Until the Digital Age, type design was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers that relied on computers to hone their skills – ultimately removing the art from the craft. If you are a designer here at Meridian, it’s probably been brought to your attention that the consensus from the older generation is that our designs often lack typographic clarity – and he’s probably right. Years ago I was trained by the Jedi-Type masters Ben Day, Rob Carter and Phil Meggs. I’m thinking that we all should revisit the manual.

If you aren’t sure where you are in your skill-set. The quizzes below might help you determine where you stand…

KernType

Your mission is simple: achieve pleasant and readable text by distributing the space between letters. Typographers call this activity kerning. Your solution will be compared to typographer’s solution, and you will be given a score depending on how close you nailed it.
http://type.method.ac/

Cheese or Font?

If you’re a designer that loves food, are familiar with fancy Font names, and harbor a quiet love for the finest artisanal fromage – this quiz should be a no-brainer. For the rest of us, let’s just say there’s a LOT of cheese in the world.
http://cheeseorfont.com/

For the interactive department, it was like seeing a celebrity. The excited chatter came when we spotted the Google Street View car while driving this week. If we didn’t have to return to work from our lunch outing, the plan would have been to follow it. Yes, and we would have checked Google Street View to see our blurred passenger faces. We’re geeks like that. But the reality is, none of us really knew how they worked their 360 degrees of magic. We did some research, so we thought we’d share:

• Google Street View launched in 2007.
• The mapping service depicts cities across the United States and in 29 other countries from ground level.
• On every street photographed, the user can scroll 360 degrees as well as up and down.
• The towering rooftop instrument houses 15 lenses looking in all directions.
• Once photos are taken, they are fed into a computer that blurs faces and license plates that would otherwise be recognizable.
• Technicians stitch photos into 360-degree views available in Google Maps.
• Processing these new images takes several months.
• Areas not accessible by car, like pedestrian areas, narrow streets, alleys and ski resorts, are sometimes covered by Google Trikes (tricycles) or snowmobiles.
• If you don’t want your house to be shown, you can just click on the “Report a problem” on the bottom left-hand side of the Street View image, submit a request, and they’ll blur the image.

So people of Virginia Beach please make us look good. Cut your grass, dress appropriately and look happy. There is no hiding from the Google Street View car.

Join Independent We Stand and enter to win a getaway to the locally-owned, independent Lago Mar Resort and Club! Just recommend your favorite locally-owned business for your chance to win a 3-day, 2-night stay for two at the fabulous Lago Mar Resort and Club in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. The more times you recommend a business, the better chances you have of winning.

Click here to enter!

Meridian Group’s very own Joe Takach competed in the Men Who Cook: Tidewater Edition foodie fundraiser over the weekend. Joe and his co-chef Bob Pfaffinger won “Most Likely to be Featured on a Cooking Show” with their Crab and Corn “Chowda”.

Congrats! Check out the article here.

Check out some of this year’s most bizarre ads here. Many of them European. My faves are Hasselhoff’s and  Utah State Fair. What’s yours?

http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/30-freakiest-ads-of-2010.html

Ok, most of us first looked a Fb as a way to stay connected to our friends and the world and as a business opportunity as well. We also know that traditional media is losing share on a daily basis but half-heartily attempting to adjust to the digital age.

Here’s my real life experience with the two:

While visiting Eastern Pennsylvania for the holidays we knew it was critical for my wife to get back to Virginia Beach on Sunday evening, December 26, for a walk-through on Monday morning for a real estate closing scheduled for Tuesday. We also knew that a blizzard was headed to the Hampton Roads area on Sunday. We were constantly monitoring both Pilotonline.com and the local television station known for their accurate weather forecasting – WVEC13. Christmas night we were both checking these sites on our mobile devices, as well as others to determine our travel plans. We decided we would depart Pennsylvania no later than 6am on Sunday. I woke up at 4am to go to visit my Father in the hospital before we left. I checked both Virginian Pilot’s and WVEC’s mobile  sites around midnight; Pilotonline had a headline that there was no white Christmas for SE Virginia. Minutes before I went to bed I checked Fb and there was a picture of a snowman that was built in Virginia Beach at 12:07am. When I woke up at 4am, Pilotonline still had the same headline and WVEC’s last update was at midnight. Lucky for us, our friends were posting away about the weather conditions and snow. If traditional media is not going to wake up to the fact that 24/7 is 24/7, they are going to go the way of the dinosaurs sooner rather than later and Fb just might find themselves the leader in the news category as well. JT

This email has recently been passed through the Meridian Group email chain. I took a crack at it and it’s not as easy as I thought it would be!

Take a stab at it and see how you do. Answers at the bottom, no cheating! These are not trick questions. They are straight questions with straight answers.

1. Name the one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends.

2. What famous North American landmark is constantly moving backward?

3. Of all vegetables, only two can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons. All other vegetables must be replanted every year. What are the only two perennial vegetables?

4. What fruit has its seeds on the outside?

5. In many liquor stores, you can buy pear brandy, with a real pear inside the bottle. The pear is whole and ripe, and the bottle is genuine; it hasn’t been cut in any way. How did the pear get inside the bottle?

6. Only three words in standard English begin with the letters ‘dw’ and they are all common words. Name two of them.

7. There are 14 punctuation marks in English grammar. Can you name at least half of them?

8. Name the only vegetable or fruit that is never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form except fresh.

9. Name 6 or more things that you can wear on your feet beginning with the letter ‘S’.

Answers:

1.The one sport in which neither the spectators nor the participants know the score or the leader until the contest ends: Boxing.

2. North American landmark constantly moving backward: Niagara Falls . (The rim is worn down about two and a half feet each year because of the millions of gallons of water that rush over it every minute.)

3. Only two vegetables that can live to produce on their own for several growing seasons: Asparagus and rhubarb.

4. The fruit with its seeds on the outside: Strawberry.

5. How did the pear get inside the brandy bottle? It grew inside the bottle. The bottles are placed over pear buds when they are small, and are wired in place on the tree. The bottle is left in place for the entire growing season. When the pears are ripe, they are snipped off at the stems.

6. Three English words beginning with dw: Dwarf, dwell and dwindle…

7. Fourteen punctuation marks in English grammar: Period, comma, colon, semicolon, dash, hyphen, apostrophe, question mark, exclamation point, quotation mark, brackets, parenthesis, braces, and ellipses.

8. The only vegetable or fruit never sold frozen, canned, processed, cooked, or in any other form but fresh: Lettuce.

9. Six or more things you can wear on your feet beginning with ‘S’: Shoes, socks, sandals, sneakers, slippers, skis, skates, snowshoes, stockings, stilts.

Taking a spin on popular reality TV shows we’ve launched The Roosevelt Hotels first ‘Meeting Planner Star’ contest.  Our goal is to create awareness in the meetings industry for the Roosevelt and to have some fun while doing so.

To house the contest Meridian Group and Launch created an engaging and user-friendly microsite. To enter, contestants fill out a quick profile and then go through steps to plan a mock meeting. They will choose from a variety of options (how about Dr. Ruth as your speaker or Street Vendors for your lunch meeting?) or enter their own all while staying under budget.  Once their meeting is crafted the next step is to get votes.  Contestants will share their meeting through social outlets including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to gain the most votes.  Once the contest is complete we will pull the top 10 meetings and the executives at The Roosevelt will choose the first ‘Meeting Planner Star.’

The best part? The winner truly gets the ‘star treatment’ in NYC.  Grand prize includes a weekend stay in the presidential suite at the hotel, limo ride to and from the airport, a meeting room named after the winner for 1 year and much more!

Show off your planning skills and enter today.

Us Meridian Groupies are still reeling from Sunday’s season 4 Mad Men finale. Without giving away any spoilers we can say that we’ve noticed every season, dark though certain episodes may be, ends on a hopeful note.

The last few seasons, we’ve seen Don Draper grow in the finale, from his baptismal moment in California to the exciting start of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in a crowded hotel suite. This season, Don prepares for another fresh start – one with exciting possibilities.

Which reminds us – even when the economy is tough, even when clients come and go, there is always something to look forward to on the horizon. This year, Meridian Group is excited about some of the work we’ve produced for clients like Independent We Stand, Wounded Warrior Project, The Roosevelt NY and CI Travel and getting poised to make a few more big announcements. We’re ready for our next season!

KFC wants to penetrate college campuses with its “Double Down” campaign but they are getting down and dirty by paying young coeds to wear it across the back of their sweatpants. It’s bad enough we are subjected to rear ends emblazoned with terms like juicy and sexy, now we have to deal with this. I sure hope they are very selective with the “talent” that wears the sweats because most of the women I have seen wearing sweats with catch phrases on the back of their pants really shouldn’t be trying to attract ANY attention to that portion of their body.

What’s next — T-shirts emblazoned with “tender” or “crispy”? At the end of the day, KFC will end up being on the butt end of the joke. Would Colonel Sanders approve?

JT