![[Unlocking the Air]](/unlock/perm-images/1332banner700x103.jpg "gold creek, golden ears provincial park, bc")
The discussion on branding and advertising and their effects on social discourse continues at the Edge. If anyone would like to take a shot at defining McPhallicism for mtaht, I'm sure he'd welcome it. I've got as far as "a 99¢ orgasm", but have been unable to finish that thought.
What I've actually been pondering the last week has been a closer-to-home kind of branding. Buttons on my sideboard, to be exact. I've been musing over why they were there, what functions they served that I cared about (and they did each serve some function, since I was reluctant to delete them), and what I could do to transform them from alien bugs to cooperative, non-clashing, visually harmonious accents. In other words, to subvert the built-in purpose of the ad to my own.
First, I needed to understand why I wanted those links. I knew why W3C or Apple or MT might want me to install them. It's the same reason why they were originally created to be loud and bright and odd sizes-- to be seen.
However, their being seen or not is of little moment to me. What's more important is that not only were they not really visible, since they clashed so badly with each other that the see-me function of each one's design cancelled out that of the others, but that their in-fighting was visible enough to call far too much attention to their corner of the screen.
Normally, I would have just banished the lot and gone back to staid, well-behaved text links. Their functions are, after all, useful to me (if no one else); the validators keep me honest and I'm sentimental about Mac links. Instead, I fired up Photoshop and played around with the four colours I'd used for Unlocking itself. I liked the results well enough to design buttons for email and XML, and am contemplating reworking the sideboard headers on the same lines.
Anyway, now they look like they belong here. None of them stand out, but they're all as visible as they should be. And none of them impose someone else's design values on top of mine.
