Tarek Fahmy: Cultural Critic

Mitch Stewart Is:

Mitch Stwerat

He Does Things Like This:

What Mitch Does

Obama’s head cheerleader (Mitch Stewart) makes ‘you‘ feel important. Mitch makes you feel like Obama is talking directly to you (1:1) with these emails/newsletters delivered directly to your mailbox.

Reminds me of some music critic saying that Frank Sinatra is so popular because when he sings ‘you‘ feel like he’s singing directly to you. As you’ve probably heard before, this administration is seemingly more reachable then previous administrations.

This unprecedented grass roots effort helped Obama win this election. This grassroots effort also depends on digital communications mixed with consistent and clean branding and identity. Take a look at the branding of the above email/newsletter, the Organizing For America Website, and the White House Website.

Is it gonna help Obama keep the office for a second term? Not sure…

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.

I have two vertical designs for the poster. The only difference is the 3 stars versus one. In one poster I am loosely depicting Oriens Belt. The other poster I removed the two stars and settled on the sun.

They both fit since the ancient Egyptians regarded the sun as the major god in their pantheon. They also, according to many Discovery channel and the science channel shows that I have watched over the years, based the overall design of the pyramids after Oriens Belt.