Modern Copywriter has made Brandcenter Week an annual tradition. They’ll choose the work of a student or two to feature daily this week. The full list of portfolio sites will go up on Friday.
Today he’s featuring Thea Ryan (and her Daily Warmups for Chicks)
And Allie Carr (and her Boy Scouts campaign that is hitting a little to close to my two-boy home):
If you’re looking to hire some writers, keep an eye out over there.
As I’ve been spending more time reading blogs and publication home pages again. The content that is served up in social media isn’t holding up so well. It’s a little … loud and shallow. Stimulating in an entirely wrong way.
Like Carrot Top.
I hate Carrot Top.
The Real Interesting is still found out in the open web, where ideas and writing styles haven’t been sanded down for the benefit of algorithms.
Venture there and you’ll find headlines that weren’t written for SEO. Writing that has paragraphs. And thinking. And sometimes nonsense. Sometimes it’s long and sometimes it’s short. Sometimes it’s just an image.
But there’s and honesty and integrity to good web writing that just doesn’t work on networked platforms.
Maybe because success in the wild open web seems to come from a consistent body of work.
It’s writing meant to communicate with people, not impress machines.
but does it float, one of the blogs I found through Kottke’s post full of people’s favorite blogs, is unlike any blog I’ve visited before. It’s a welcome break from the literal and analytical and fame-seeking and monetizing that makes up the vast majority of the 2018 Internet. No hot-takes or link-posts or pushy algorithms or sponsored suggested content featuring things that so-and-so just did to some other thing that you won’t believe.
The format: conceptual title followed by a few screens worth of images that appear as you scroll. The effect is hypnotic. Falling through a well of imagination and half-ideas. Your brain fills in the emotion. The interpretation.
I can’t recreate it, but here’s a screenshot of a recent post that does it no justice:
Click through for the full effect: Truth suffers from too much analysis
Never trust anything that thinks for itself, if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.
— Arthur Weasley, via Harry’s memory — Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Not sure why these numbery sites always grab me, but it always seem like good things to share:
EverySecond is a site aimed at visualizing the things that happen every second around the world.
It’s interesting to see how many widgets are being sold. But I’m a sucker for seeing the cost of hidden things like R&D over time.
