Clearing the cache, part 1

I’ve got a lot of links clogging up the RSS feed and del.icio.us bookmark. Here are a few for your consideration:

Presidential campaign logos, 1960-2008, an interesting study in the evolution of design, marketing and sloganeering. Via Jordon Cooper.

The linkbaiting playbook. A must-read for all bloggers.

Playing it safe is a trap: 5 syndromes in online marketing, a good article by Michael Gilbert, who obviously has read the linkbaiting playbook. Via Karlyn Morissette.

Brands of the living dead. A thoughtful NY Times Magazine piece by Murketing‘s Rob Walker about how dead brands live on in our collective conscious. “A great deal of what happens in the consumer marketplace does not involve brands with zealous loyalists. What determines whether a brand lives or dies (or can even come back to life) is usually a quieter process that has more to do with mental shortcuts and assumptions and memories — and all the imperfections that come along with each of those things.” All brand managers should read this piece.

Hand-coding is still in vogue. “[A]fter 14 years of such editors — FrontPage, PageMill, GoLive, Dreamweaver, and many others, with few surviving the hecatomb — hand coding still rises to the top as the preferred method of building pages.”

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Now playing: Various Artists – Mamie Van Doren – Cat Fight
via FoxyTunes

Please, for the sake of the kittens…

Louis Rosenfeld‘s great presentation on web redesign is worth a view — and not just because it has kittens. The slideshow is from a recent “Redesign Must Die” presentation at the University of Illinois, which Rosenfeld mentions on his blog. Hat tip to College Web Guy, who really likes the lipsticked pig picture Rosenfeld put in the presentation.

Go take a look — for the kittens, or for the pigs, if not for the sake of your own institution.

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Now playing: Nine Inch Nails – Discipline
via FoxyTunes