BlackBerry's new Creative Director is...

http://www.lightlybraisedturnip.com/alicia-keys-to-buy-blackberry/2013/10/1/new-bid-for-embattled-blackberry-led-by-its-creative-directo.html

:laughing:

“I saw a lot of poor decisions being made with regard to design and the overall image of the brand,” she said.

True.

A source close to Keys said that she believes that phones with more dramatic color schemes – such as zebra prints and luminescent orange – will appeal to the youth market.

Oi vey.

You do realize that’s a parody news site. :wink:

I did not. It all seemed realistic to me hehe.

Bummer, and we all had such high hopes . . . :frowning:

“Singer Alicia Keys to leave BlackBerry after year-long collaboration”

I blame this all on the undergraduate schools in the world. They need to make their marketing degrees harder to attain. At the very least, make the requirement to form a complete sentence mandatory.

3D Systems Appoints will.i.am as Its Chief Creative Officer


Hooray! Everything about the following is great!


“The addition of will.i.am to the 3DS team brings tremendous talent, vision and influence, and underscores the company’s commitment to democratize 3D printing. 3DS plans to leverage will.i.am’s international creative industry network to immediately extend its reach into select high-end fashion accessories houses, leading entertainment and life style brands and key corporate sponsored educational and sustainability initiatives.”


“We’re excited to partner with a pop culture influencer of will.i.am’s caliber who really gets 3D printing and its potential,” said Avi Reichental, President and CEO of 3DS. “will.i.am is a global tastemaker who embodies the essence of creativity and entrepreneurship, and we are fortunate to have him as our guide on this exciting journey.”

Makes sense since he built his resume at Intel:

I can understand 3DS wanting to hitch their wagon to “…a pop culture influencer…” and to “…leverage will.i.am’s international creative industry network…” but do these things actually work?

On one hand, Mr i.am says he’s put his money where his mouth is:
Will.i.am’s 13 lessons on how to be creative in business

but this is the result:
Will.i.am unveils horribly overpriced punctuation-laden iPhone camera accessories




uuummm…More power to him, but to me this whole setup continues the myth that any sort of creative process is about the sole genius with an ‘idea’ and not the hard work and process and the many people involved. He can swan into a meeting and spout a few buzzwords and name drop and somehow that is designing a product that ends up on the store shelves.

I want to say he comes across as a hyperactive over-privileged teenager, who thinks his opinion matters, and someone needs to have a quiet word to him to pull his head in - sort of a cross between Verruca Salt, David Brent and Mugato, but that would be very unfair of me, so I wont.

I do, too, Mugatu. I do, too.

Samsung should hire her to promote the Note7 phone … this girl is on fire!

Is Will.I.Am design kryptonite? He ruined so many cars too

The Brief, Bumbling Tech Careers of Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, and Gwen Stefani

For a minute in history, it was oh-so-cool for legacy tech companies to hire pop stars. It didn’t work.

https://backchannel.com/the-brief-bumbling-tech-careers-of-alicia-keys-lady-gaga-and-will-i-am-f64f8770ed88#.jvqbtfo9p

Maybe they should have hired an army on barbarians on horseback. It would have been just as effective :laughing:

I found that whole trend really odd. I worked with a few of star athletes while at Nike. Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade. All of them had great input on what their performance expectations were and feedback on what fir their personal style. The tone Nike spent was when we work together on show we collaborate as peers. I always felt a lot of respect and appreciation for what we did on the product side and an excitement to be involved, and we echoed that back as it was pretty exciting to be working with them. Even though they were spokespeople in some regard, they also had to work in the product. The product had to perform and a bad product could lead to a career limiting injury. In fact, they would be putting the product through some of the most extreme performance conditions… even with all of that none of them seemed to feel the need to be called creative director.

So the whole celebrity creative director thing just baffled me. It feels so … tawdry. Now if any of them stopped performing, recording, or acting and sat with the team every day and actually designed phones, that would awesome, but a title does not make a person, a person makes a title.

At least at Nike the athletes/celebrities providing input had a huge amount of experience in that field to know what the performance issues were, what they wanted improved and that in turn would influence their play, making it extremely valuable advice to apply to the design process.

Even if they had stopped performing to help full-time to work on product design, do they use technology so differently that their input is more valuable than what regular consumers provides? Basketball shoes I understand absolutely how pro input influences shoe usability and the brand itself. A phone…not so much.

Would I buy some basketball shoes because Michael Jordan helped design them? Sure, he backs up his input with experience.
Would I buy a phone because Alicia Keys had some kind of input? Nope.

I don’t know how it is at Nike, but at CCM (albeit 12 odd years ago), all the product managers were ex-hockey players. I think it does help to bring the VOC into the development process.

On the other hand, my impression was that they were more skeptical of new technology than the average consumer.

Would I buy an Aston Martin RB 001 because Daniel Ricciardo applied the final brand placard? Yeah, well, I guess. :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

I hope nobody ever cleans that placard! His fingerprint residue makes the car twice as fast as a regular one :smiley:

Have to resurrect this one with some shocking news:

Will.i.am’s technology company i.am+ is running out of money, according to current employees, company emails, and documents obtained by The Verge. As a result, two current employees of smart home platform Wink — which i.am+ acquired in 2017 — tell The Verge that workers haven’t been paid in seven weeks, and that their office in Schenectady, New York has been temporarily closed.

Let’s get Will.i.am that much deserved Core77 design award before it’s too late!