A disproportionate segment of my adolescent life was spent doing one of three things: Skateboarding, talking about skateboarding, or watching skateboarding videos. This was back before the internets, when skateboarding culture was still misunderstood and seen as a general menace to civilization akin to the Russian paratroopers in Red Dawn. To be a skateboarder in the late 80’s, you needed some sense of entrepreneurial spirit to practice your craft. To skate, you generally had three options.

First, you could go to the skateparks. The Turf Skatepark in Milwaukee and Rotation Station in Rockford, IL both benefited from receiving large chunks of my minimum-wage earnings. These places were a skater’s paradise, but the true benefit of going to the parks was usually the people you met. You’d connect with other kids who shared the same passion you had for riding around on a plank of wood with four wheels. Turf’s “Elvira” pinball machine and exquisitely curated jukebox were perks as well.

Secondly, you could build your own terrain. I had the benefit of living in the countryside, where one of my close friends just happened to have a huge, empty barn laying around. A couple summers, dozens of trips to the lumber yard, and a few hundred hours of work and we had ourselves a veritable private skatepark. A forty-foot wide, masonite-sheathed, private indoor skatepark in cold, snowy Wisconsin. My childhood was closer to heaven than I’ll ever be again.

Lastly, you could skate the streets and hope you didn’t get caught. This was by far the most popular option.

Luckily, communities across the globe are now realizing that skateboarding is actually a viable sport. And like many sports, it requires the proper environment to practice it. I’ve heard rumblings for last few years that a group of young skateboarders, Tosa Skateboarders United (TSU), were working on a proposal for a skatepark in Wauwatosa, the city I moved to a few years ago. Well, apparently they’ve been working hard, and through the right channels. I just read today that a plan has been selected for a brand new public skatepark. It’s an amazing design by the Site Design Group, which specializes in design and construction of action sports terrain. Click the image above to see a larger view of the plan.

TSU has been working with the community to plan the new skatepark, which will be located in the newly-expanded Hart Park, in the heart of the city. They’ve really done their homework and have held community meetings to discuss the plans, get feedback from citizens and involve people interested in the project. It’s a great example of a small group of passionate citizens pleading their case and the municipality listening and responding. This is the kind of project that makes paying property taxes worth it.

The question is: will my 30-something year-old body be up for it now? I’m no spring chicken anymore. I mean, this is the same city park where I play tennis with my wife and start my marathon training runs from. That being said, it’s great to see this type of thing happening in my own back yard.

Each time I attend an Outdoor Industry-sponsored event — whether Outdoor University or a Retailer show, it becomes increasingly clear that this industry is a passionate steward of the environment. From the “green” materials brands are specifying into products, to choice of educational speakers, to the seminal work of the founding members of The Conservation Alliance, members of the Outdoor Industry, more than any other, understand their role as advocates for environmental sustainability.

At a breakfast meeting on Thursday, Jan. 24, the Conservation Alliance announced the launch of the Legacy Fund and its goal to raise $3.5 million by the Summer ‘09 O.R. show, which coincides with the Alliance’s 20th anniversary. With pledges of $500,000 from Merrill, $250,000 from REI, $1 million from North Face, and $25,000 from Keen, this is clearly an obtainable goal.

In ‘07, Conservation Alliance membership dues funded grants that protected 1,200 acres of Wapack Wilderness in new Hampshire, secured the Laural Knob granite cliff and surrounding forest and wetlands in North Carolina, removed the Dillsboro Dam on the Tuckasegee River in Tennessee, helping restore the natural river flow, and allowed Canada’s Parks and Wilderness Society to add 7 million acres to the Nahanni National Park Reserve.

The Outdoor Industry is about so much more than great products. It’s an amazing industry that can compete mightily for the hearts and minds of consumers while working collectively to care for the outdoor spaces we all love so much.

In a tribute to Jerry Seinfeld (Whose show had an interesting tagline: “A show about nothing”), I think I’ll start this blog commentary by saying: “What is the deal with…”

Hence. Ahem. In my best Jerry Seinfeld…

What is the deal with academics always trashing copywriters? In a recent Ad Age Online CMO Strategy Column, Grand View College professor Stephen Winzenburg (who incidentally has written a book, entitled “TV’s Greatest Sitcoms”) weighs in on taglines.He makes some interesting points about how taglines shouldn’t be so generic that they become interchangeable. But he also seemingly, misses the mark on some of the more successful ideas in the industry (love em or hate em).

Loving taglines is indeed a subjective thing. One thing I know about taglines is that they have to say a whole bunch in very few words. They must position, differentiate, exude emotion (or create some visceral response) and be catchy as hell in, oh, like no more than 8 words. They are tough to write, but really great when they work.

Interestingly enough, Winzenburg debunks the Easy Button and Staples’ “That was easy” tag, because he didn’t get the ad. I think he missed the fact that this brand has been doing this campaign for over a year (maybe more now) and has built incredible equity in both the big idea and the tag. And might I add successfully, gaining market share throughout the campaign.

He also thinks the Macy’s Holiday tagline hit the mark this year: “The Magic of Macy’s.” You be the judge. Personally, a retail store using Magic and alliteration in a tagline, wow, that’s really breakthrough. Don’t you think???

Anyway, here is his slam on crummy taglines.

P.S. He also notes poor punctuation in taglines (clearly this communications professor doesn’t get copywriters), and he really isn’t even talking about taglines (mostly), he is talking about campaign lines and the ones he chooses are for the most part very value/retail driven.

NOTE: I feel like it’s my duty to report copy slams. So more to come.

We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist . . .
in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

This incredible video is a crash course in understanding how technology affects young people’s lives and development today. Originally a PowerPoint presentation for a 2006 Arapahoe High School faculty meeting in Centennial, Colorado, it went viral last year, getting over 5 million views in 5 months. The number has grown to 10 million+ since then.

This new version is eight minutes of sheer information design genius, bringing to life what would otherwise be a very dry lecture on technology, education and economics.

It’s engaging, frightening and surprising all at once. Well worth the eight minutes.

Six months ago Hanson Dodge Creative began working with Humminbird on the complete redesign of their website. Our research and resulting strategy recommendations were simple:

- Selling online was critical to future success of their business

- Consolidation of the systems and data captured by the website would streamline the process of updating and communicating directly with their customers

- They had a community of enthusiasts who loved their product and wanted to engage with them directly

- Rich content and media was key to providing a deeper customer experience

The result? On January 10th we launched the new Humminbird website. Our client wrote a great blog that details the new features and functions of the site. Here is an excerpt from that post:

Here are just a few new features:

• New e-commerce store: Shop for and find the Humminbird products and accessories you want faster with advanced search and filtering. Experience our products with our new gallery viewer and download product manuals.
• Updated Support section: Register your Humminbird products, find Frequently Asked Questions and download the latest software updates.
• Leading Innovation: Everything you need to know about why our technology will help you catch more fish or locate structure.
• On the Water: Join our community: share in stories and information with our new blog. Plus, Meet our professional team and watch them in action on HBTV. You can also win Humminbird gear by sending us your Side Imaging screen shots!
• Company: Learn a little bit about our roots – check out our official area for media, including press releases, awards and job opportunities at Humminbird.
• Find a Dealer: Want to experience our Product in person? Check out our new dealer locator to find a dealer near you, it even maps the results!

Our website is built on a platform that allows us to continually update, refine and refresh the information. So please come back again and again, or you can always get latest news and updates sent to you directly by subscribing to our newsletter and our blog RSS feed.

We hope you like the improvements and as always welcome your continued feedback.

Thank you and enjoy.

On February 12th our lives will change. When you walk down the street you may see a few people here or there with an extra spring in their step, you may hear peals of laughter from dark corners of your office or flagrant hoydenism among people who you may have thought mute. How do you ask? With the economy grinding down despite Federal twiddling, the dollar sliding into the dirt and the implosion of the housing market soon to be followed by the burst of the web 2.0 bubble, how could anyone be filled with unabashed hope for the future? Simple: on February 12th, Internet Explorer 6.0 is dead. Microsoft, in a move that will go down in history as “rather swell,” will force upgrade IE 6.0 to IE 7.0. This will end a seven-year reign of arrogant non-compliance, high tower decision making, blasted web budgets and the most universally accepted broken product in human history. Not that IE 6.0 didn’t have its moments. Its list of accomplishments include the following:

1) It’s not IE 5.0
2) Firefox

Unfortunately for short-sighted businesses and some equally short-sighted programmers, IE 6.0’s departure will mean their business applications illogically built only to run on IE 6.0 will need to be reprogrammed, but this is a minuscule price to pay for the (semi)logical compliance of Internet Explorer 7.0. This is not to say that IE 7.0 is a peach, but by mid-2008 the beta for IE 8.0 will be hot in our hands, driving the last rusty nail in IE 6.0’s well deserved, and long overdue, pine box.

Last Sunday, I read an article in the NYT about the rise of “cell phone novels” in Japan. You read that right: entire novels pecked out on cell phone keypads, written in the abbreviated language of text messaging, with little plot or character development, uploaded to web communities.

The big news is not that these cell phone novels have gained popularity among young people; it’s that they’re beginning to be republished in book form and making money. In fact, of 2007’s top 10 best-selling Japanese books, five are republished cell phone novels. It’s officially a cultural movement.

Predictably, the value of this new genre of writing is hotly debated, with opposing viewpoints falling squarely along generational lines. The younger generation would like the novels to be recognized as a genre, and older folks dismiss the works as “comic books.” It’s understandable how the novels’ language, replete with emoticons and Leet, might befuddle anybody over 25 who isn’t Merlin Mann.

What’s interesting to me is that these young, mostly female novelists aren’t experienced writers. Most of them have never written fiction at all. Was it the cell phone that stirred a desire to write? As a society, we tend to be wary of personal technology, branding it “isolationist” or worrying about its effect on our imaginations. We talk about TV turning our brains to mush, wasting time on the internet, and worry about texting replacing “real communication.”

But at least in this case, it looks to me like the technology made an easy avenue for creative expression, instead of hindering it. And it’s not the first time, either: all we need to do is look at Technorati’s growing blog registry to see that folks are expressing themselves left and right on the Internet.

Could it be that as humans, we all have an innate need to communicate and express ourselves, and the technology matters less than we think?

Behance Network, a national creative network dedicated to inspiring, educating and promoting creative professionals, is featuring HDC’s Trek ‘08 site today.

While this may seem like a mere design-insider-pat-on-the-back, it’s a tremendous honor to be selected as a featured site. Sites are chosen by a small team of professional, well-regarded designers, developers, product designers, and researchers.

Features like this remind us that – while technology and branding are critical – beautiful and effective creative is what makes a site stand apart.

Hearty congratulations to Trek, Dan Herwig (for his work and submitting the site to Behance) and to the rest of the Trek team. Well done, folks. Well done.

More about the Behance team:
We advance the philosophy of Productive Creativity in three ways. First, we seek out and learn from exceptionally product creative people and teams. Second, we synthesize the best practices and insights we learn to make them accessible to the broader creative community. Third, we publish articles, design products, run seminars, gather resources, and plan other initiatives to promote Productive Creativity in the creative community.

The greatest way to spread Productive Creativity is to feature it. We are constantly on the lookout for creative professionals that are “getting it right” and making ideas happen. We feature the work of these productive people and teams, along with their insights, in the Featured Section of Behance.com.

Our friends at Two West have a great podcast called the Brand Show. Every week, they explore the brands people love, hate, and love to hate. Their guest list includes some of the best minds in the biz, including some familiar names from Hanson Dodge Creative. This week, our own Dawn Finnegan and Marty Ellery discuss our Active Insights research initiative. You can check it out here.

(Their segment starts about three quarters of the way through.)

Earlier today, Hanson Dodge Creative launched the first iPhone-optimized site that we’ve created for one of our clients, Trek Bicycles. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, I invite you to pop over to the site and take a ride. We’re really excited about the new site and are fortunate to work with forward-looking clients who engage us on projects like this. These are the types of projects that make being a designer or developer worth it.

Yesterday, the New York Times published an interesting article that spoke about a spike in Google’s traffic on Christmas, ostensibly from users who had just received iPhones for the holidays. The traffic from iPhone users eclipsed that of established, entrenched mobile OS providers. Here’s the really interesting part of the article:

“The data is striking because the iPhone, an Apple product, accounts for just 2 percent of smartphones worldwide, according to IDC, a market research firm. Phones powered by Symbian make up 63 percent of the worldwide smartphone market, while those powered by Microsoft’s Windows Mobile have 11 percent and those running the BlackBerry system have 10 percent.”

So, with just 2 percent of the market, the iPhone already registered higher web traffic volumes than platforms that when combined, hold 84 percent of the current market. From my design-centric point of view, I can only deduce that people with existing smart phones do not use the web functionality of their phones and that the interface design of the iPhone makes mobile web browsing a viable, if not liberating option.

We’ve seen the same trend. In fact, it’s even more pronounced than Google’s numbers. In our own traffic logs, and in some of our clients’, we’ve noticed a meteoric rise in of the number of iPhone and iPod touch users. Overall, we’ve seen iPhone and iPod touch users, with .2 percent of traffic, register an order of magnitude higher than the next closest OS - Symbian, coming in at .02 percent. This is an unscientific look at the numbers, but it does seem to indicate that the iPhone is in a league of its own when it comes to mobile browsing.

For those of you who love lists, here’s how we see the OS traffic levels shaking out currently. Again, the jump to the iPhone and iPod touch was an order of magnitude from the closest competitor, Symbian. Any platforms not listed were below .01 percent of traffic.

1. Windows
2. Macintosh
3. Linux
4. iPhone/iPod
5. SymbianOS
6. Danger Hiptop
7. Playstation 3
8. Palm OS
9. Nintendo Wii
10. Sun OS
11. Playstation Portable

For me, this project was the first one that really made me believe in the future of the mobile web. I’ve been designing for the web for a decade now, and although I’ve done my fair share of mobile projects, none of them ever felt like a viable substitution for a full browser-based experience. The iPhone is changing this, and will hopefully pressure other mobile platforms to improve the browsing experience for its users.