I’m leaving for Japan on Thursday, Osaka to be precise, and naturally I’ll do my best to flavor my blogging gigs - such as Wisdump - as much with Japanese design culture as possible.
In other words, I intend to do commentary posts on advertising, store design, branding, things like that - either some inspiration for you lot, or as a basis for commentary of sorts.
However, is there anything in particular you want to see from Japan? Any special kind of advertising, a cultural phenomenon that you think would be interesting? I don’t know, I’ve never been to Japan, and I won’t have unlimited time or anything, but if you know that there are things I should be on the lookout for, do let me know.
I find ads entertaining, for lack of a better word. This one did get everything right though (as opposed to this one):
It’s a PED-estal, basically a holder for iPods and whatnot, and it certainly caught my eye. I saw it on MacRumors’ Mac Buyer’s Guide, which is a truly targeted ad. I clicked it.
Advertisers! That’s the way to go.
I’ve had some reflections on premium blog themes, and also stated that they’re in for a rough ride, with the open source community’s free offerings getting better and better. In a way, I think serious theme releases like Cutline and Plaintxt paved the way, and I’m sure we’ll see more supported free themes.
However, doing something for free usually means that it’s limited to your free time. And free time is always limited, right?
If you charge for something, that usually means you can afford spend more time on it. more
Just a quick one today, because I’m trying a new Wisdump design concept, and if it turns out OK (or promising at least), I’ll post it here and let you guys say what you think. Just like I did with the previous one.
So, premium themes are in for a rough ride. There’s a lot of money involved, and support is great for buyers needing that, of course. However, if there’s something the open source community is good at, is to offer alternatives. Blog Perfume features the BranfordMagazine theme for WordPress, a theme that’s bound to take a way some sales from newsy premium themes.
And here’s the problem for premium themes. There will always be theme designers who do similar ones, and release them for free!
The premium themes are indeed in for a rough ride.
You might remember that I linked the Brak Your Design Mold post on Devlounge, written by yours truly, a while back? Well, I’ve done a follow-up, where I put my, er, design, where my mouth is and did a dark design, as opposed to the light and clean ones I usually do. It was client work, so I had to keep it sober and stick to the site’s general feel, but still.
Check out Design Mold Status: Broken!.
I have nothing against premium blog themes, being custom designs that costs money to use, but not being unique. In other words, you buy a theme (and hopefully get support on it), and others can buy it as well. While you won’t get a custom design, you know that the theme in question won’t be as widespread as, say, Cutline, or any other popular WordPress theme. At the price of a license, ranging from $20 or so, up to a few hundred dollars sometimes.
People doing premium themes sometimes go to great lengths to defend themselves. Like Darren Hoyt did just recently, in a progress report on his upcoming Mimbo Pro premium theme. He said this, taking about the need for premium themes:
So there does seem to be a viable market since not everyone can afford a $10,000 custom design with a full-featured CMS.
Whoa there! $10,000 is a crazy number to wave around, when talking about blog designs! Darren probably knows that as well, since he’s throwing “full-featured CMS” in there, when he’s actually talking about premium themes in general, and WordPress ones in particular. more
Have you seen Prologue, the new WordPress theme inspired by Twitter, to say the least. The whole idea is to let groups of people post small blog posts.
Read about it here, visit the demo blog, and nab it for yourself here.
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