Adam Rotmil began setting type as a teen, co-wrote an instruction book about Flash during college, and upon graduation helped rebrand a Fortune 500 economic consulting firm.
He has led concept development through press-check quality control. Adam’s clients have included Brown Brothers Harriman, The E.P.A., Harvard University Alumni Association, small businesses and individuals.
Adam has published in Forbes and Applied Arts. He has spoken on design at art schools and at the AIGA Annual Conference. Adam holds a BFA degree from The Art Institute of Boston; studied typography at HGK Basel, Switzerland; studied Japanese language at Harvard University.
Kamel Ouadi, global brand director of Louis Vuitton: "Luxury is an emotion, a dream."
While there enough glitz at most fashion shows to make us collapse in ridicule, this video is remarkable for its humanity. -Adam
Adam Rotmil runs the Japan office of Adam Rotmil Partners, specializing in brand strategy and design. He has 15 years of brand and design experience with companies of all sizes. He held a senior creative position at Marsh and McClennan Companies, the premier global services firm. Adam later designed at Brown Brothers Harriman, the largest private bank in the United States. Adam lives in Japan and partners with experts worldwide, sharing projects and talent. His singular vision is to improve brand value through strategy, exploration, and discovery. Adam knows good work implies social awareness, dedication, honesty, and integrity.
It seems today everyone is talking about social media with great fanfare.
It is common for new ways of communicating to receive great attention and hype. Consider, though, when a search engine was called artificial intelligence. These days, we no longer think of Google as such. I believe that in the next few years, what is now called social media will assimilate similarly into ordinary experience. When it does, it might not be called anything. The hype will fade, and what proves actually valuable will remain. The notion of endorsing something or someone, often called liking in social media parlance, will remain. It depends on innovation and natural selection to determine how this changes our everyday experience. Let's take the long view, though, by looking at the "artificial intelligence effect." Other examples include the way your brakes work in your car. Or the way a rice cooker or microwave determines when to stop. It would seem odd these days to say these devices demonstrate the awesome power of artificial intelligence. For my part, I look forward to a similar calming down about social media. I suspect part of the hype comes from genuine excitement that there is potential for the web to change again via "the social graph." But please, let's remember that we got into a bubble before: everyone had great ideas, people under 30 became wealthy CEOs and wore turtlenecks to work. When the inevitable disillusionment hit, it stung for a long time, and shattered much of the faith investors had in smart young people. This time, let's keep a modest perspective while we innovate. Finally, if you like this comment, please twitter it or share it on facebook. Thanks for listening.
Thanks to Totally Naked, the Tokyo-based blog where we found a copy of this video.
How can motion sensing integrate with social media to turn all the world's streets and mountains into a big playground? Well, the folks at Burton know the history of snowboarding and were behind much of it. For over thirty years, actually. Is there a skateboard and snowboard that knows what tricks you did? Can it keep track for you and share the data with your friends? Or is this just a dream of an idea, maybe to be developed someday? Take a look at the video, and see what you think.
Adam Rotmil runs the Japan office of Adam Rotmil Partners, specializing in brand strategy and design. He has 15 years of brand and design experience with companies of all sizes. He held a senior creative position at Marsh and McClennan Companies, the premier global services firm. Adam later designed at Brown Brothers Harriman, the largest private bank in the United States. Adam lives in Japan and partners with experts worldwide, sharing projects and talent. His singular vision is to improve brand value through strategy, exploration, and discovery. Adam knows good work implies social awareness, dedication, honesty, and integrity.
Typefaces, often called fonts these days, abound. When I studied briefly with David Berlow (Font Bureau, Boston), he had a few stories to tell. He said something like this. He said, “I thought of it like selling arms. Type can be used for good or for bad, and I don’t care.” Then, from my memory, he wavered and said that he had started to care. It mattered when he saw his designs used poorly. He said, “Suppose you have a farm. If you say, I like this sheep because she makes the best wool, then that’s professional. If you say, I like this one because she’s pretty…” It reminded me of Emil Ruder’s declaration in his book Typography, “Type has one business before it and that is to communicate.” (Basel School of Design). There we run into questions of what it means to communicate.
We could dress it up with fancy words like ‘semiotics’ and the latest post-this-and-that. That’s an old academic trick. Here is a simple claim: typefaces communicate more than the underlying idea of the words. Just as in oral language, there are connotations. We know this from common experience. Typography can feel techno, can feel pop, can feel esteemed, with infinite variation. And that’s just it. Aren’t there enough typefaces? Berlow addressed this, too: “You could say there are enough shirts, and yet people keep designing them.” Let’s explore why.
Companies that have a strong retail presence require a powerful, memorable, and positive brand. It must be different from the competition and visible in the urban space. These are six things we have learned.
1. How Was It for You?
Even with the most visible, most advertised brands, it’s about a positive experience. Big media purchases may bring a spike in sales, but does that equate to positive reputation? Brand engagement with company employees has shown more long-term value. Having your own mini-army of proud, confident and helpful employees means connecting with customers at the most vital touchpoint: human contact. While price is one major element in customers' decisions, most of us would rather go where we feel we are treated better, even if it costs a little more. For this to happen, employees must understand the brand and feel like part of its culture. Take for instance Apple. With rare exception, they'll do almost everything to earn your satisfaction. Even if that means bending rules. It is an accepted axiom that the most effective advertising is positive word-of-mouth. With the advent of social media, this is even more the case.
Mariah Carey, the all-time highest-selling female recording artist, and Justin Bieber, the current teen pop icon, present a design signal with two recent and unconnected music videos. In November, Mariah released a video for her cover of the 1980s Foreigner song “I Want to Know What Love Is.” Bieber later released a video for the remix of his song “Somebody to Love.” Both recall the aesthetics of those from the early 1990s, a time when MTV and music videos were all-important in TV and music marketing. Mariah’s accomplishment, with director Hype Williams, is especially interesting. Will these videos herald a trend in 90s-retro music videos?
Many music critics, and Mariah’s fans, had claimed that she sung better at the onset of her career in the early 1990s; moreover, they said she had looked better, dressed more modestly, and they preferred her adult-contemporary material over the hip-hop infused direction she’s taken since around 1997. You Tube presentations of most of Mariah’s videos made after the early 2000s include viewer comments that “Mariah doesn’t sing like she used to” or that she’s not as attractive as before.
