In a collaboration with Wolff Olins and AOL’s music website, Spinner, AOL hosted four free pop-up shows during the South by Southwest Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. Broken Bells kicked off the series on March 17, followed by Rogue Wave on March 18, VV Brown on March 19, and Rival Schools on March 20. It was surely an exciting weekend for art and music lovers. Times and locations were revealed the day before each performance on Spinner, AOL music’s SXSW hub, the Spinner Facebook Fan Page, and to Spinner / SXSW Twitter followers.
The posters were designed by WO and were beautifully screen printed by D&L Screen Printing of Seattle, a legend in the grunge music scene.
The spirit of this collaboration truly lies in the heart of AOL. Connecting with the latest in art and culture is an important aspect of their brand and one they aim to bring to their readers.
An insightful film comparing social media and internet activity around the world. Social media activity has proliferated with 126 million blogs on the web. Facebook has 350 million users and logs in at 260 billion page views per month. Plus, there are 84% more women than men on social networks. The best part (at 2:51) shows the Launch Dates of Social Media Networks, showing an evolution of what we’ve adopted (and abandoned) from 1995 to 2010.
Today people experience brands in multiple ways, including built networks that allow for a closer interaction with the brand. It’s how users are trusting peer to peer recommendations or an active brand profile as opposed to a one-click search that is important. The marketing needs to be brand led, and have the capacity to take on different forms in order for the brand to be best brought to life.
After publishing with a blackletter logo since 2007, Fashionista decided it was time to reconside and redesign its stoic face as well as swap its back-end CMS from Movable Type to Wordpress.
The old logo was this oversized, domineering, gothic lettering thing that said “spiky, aggressive, old-school news brand.” That’s not what Fashionista is. The editors of Fashionista are excellent journalists who will be critical when it’s called for, but they’re also unashamedly fashion lovers. They might poke fun from time to time, but they’re not spiky or unnecessarily aggressive. And they’re also inherently new-generation when it comes to how they go about their business — they use a blog platform, Flip cameras, smartphones and various social media to deliver their content and engage their audience — so unless we were being very ironic with the gothic, old-school newspaper font thing it just wasn’t really appropriate. I’m also a big believer that the logo and furniture on the site should be a little subservient to the content — it’s the content that engages and the content travels well beyond the site too — so we also needed something a little less imposing. — Jonah Bloom, CEO/Editor-in-Chief, Breaking Media
