Day: 20 October 2021

The Design of TV Key Art ⇥ whyisthisinteresting.substack.com

Rex Sorgatz, for the Why Is This Interesting? newsletter (via Jason Kottke):

One neglected characteristic ties all these images together: They are all horizontal.

It sounds trivial, but going wide helped differentiate TV key art as its own medium, distinct from book covers and movie posters. And because these images appear on streaming platforms, they are unencumbered by other marketing copy, like taglines, cast and credits, and multifarious blurbs.

There is a simple purity to key art.

I remember scouring the web for key art when I used Plex over ten years ago. It is such a specific category of design — bracingly simple and evocative — and this is a great post and collection from Sorgatz. I hope this is not yet another thing to add to the list of creative pursuits A/B tested to death.

Mega Meta Domain Sales ⇥ tldinvestors.com

Raymond Hackney, writing last week at TLD Investors:

Meta as an exact keyword has made some impressive sales in keywords no one ever discusses or even knew existed.

Meta.LC is a great example, Namepros member Makbliss sold Meta.LC for $20,000. on Afternic. He had just hand regged the name on August 7th of this year. Most don’t even know it’s the country code for Saint Lucia.

Nikul Sanghvi of Hypernames.co hit a monster home run 6 days ago with the $149,000 sale of Meta.so. He registered it in April. It was the second 6 figure Meta name this year. Meta.io sold for $100,000.

In the midst of Facebook’s endless scandals, I appreciate their ability to create a pleasant distraction before that big investigation drops.

The Verge: Facebook Is Rebranding ⇥ theverge.com

Alex Heath, the Verge:

Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The coming name change, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to talk about at the company’s annual Connect conference on October 28th, but could unveil sooner, is meant to signal the tech giant’s ambition to be known for more than social media and all the ills that entail. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more. A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story.

At best, this can be seen as Facebook doing as Google did with Alphabet, but several observers have compared it to the Philip Morris’ Altria rebrand. Is it an attempt at insulating WhatsApp, Oculus, and future products from Facebook’s tainted name, or is it merely acknowledging the company’s expansion and new ventures? I guess that depends on your perspective. Regardless, I am skeptical of this buzzword-heavy “metaverse” direction.

Heath, who broke this news, says the new name is a “closely-guarded secret” — which, of course, began the attempts to figure out what it could be.

Kali Hays, Insider:

Facebook, through its lawyers, has filed seven new trademarks since February, the USPTO database shows. The most recent include a new symbol, shown below, and a new name, “Stories,” both with broad descriptions of what they would be applied to.

[…]

What the trademarks don’t mention is whether they are a new name or logo for the whole company, as is coming soon, according to The Verge. While speculation of what the new name may be has so far centered on “Meta” and “Horizon,” neither are linked to Facebook filings with the USPTO. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

A trademark would be a typical step by any company before it begins using a new name, logo, or, in many instances, a tagline for advertising. But it is possible that an entity or person can simply start using a term and claim that it did so first, leaving it to claim a trademark by “first use” and file for registration later.

I also began by searching the USPTO and found the same registrations, but I am not sure they apply to this rebrand. While a trademark could point to a future direction, it is not true that Facebook would need to file a U.S. trademark to claim ownership. Companies like to register in other countries, like Jamaica, where searching the trademark database is more complicated. That way, they can claim new product names but keep them more-or-less secret.

My search for Facebook’s new name took a slightly different path. I ended up using a DNS search engine to find domains that have the same name servers and email servers as Facebook’s corporate entities. And there are a lot — over four thousand domains use the a.ns.facebook.com name server — but I did not see an obvious rebrand among them. There are the domains of several companies acquired by Facebook, like Wit, Egg, and Scape, that might be fine enough names, but none stood out to me. I also found out that Facebook owns oceaniaramen.com for some reason.

So, a dead end. But perhaps a clue: I did see that meta.com, which is already owned by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, was last updated yesterday and, until today, redirected to meta.org. It has since stopped redirecting.

Mashable: Monday’s Product Launch Was the ‘Worst Apple Event Ever’ ⇥ mashable.com

Chris Taylor, in a Mashable article that will age with all the grace of a freshly cut avocado:

But the fun came to a screeching halt during Monday’s Apple event, in which there was precious little to announce (new Apple Music price tier, new HomePod colors, barely new AirPods) and enough tech specs from a confusing couple of laptop chips to send a Mac nerd like me to sleep. The $19 screen cleaner — this year’s iPod socks — didn’t even rate a mention. And not for lack of time. The keynote lasted 50 minutes, making it Apple’s shortest ever, and didn’t so much end as gave up the ghost.

This isn’t about entertainment value; it’s an indicator that the company is running out of creative steam. Apple was widely criticized, even by the Macworld faithful, for having little actual new technology to wow us with at September’s iPhone 13 launch event. But at least it covered that fact up with a vibrant love letter to the state that birthed it. A month later, the marketing department has nothing left in the tank. If I was an investor looking for signs of the company’s long-term health, this would be a troubling one.

Try to get past the factual errors in this piece, like Taylor’s claim that Craig Federighi showed up at an Apple event for the first time since 2020 with “under a minute of screen time”, despite playing a starring role in the WWDC 2021 keynote. Pay no attention to the widespread praise for the new MacBook Pro lineup, and demand so strong it made Apple’s online store creak under the pressure. Forget that this is Taylor’s sixth review of a pandemic-era Apple event and is resorting to the same cynical tropes. Never mind that the memorably vacant WWDC 2007 keynote contained some of the most unpleasant moments of the modern Apple era.

The thing that got me is that Taylor already wrote this article back in 2016. Taylor’s complaint was that the then-new iPhone SE was just recycling bits — that Apple was doing nothing new or innovative, just reconfiguring iOS in different boxes and selling it as something new.

As Taylor said this year, “get some new material”, which is just a different way of saying that his articles need something, as he said in 2016, “truly, categorically new”.