Omega Point

Failed slogans: “Woodbridge: the wine that takes 2 hours to choke down”

So there I was, wait­ing to meet a friend for sushi, when she called to let me know she was run­ning a lit­tle behind. What to do, what to do? Why hello, Liquor Store!

This par­tic­u­lar BC Liquor Store is located in Vancouver’s classi­est shop­ping estab­lish­ment, Kings­gate Mall. Home to the Worst Wash­room in Canada,¹ Kings­gate also fea­tures stores that sell knock­off swords, hooker boots and hos­pi­tal scrubs, as well as a Shop­pers Drug Mart, which is usu­ally the sole rea­son I go in there.² Also, some­times Pay­less stocks Catherine-sized shoes. Mostly not.

On a side note, I was just buy­ing a replace­ment bot­tle of vodka–my pre­vi­ous one hav­ing gone to a good cause: low­er­ing the col­lec­tive IQ of Vancouver’s Twit­ter com­mu­nity by about 2%. So this was more of an errand than any­thing likely to get my 2-day chip taken away.³

Being a smart shop­per, I gen­er­ally avoid buy­ing alco­hol in the evening because, well, who wants to be wait­ing in line for 15 min­utes? Exactly: bored peo­ple.

While stand­ing there, being told by a vari­ety of drunk, jonesing, tooth­less and urine-smelling peo­ple that my hair, hat, paint­brush case and eyes were pretty, I noticed a dis­play in the “impulse pur­chase” rack pro­mot­ing Wood­bridge cabernet.

The first thing that struck me about this dis­play was not that it was posi­tioned where the gum and Archie comics are sup­posed to be, but rather that it appeared that some of the other peo­ple in line with me had been given a copy of Corel­Draw and hired to make wine ads.

I’m actu­ally not really sure where to start. At some point, I’m sure there was a designer, art direc­tor, pho­tog­ra­pher, the whole deal. Sadly, it appears some­thing hap­pened on the way to the print­ers’. (“I said ‘cre­ative’! Throw some more fonts in there!”)

Pos­si­bly the stock photo of the man and woman enjoy­ing ham and pineap­ple with root beer floats is not the most rep­re­sen­ta­tive image of “any evening” with “6 friends”, but hey, it looks like a really good ham, yeah?

I do like the fact that the inex­plic­a­bly wordy “Enter to Win” bub­ble com­mu­ni­cates its rela­tion to the prizes men­tioned in the ad’s footer by totally over­lap­ping some of the text with its drop shadow. Pretty effec­tive, right?

In fair­ness to Wood­bridge, Robert Mon­davi, and their staff of tal­ented media pro­fes­sion­als, the “ENTER TO WIN the fol­low­ing prizes!” bub­ble does impli­cate the importer, Vin­cor Canada. I do also get that $11.50 wine that comes with a chance to win prizes is unlikely to have its rep­u­ta­tion besmirched too unduly by some bad drop shad­ows. How­ever, I don’t think I can for­give the “yes, we’re using Arial” copy:

6 friends
any evening
2 hours enjoy­ing the con­ver­sa­tion
1 bot­tle of Woodridge BY ROBERT MONDAVI

You know, it’s not ter­ri­ble. That sounds like a pretty good evening, actu­ally. Fun times, am I right? Er, wait, what? One bot­tle? How big is it? Are we sure this wine actu­ally comes in a bottle?

750mL, 13.0% alcohol.

I see: 750mL. Not being a huge wine drinker, I was a lit­tle con­fused, as this sounds to me like a fairly small amount. In fact, I can recall shar­ing a sin­gle bot­tle of wine with only one other per­son. Maybe I am an alco­holic. Is that one of the definitions?

So what gives? The LCBO, Ontario’s coun­ter­part to BC Liquor Stores, describes a “stan­dard” glass of wine as being 5 US fluid ounces (147.9mL) and a 750mL bot­tle as con­tain­ing 5 glasses of wine. In fact, the LCBO goes fur­ther, pro­vid­ing a handy “Party Cal­cu­la­tor” that esti­mates a more rea­son­able vol­ume of wine for “6 friends” to chug back whilst “enjoy­ing the con­ver­sa­tion for 2 hours” is four bottles.

Sweet. I knew I wasn’t some kind of insane lush. Ad writ­ers: you’re clearly there any­way. Make sure you run your mar­ket­ing copy by the line at your local liquor or wine store. It’s important.

1. Dur­ing my sole visit, I was able to accu­rately dis­cern the height of one of the pre­vi­ous vis­i­tors to the stall. Think about that. [↩]
2. Shop­pers Drug Mart is awe­some. [↩]
3. Inter­ven­tion averted! [↩]

Blogathon 2009: What does Marcellus Wallace look like?

So I’m work­ing on a single-serving site to finally make use of my other domain. Func­tion­ally, it’ll be a busi­ness card of sorts, fea­tur­ing a more coher­ent bio, with links to the var­i­ous ways I can be con­tacted online.

Ulti­mately, I sus­pect I’ll roll this site into it.

Any­way, while the art style I’m using is very, very dif­fer­ent than this, both use a nice slab serif type­face called Rock­well. While select­ing it, I came across this this video I liked from a cou­ple years ago: the “Say ‘what’ again. I dare you.” scene from Pulp Fic­tion, in type form.

Blogathon 2009: Infographics Part 2: The New York Times gets it right

While I found the CBC’s efforts lack­ing, the New York Times uses “inter­ac­tive fea­tures” very effectively.

For instance, this info­graphic from last year uses area and two states to visu­al­ize the loss of over $88 bil­lion in value dur­ing the col­lapse of the US bank­ing sys­tem. It’s very effec­tive, con­veys the mas­sive drop in value well, and frankly, it works bet­ter with an ani­mated tran­si­tion than a sta­tic image would have.

This is an impor­tant point: just because you can make some­thing “inter­ac­tive”, it doesn’t mean you’re not bet­ter off with a nice, standards-compliant JPEG. (Hey, how’s it going, Cana­dian Press?)

On the other hand, there really isn’t a bet­ter way to rep­re­sent the data avail­able than how the NY Times has here. Colour me impressed.

Blogathon 2009: The Typography of Idiocracy

So I’m a giant typog­ra­phy nerd, as any of my friends can attest:

Me: “Hey, a friend of a friend designed the font they’re using in that logo!“
Every sin­gle other per­son I know: “Yeah, that’s super, Catherine.”

As such, I enjoyed this analy­sis of the fonts and brand­ing fea­tured in Mike Judge’s 2007 eugeni­cist cult favourite Idiocracy.

“Haulin’ Ass, Get­ting Paid”: finally, the reli­gious right and “sep­a­ra­tion of church and state” peo­ple can agree on a slo­gan to print on currency.

A quick syn­op­sis of Idioc­racy: stu­pid peo­ple out­breed the yup­pies and nerds. Con­se­quently, the aver­age IQ drops steadily. 500 years later… FOX News employs sex­u­al­ized mod­els as anchors, all enter­tain­ment is lowest-common denom­i­na­tor, and cloth­ing is cov­ered with cor­po­rate logos. Er, wait a minute…

So the joke runs out pretty quickly, but it’s still an enter­tain­ing movie, if only for the sets and one-liners: “You went to law school at Costco!?”

Ahh, Star­bucks, home of Exotic Cof­fee for Men.

Any­way, I ref­er­enced Vancouver’s own typog­ra­pher Ray Lara­bie above because many of the design choices in Idioc­racy look like his 1990s free fonts. Which is kinda cool, actually.

You should read the review, Idio­cratic Design at Under­Con­sid­er­a­tion now!

Catherine is employed and blogging about Art Spiegelman

So I’m blog­ging for my employ­ers, the Mas­ters of Dig­i­tal Media Pro­gram. I scored tick­ets for the Van­cou­ver Art Gallery/Cen­tre for Dig­i­tal Media (that’s us!) joint speak­ers series, KRAZY! Talk Indus­try Giants, held in con­junc­tion with the KRAZY! comics + video games + anime + other stuff exhi­bi­tion at VAG, and so, I’ve been blog­ging my thoughts about each lecture.

By agree­ment with my boss, these posts will not con­sist of a giant sar­cas­tic rant about the use of excla­ma­tion marks in names of proper nouns, how to end a sen­tence with ‘KRAZY!’, nor the thir­teen dif­fer­ent fonts Tick­et­mas­ter used on the tick­ets to the events. This last one in par­tic­u­lar will be tough. One of them is Comic Sans.

The first post –fea­tur­ing my thoughts on what a gen­er­ally all-around swell guy Art Spiegel­man is– went up a few days ago. Com­ing up, Tim John­son, M/M Paris and Will Wright.

Do check it out, won’t you?