I was listening to Simon Sinek’s TED talk earlier today, and I couldn’t help but to feel uncomfortable. Simon (born in England) is this quasi-intellectual who rode on the wave of fame and fortune with the success of his one book: “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action.” Simon sure has created a name for himself talking about leadership. His main idea is the concept of the “golden circle” that illustrates (in a similar way to Dante’s hell) the levels of human understanding inside a metaphorical circle. In the very center we have the “why,” in the second level is the “how,” and the outer level is all about the “what.” He states that effective communication focuses on the “why,” and he expands from there.

What’s problematic about Simon is that, even though the premise of his talk is the “why,” I can never understand why he’s doing this. His motivation seems to be more about the “what.” He is all about finding results for the sake of results. As an effervescent salesman he tries to repackage an old marketing concept by throwing in a couple of buzz words like “leaders” and “action” to make his ideas pop. But his lack of sincerity is apparent, and can be appreciated in many of the comments users have written in the TED website. Simon seems to be more in love with himself and his empty rhetoric, than with the ideas he’s “spreading.” In his talk, he doesn’t focus on the applications of leadership and simply offers a template for mental manipulation of the masses. At least Machiavelli was less hypocritical when writing The Prince. Simon sounds more like an Apple Fanboy trying to rationalize his love for good marketing.

What really ticked me off though is how he brings up the Law of Diffusion of Innovation, just after he’s talking about virtuous leadership. He contextualizes this law inside the realm of consumption and standing in line for hours to get a new iPhone. Seriously? Is this his interpretation of leadership? Simon is giving a gold star to all those people who are followers. Just because you are an early adopter, that doesn’t mean you are less of a follower than the late adopters. In fact, some might say that weak minds who are more easily manipulated are the ones adopting early technologies. He is grouping in the same metaphor Martin Luther King Jr.’s supporters and bored bourgeois with a surplus.

Is this really what contemporary intellectuals are getting off on nowadays?

Their project: The Little Cake Parlour reminds me a bit of how we (at Fluid) solved the Benefit Cosmetics design, which included a lot of “faking” ribbons and adding PNG assets to break off from the square edges. Benefit turned out better than this example, but it is always nice to see how other people solve similar issues.

Fhoke them… http://www.fhoke.com/

-Alex

We at Fluid, Inc in San Francisco recently launched the most awesome site for Vera Wang Princess. It focuses on the fragrances (Original and Glam), and other cool social media content. This particular piece promotes the Vera Wang Contest at Polyvore.com, and for this I designed under Cat Lee’s art direction and Mariano Ferrario’s interaction design.

I must say the site has been quite a success, including the Facebook application we launched for them. This application allows the users to share their princess moments in their very own Vera Wang photo-op. So, what are you waiting for? Check it out for yourself!

Today Sweet Trip releases their long-awaited album “You Will Never Know Why.” Here’s some surrealist artwork I did for my personal enjoyment inspired in their music… among other things. Did this using Flash, Photoshop, and my camera.

If you wanna see Sweet Trip live, they’ll be playing this Wednesday (September 30th @9pm) at the Bottom of the Hill venue, in the Mission.

Also, Miike Snow will be visiting Bottom of the Hill 3 days later (this Saturday, October 3rd)… and they’ll be rocking the house as always. A great week for music in San Francisco.

All good things… or bad things for that matter must come to an end, right? From great trends such as repurposing garden gnomes, to bad ones such as cuddling pet rocks, there comes a moment in which everything becomes obsolete. Is this what is happening to Twitter?

Lately the people who are contacting me on Twitter are not real. They are bots, spammers… entities obsessed in selling me sex or cheap ringtones. Similar to what happened to MySpace just after it peaked it is becoming infected with noise as opposed to real information.

Something I enjoy doing is seeing what topics are peaking, and reading what people say about them. Tonight, most topics led to dead-end type of results. Most tweets such as “Free ringtones #ATT” or “sexy webcams #ATT,” or other wasteful crap was filling the “ecosphere”… and this repeated all throughout the most trendy topics. It seems the dialogue is being killed by all the fake accounts that are born. I wonder what the ratio is now between real users and fake ones at the moment.

Will there be a time when there are more spammers than real people behind the Twitter accounts? Very likely. But let’s go slightly deeper and wonder… why is this? I know I’m always repeating the same thing, but this is just the plain old manifestation of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of Commons. No good system can ever peak in popularity that doesn’t start sucking because there will always be people abusing that system. When you are unable to filter your community successfully, or isolate it for that matter, these things are bound to happen.

I suggest the Twitter executives to monetize on the community immediately, because it is only a matter of time until a good chunk of the people abandon Twitter, and say hello to Tumblr. Ah, the era of short intensities… keeps getting… shorter.

-Alex

Calvin Klein, one of the main projects I’ve been working on in the last few months is launching today! I designed this for Fluid, Inc. Art Direction by Cat Lee. Interaction Design by Andrea Nelson. Implemented by Kris Range.

The site consists in a main website called Calvin Klein Fragrances, and there’s the microsite called CK Free, which promotes the latest fragrances they’ll be launching this fall.

I’d love it if you checked the site out and helped it go viral by creating your own postcard and sending it to your friends too.

Un besote y los quiero!
-Alex

TNF keeps making it to these top ecommerce lists. This one in particular is CartCraze’s list.