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From the front steps of the Unity Church of Fort Smith you can see two churches nearby. What each church needs is Decommoditification! What unique story can any of them tell that makes them not only stand out, but separates them from the crowd. That is where Brand Design comes in.

When your building has a steeple, stained glass windows, and is made of stone and brick, most people in the Western World will know that your building is a church. When your architecture tells your story, you don’t need much of a sign.

Today we went to a wedding in Ft. Smith, AR. Outside the church, I spotted this water meter box cover with the Arkansas Razorback Logo. It turn out that the Ford Meter Box Co. turns 108 years old next Wednesday. Their website doesn’t use a logo on their homepage, but they do have a logo celebrating their hundredth birthday. It seems they made it past a hundred years by using their customers logos instead of their own. Now that’s user centered design for you!

The mystery lives on! We continue to get many visits from Tyler, TX, and now for the search term “ninja tattoos and drawings” on Yahoo. Although I’ve had a longterm interest in tattoos, and we are Design Ninjas, it just doesn’t make sense.

To clear up one mystery, that’s Sandy Duncan on TV’s Omnibus, from the Broadway revival of Peter Pan in the clip, who was born in Henderson, TX and grew up in Tyler.

Driving south on AR-5 yesterday, Misty shot this clip from Calico St. past Walnut St. to Railroad St. before crossing the tracks and bridge over the White River in Calico Rock, AR. The first thing I noticed was the lack of sign pollution compared to Mountain Home. The town is about 27 miles southeast of here and has a population of about 1025. Then I noticed that the east side of the street had awnings covering the sidewalk, reminded me of some streets in Santa Fe, NM. Maybe in a town where everybody knows your name, you don’t have to shout it out with your sign.

Since our Niche Video, we have been slouching towards understanding.

Misty and I are geeks, we even had a Geek Dinner last May by Lake Norfork. Misty is more of a puzzle solving geek who likes to put the pieces together to come up with the big picture, while I’m more a big picture geek who likes to drill down to the details. And we like Hugh MacLeod’s advice to Fenderkicker: “The more geeked-out your blog, the more frickin’ yachts you will sell.”

So yes, we are Nerds, and Proud of it!

This trailer reminded me of our White and Nerdy mashup. Geek Chic lives on and touches us all. Like Weird Al says, “It’s All About The Pentiums“.

Misty just loaded and configured the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin from Alex King, so you can now browse our site from your internet enabled p.d.a. or mobile phone. On Misty’s Dell Axim the photos and text render very nicely, and on our Samsung x427m phones the text is optimized for easy reading. While the visual experience is still best on a laptop or desktop, for quick viewing on a mobile device things work just fine. Let us know if there’s any problem on any of your mobile browsers.

But Carsten Schmidt asks, “Mobile 2.0? Where was mobile 1.0?” Yep, there are still a lot of things to work out, and that’s where the Fun comes in!

Richard MacManus asks, Are you an “Out There” Person?:

* Value fame as an “asset”
* Willing to share certain types of sensitive information on the web
* Believe it is appropriate to criticize their organizations on the web
* Believe that “organizations need to be more transparent to succeed”
* Believe “there’s no harm in openly discussing the work I do inside my organization with others”

The findings are in a report from the Attention Company and includes this warning — “Any attempt to control it ham-handedly will only lead to excessive blowback.” You have been warned!

Misty wants a mobile phone so she can shoot pictures and videos, surf the web and get email, play music and games, get GPS data and store documents, and get great phone reception anywhere on Earth. I want a mobile phone for phone calls, a high-megapixel camera, and an ultra-light laptop with WiFi. But I was impressed by this post by Rudy De Waele, and his quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google:

Mobile phones are cheaper than PCs, there are three times more of them, growing at twice the speed, and they increasingly have Internet access. What is more, the World Bank estimates that more than two-thirds of the world’s population lives within range of a mobile phone network. Mobile is going to be the next big Internet phenomenon. It holds the key to greater access for everyone – with all the benefits that entails.