From the monthly archives:

July 2009

How to broaden a tv audience – why Sci-Fi has become SyFy

July 27, 2009

in Notes

In various posts around the web you can find opinions on the new identity of the tv channel SyFy – formerly known as Sci-Fi Channel. While I don’t want to go into the design details I want to express some thoughts why the probably made this change. At first it seems quite unusual to change a well established brand so radically. It seems even more radical as the new name is also a new term that sounds like the old name but doesn’t has the same meaning – it actually has no meaning.

This puzzled at first even me. Science fiction was born over 100 years ago and the abbreviation sci-fi has become wide spread. Everybody knows what sci-fi is and therefore naming a tv channel who broadcasts sci-fi shows should be called sci-fi. But here lies the big problem. The vast majority of people “thinks” the know what sci-fi is all about. Basically science fiction is all about ufo’s and space travel. Science fiction is obviously much more than that and actually most of the movies and shows on tv are some sort of science fiction. How can you break this misinformation of the general public?

There are two ways. One way is to educate the people, but this would cost much more that just do it the way SyFy has done it. They changed the name and claimed that SyFy is the tv channel where you could “imagine more”. The name sound familiar enough to sci-fi fans to recognize the term and is new enough to new viewers to just be a name.

How far SyFy is more than just space crafts and aliens shows the spot – well done and good luck to the “new channel”.

Update: As @Lazarus2000 on Twitter pointed out giving a brand a unique name has another advantage. You can trademark the brand.

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Hidden Calculator in Adobe Creative Suite

July 21, 2009

in Tips & Tricks

Sometimes the biggest time savers are in front of your eyes the whole time but you can’t see them. Mostly because this great features are so part of the system that nobody actually talks about them anymore.

calc_01One of this hidden features is the incorporated calculator in Adobe Creative Suite. It’s not documented that every value field can actually do some basic calculations and transformations. So if you want to expand a rectangle by 5 pt you just select the rectangle, add a “+ 5 pt” in the width field in your toolbar and hit Enter. You can even use different units to do the calculations – cool isn’t it.

calc_02The operations you can do is addition, subtraction, multiply and divide. But remember you can make only one operation at a time. calc_03Another cool way to use this feature is for font sizes. If you know are doing a poster for example and you know that you need the font to be 5 cm in height you can enter it right away, no need to transform centimeters in points.

The available abbreviations for the units are:

  • Points – pt
  • Picas – p
  • Pixel – px
  • Centimeter – cm
  • Millimeter – mm
  • Inch – Inch (in English) Zoll (in German)
  • Cicerco – c
  • Agate – ag
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Trick Feedburner Feed Addresses

July 3, 2009

in Tips & Tricks

There is much talking about the Facebook usernames  but none about the Feedburner feed dresses. You could get nice feed dresses in Feedburner right from the start and you might think there is nothing new to know about them. You’re right, nothing new but some time ago I found some trick to get the feed address you like even when it’s already taken.

There is a undocumented feature when you choose your Feedburner feed address – the address supports the forward dash “/”. This means, that you can have a Feedburner Feed with this address http://feeds.feedburner.com/frankie/blog/allitems and the best part about this URL is, that the feed address http://feeds.feedburner.com/frankie was already taken by someone else.

You can use this feature to make your feeds (say for your category or comment feeds) or to get nice looking feed URLs relevant to your business and to reinforce your brand.

BTW: I always suggest that if you are using Feedburner you should also use the MyBrand feature which let’s you use your domain name instead of feedburner.com. It’s wise to let your visitors subscribe to the RSS Feed with your domain in the URL because if for some reason in the feature you want to drop Feedburner or Feedburner closes down you will not lose your subscribers.

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