Not quite ready for take-off…YUL, even less so

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Having missed more than my share of flights in recent years (which I figure is one per person, the reasonable traveller vowing never to risk such crippling opportunity/financial/ego cost again), I’d planned to:

a) pack the night before, rather than the evening of
b) take the $8 shuttle bus to YUL, rather than an overpriced cab
c) arrive 3 hours ahead of my flight time, rather than my usual 1 (or less)

I bade the cab driver a tense goodbye and burst through the doors (well, I shuffled as closely as I possibly could against the glacial rotation of the automatic doors), only to find a line of about 500 people snaking down the corridor.

All systems were down.

Microsoft’s view of the Windows user: The meaning behind the UI’s evolution from XP to Vista

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Although Windows XP was marketed as intuitive and user-friendly, the next generation of the Windows operating system boasted a completely redesigned and much buzzed-about interface, overhauling everything from language to iconography to navigation. Some attributes remained, while others disappeared, creating a new environment of changed meanings and renegotiating the relationship between the operating system and its user.

Regardless of version, Windows operating systems—and most examples in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) genre—share standard elements that serve to represent the inner workings of the system to the user through semiotic functions. These elements can be grouped into categories of windows, menus, controls, and icons, as well as the natural language and stylistic treatments that appear throughout the interface. By examining differences between the top-level signifiers for Windows XP and Windows Vista, their paradigmatic and syntagmatic functions, and the codes and myths they activate, we can deconstruct how the discourse between Microsoft’s operating system (addresser) and its target users (addressee) has evolved.

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3D Graffiti: An experimental marketing campaign that tore through the noise

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Despite being meek and bookish, in high school I—like many other adolescent, suburban adopters of urban trends—developed a graffiti tag. Never possessing the gall to emblazon a wall with aerosol, I satisfied my rebellious urges by hastily scrawling it on desks and in bathroom stalls with a ballpoint pen. When I finally found enough of myself to disengage from Scarborough’s dominating hip­hop culture, such adventures in petty vandalism went the way of my FUBU hoodies and Tupac CDs. The city was safe. That is, until myself and three other classmates found ourselves tasked with launching an ad campaign as an end-­of-­term project for The Discourse of Advertising, a fourth ­year course at the University of Waterloo.

The ultimate aim of the campaign was to drive traffic to a website, which features a preview of artist Dane Watkins’ online Moral Meter, by any means necessary. We needed to devise a means to capture and hold the attention of masses of typically attention­-deficit people. It had to be daring, it had to be compelling, and it had to be cheap. So, we grabbed some paper, and set to work: folding origami cranes. Enlisting the help of our devotees and debtors, we made close to a thousand to disseminate throughout campus and in nearby cities such as London and Toronto.

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