There are good advertising campaigns… and then there is “What Starts Here Changes The World.”

Everyone who has watched a football game in the last couple of years or has heard of the University of Texas probably knows what I am talking about. Simple, to the point narratives stretched over different imagery of Austin and the campus, the ads ‘give you the chills’ if your a UT student / alumni and pretty much tell everyone else what they are missing out on.

First off the tagline is great. It is carried over in all the literature and campaigns that go on around a university and has become commonplace on campus, but when voiced over by David Carradine (the whataburger commercials) evokes a completely different emotion. It has its roots in the new plan of the University to not just be a world class institution of higher learning but to spread its emphasis in research and a few other areas; but has coincided with a spreading of UT’s image for a couple of different reasons.

This is not the sole reason, but UT Athletics in the past few years has an absolutely unprecedented string of notable achievements. There is still no greater advertisement than a winning football team. (Applicants to the university shot up 50% after the national championship team and continue to destroy records every year since then) The university was already headed in a very positive direction pre-Vince Young, but the ability to showcase that on a national scale can’t be matched. Then UT came along and got serious playtime for this bunch of ads during that time.

Everytime this commercial comes on (they play them during the football games on the godzilla-tron) it gets the same kind of cheering you would expect from a winning touchdown. Every arm is raised with the ‘horns up and eye turned toward the screen. What kind of ad evokes that reaction? It really is powerful not only to the 100,000 in the stadium on gamedays but every time it is played on TV.

The ads are simple but the images are powerful . Watch ‘ em.

Put Your Horns Up During game :

Quicktime Links
(favorite) : Horns Up
(same vid, different message, hook’em horns)Rallying Cry

Breakfast Tacos

Soul

I got some love from the icons I used on that the new Your Address site, so here I share the wealth : A bunch of the icon sets I have favorited right now : 

All of these sets are free for you to use, and most are brought to you via Smashing Magazine because that is what I’ve been reading lately. I also like how they have a lot more than the usual fair, the icons are all slightly out of the ordinary… you won’t find any blandness here.

Weird : 

An Animal RSS icon set

I think the real question here is …. Why wouldn’t you want all of your social media web site icons in different types of glassware?

Social Web Site Icons (RSS, Twitter, Stumbleupon etc…) :


A social icon set with hearts

Another social web site set — this time all in the shape of leaves — good for a fall theme

Financial Icons :


A financial set — more normal than the others

Miscellanious :


Some misc. icons - used on a couple of my new sites

Some misc. icons - I love the twitter bird and the post it note from this collection

Working on a new site for work, will take reviews if you have them. This site is only running right now in FF or chrome, so don’t report IE errors, I know they are there.

As you can see I’m taking a pretty big departure from http://www.youraddressmagazine.com with this, and I’m moving from drupal to wordpress. While drupal is sort of nice, I found it to be too unfinished for anyone besides me to use. I tried to train a couple people on it and it just wasn’t working. Wordpress is simple, I can get a site up and running in ten minutes, have it skinned in a day and there is practically no training required. Unlike the other tips and techniques you have to teach to work drupal’s system I’m hoping to just drop people in and let them run with it. 

That was the original point of the site, to be updated by more than just me so maybe I can take webmaster out of my title after this . 

Known issues : - IE (stated above) - Navigation is terrible (the hierarchy makes no sense) - the calendar is broke

Thanks!

Link : http://new.tylerjameslee.com/wp/

Due to recommendations from Supersloth and Nate Mcguire I have done some more updates. The backgrounds now rotate with time. Normally I think thats really corny but it didn’t take me too long so I am happy with it for now. Also, you wide screen individuals shall now be enjoying a better view. If you are using anything over 1900 px wide then you can go ahead and screw yourselves. Quick Javascript on how I got the background to rotate :
function getCSS()
{
datetoday = new Date();
timenow=datetoday.getTime();
datetoday.setTime(timenow);
thehour = datetoday.getHours();
if (thehour > 20)
display = "http://www.tylerjameslee.com/wp-content/themes/qwilm-03/style.css";
else if (thehour > 17)
display = "http://www.tylerjameslee.com/wp-content/themes/qwilm-03/style_fire.css";
else if (thehour > 14)
display = "http://www.tylerjameslee.com/wp-content/themes/qwilm-03/style_early.css";
else if (thehour > 11)
display = "http://www.tylerjameslee.com/wp-content/themes/qwilm-03/style_blue.css";
else if (thehour > 7)
display = "http://www.tylerjameslee.com/wp-content/themes/qwilm-03/style_dawn.css";
else if (thehour > 4)
display = "http://www.tylerjameslee.com/wp-content/themes/qwilm-03/style_dawn.css";
else if (thehour > 1)
display = "http://www.tylerjameslee.com/wp-content/themes/qwilm-03/style_deepnight.css";
else
display = "http://www.tylerjameslee.com/wp-content/themes/qwilm-03/style.css";

var css = '<'; css+='link rel="stylesheet" href=' + display + ' \/'; css+='>';

document.write(css);
// End -->
}
 
then do a getCSS() to call the function.

I am almost 100% sure I copied this from another website a long time ago, but it was sitting in my ’saved javascripts for a rainy day’ folder and I have no idea where it came from. So , its not my code, but I can’t give any props out. I mean its nothing hard, just saying.

I thought about doing it to just change out the images themselves, but changing out stylesheets will allow me some more freedom if I want to do something different depending on time of the day also.

That theme I built for UT Austin just got rejected by the University Office of Trademark & LIcensing. Honestly, I think a big deal was just not understanding exactly what the software (Free, open source) or the purpose (being a fan) was. It isn’t intended to make money so I thought it had a chance of getting through. I was referenced to stardock.com (the makers of windows blinds) because apparently has a deal with them to make desktop themes. Not the same thing. A free tiny download on an open source browser as opposed to a packaged software requiring purchase and purchase of the additional theme.

Anyways, the theme was up to 700 total downloads and 400 daily users which is a ridiculous number for being in the sandbox at mozilla, the other sandbox items have like 10 , 15 total downloads.

So, before I bury it, does anyone know of any sort of fair-use something or other that allows for the recreation of the image if there is no profit from it? If not, then you will be able to find the theme on this site for the forseeable future but installation isn’t as easy so it will eventually die.

I woke up in the morning and heard the news anchor say the market was looking good due to some drop in oil… and come back from campus to screams and the gnashing of teeth all over msnbc.  Let me just say one thing… when I worked in the industry ( and by industry I mean my 3 month internship at A.G. Edwards) the market was doing fine. Since I left… well, not so much. Just an odd correlation. Maybe more than coincidence. 

What are you doing this Tuesday, September 29th? You probably should be out renting today’s new releases on DVD Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Ironman. Ironman should be arriving on my doorstep via Netflix hoo-rah. Who’s down for a lil Robert Downey Party (not the dui or drug part) ?

Also on the agenda. More work on orangecampus.com so I can finalize it and get it up for my project on Friday. Tell me what you think of the design.

I just checked my page rank for the first time in a while and I am a 3. If I remember correctly the last time I checked was about 2 weeks after my relaunch so I was a big fat zero. I’m pretty happy with that, not that I overanalyze my analytics or anything… I don’t really care that much right now, but just a simple SEO package for wordpress has seemed to get the word out a little bit better. 

Anyways, if you want to check out your own pr :

After reviewing Itunes last week I went back to the Zune Player and downloaded the newest version. Not going to do a full review right now since it has been done before, but I will show you some of the cool things they are doing visualizer wise.

As I expressed in the itunes review, visualizations are played-out, no one watches that except for the occasional house-party when you want to be hip.  So you are saying to me…. then why Tyler, WHY, would you comment on them? Because Micrsoft doesn’t see them as standalones, they integrate them into other parts of the player where functionality exists.

First off the player itself is so different in design, when you first load up the visualizer you get something along these lines :

Which looks cool on it’s own… (all those covers in the background are your collection.) but then it switches to this :

I mean come on … tell me those aren’t cool. I’m not actually sure where those images come from because they aren’t covers and it works when not connected to the internet, so I guess it just pulls them down and caches them somewhere. (Some info must come from the internet on each play, but at least some of it is saved) Anyways, it throws the colors on top of them along with stats like duration of song, info about artists etc… and anyways, it looks great. The images pan in and out , changes out, there are more than a couple. This is the type of visualizer I keep open all the time.

Also if you have used zune they have this sick “fire” that runs the bottom of the window throughout the program, settings / visualizer / playlists everywhere that keeps the beat to your music. It keeps the beat to your music and there is no way to describe it besides fire.

If your too lazy to download and install zune here is what it looks like :

I think this is the final version of that poster I showed last week. 

http://capty99.deviantart.com/art/Tipping-Point-98320621

I have a break in my schedule and got some time to work on this Firefox University of Texas Theme. (For the download link see my sidebar)

But I need some more ideas for it.

So far all I have update is I have gotten rid of the slightly sac-religious Horns symbol turned sideways in the back button and replaced it with a regular logo which looks a lot better in my opinion.

Also I have added the coloring to the ’small’ icon layout, and the ‘flipped’ layout so some people who like to use firefox in different ways will be able to use this template.

I do need to do some testing on mac versions and linux so post in the comments if you would like to help me there. I will just send you a file that you drag into your add-ons folder and then tell me if it works or not.

OKAY, SO IDEAS AWAY.

Just remember, I’m keeping it clean and professional so it can be used in work or wherever, not blatant and out there like the FF 2 theme some people used.

The non-mac / linux users can try out .2 here : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/developers/details/8247

You won’t notice any difference beyond the logo change, but there are changes underneath.

This poster I would guess is halfway done. It is using the same idea that I had for the wallpaper I posted last week, but then goes in a completely different direction. Really want some criticisms of this one, its a different realm of graphic design I haven’t touched before so I still haven’t decided exactly where it is headed.

The high res version is about 20×36 inches, so almost normal poster size. Below is a 3000px wide version.

still unnamed