” signal what’s coming in the future.  And since teens use Facebook and Twitter and SMS, and don’t use email or create blogs, that naturally means [...]

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If There Were A Marketing God

Sometimes I like to imagine what ads would be like if there were an omnipresent Marketing God.  Some supreme, completely honest marketing voice that knew all.  All about the products and companies that we have access to. In order to draw fair and complete comparisons between complicated products and conditions you have to think that [...]

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Gap is the Biggest Wussy on Earth

So we all saw the new Gap logo. It looked weird. It looked wrong. It looked like all sorts of other unbecoming words that were broadcast over Twitter and Facebook within hours of its unveiling. Then, in what is going to be (or should be) remembered as the biggest corporate branding fail of the last [...]

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Confessions of an Apple Freemason

I love Apple products. But something has been troubling me… People have been calling me and my kind Apple Fanboys for many years.   Before that term was trendy they called us Apple fanatics. I used to resist these labels since from my point of view I was just reporting the obviousness between Macs and [...]

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Going Social On Your Ass

Three years ago some ad agency dweeb leaned into my office and smirked “Dude, our campaign just went social”. And I think, after a brief pause, my immediate reaction was to throw up in my mouth.  I silently hoped I would never hear that stupid little term again. That something “went social”. But boy it’s [...]

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The Best Thing On The Internet Right Now

So after a particularly frustrating day of having Flash-based content crash my browser, I finally buckled under and succumbed to the recommendation of my old business partner Tim Smith and downloaded a little, free Mac Safari plugin called “ClickToFlash“. ClickToFlash is a simple tool that blocks Flash content in the Safari browser and replaces it [...]

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