Tarek Fahmy: Cultural Critic

Social networking sites have become an important tool in marketing your business, gaining an audience, and translating that audience into clients. Part of these business pages, whether they are on Facebook or other sites, have avatars/profile pics. It’s the first thing that the end-user sees. These avatars are usually neglected and not catchy or conceptual. More often then not they are the business’s logo or a stock image that is thrown in there with no connection what so ever to the product. These avatars need more attention!

I believe that businesses should start devoting time and energy in designing thoughtful and aesthetic avatars for their Facebook pages, and ALL OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES that they are involved with. These so called avatars should become an integral part of any identity/branding system. The corporations’ style guides should contain specs for each social networking sites avatars.

As a designer, the first thing that I look at is what I like to call the ‘canvas area’. The space that the given social networking site allocates to each user to display their profile pics/avatars. After finding out the maximum dimensions, create something that suits your business conceptually/aesthetically and that ALSO fits in with the surrounding area; the site itself or in Fine Arts terminology - the background.

A good example of that is my VIMEO avatar. I used a background color that I copied from VIMEO. I also made my avatar snug, it fits aesthetically with the entire page (rounded corners on the top and sharp corners on the bottom) as well as my current mini-branding campaign.

Do not neglect those avatars because whether we like it or not, first impressions do matter especially when the competition is everywhere.

Last night I attended the release party of the book titled ‘Going Rouge: Sarah Palin An American Nightmare‘ in NYC. It was fun, interesting, and contained two Palin ‘clones’. They had two women dress up in Palin-esque red dresses, coiffured like Palin with similar glasses, and similar speaking accents.

Sarah Palin

Going Rouge is a collection of essays from 23 writers/contributors. This book is strategically being released on the same date as Sarah Palin’s book titled, ‘Sarah Palin: Going Rogue An American Life‘.

Sarah Palin Books

The book is edited by Richard kim & Betsy Reed of the progressive magazine The Nation. Although the cover might give off a satirical vibe, the book’s content is supposed to be serious Palin critique.

Betsy Reed: We want to emphasize that although the cover has an element of satire, the book is not a parody. Our goal was to present a serious appraisal of Sarah Palin’s record and an assessment of her role in American politics - and her future in American politics. She is a very well-packaged celebrity at this point, so we felt it was important to show her beneath the gloss. (From the interview by Maya Schenwar)