Straight from the parallel universe where clever and horrible go together like peanut butter and chocolate comes the following press release:

We are excited to announce the launch of our new community website for Sears and Kmart customers. The service you originally registered with, My SHC Community is now called sk-YOU. The new name represents "Sears and Kmart, building a better relationship with you" and that is of course, part of our vision and mission. It is a growing and personalized online community currently comprised of 40,000 consumers who want to be heard. You can share ideas, opinions and thoughts on a wide variety of topics from travel to kitchen appliances and cell phone service. It enables you to provide feedback and guidance on the offers and shopping experiences that are most important to you.

I can see how this sounded wildly clever in a meeting.

Mash Sears, Kmart, and "you" all together and look what you get. It shows our commitment to the customer and it sounds like "sku".

Bzzzt, horrible. People don't care about stock keeping units—and they certainly don't want to be associated with one. They don't care about clever. Unless you're a financier, there's no reason to associate Sears with Kmart. Branding should help the you understand and remember a product. It's not about how you perceive the customer or about how you perceive an internal initiative. The dash and all caps YOU makes it harder for the customer to remember. But I ramble.

At Juice, our naming bible is available in PDF form from Igor International.

http://www.igorinternational.com/process/naming-guide-product-company-names.php

The central wisdom of this guide—and it's packed full of gems, naming taxonomies by industry, checklists, taglines, case studies—is that names fall into the following categories.

Descriptive names (names that describe what the product or company does) BMW, IBM, AdWords

• Good for a product, easy to remember
• Rough sledding for a company name, as there will be dozens of companies in the field with similar names (unless you have 100 years of meticulous branding like BMW and IBM)

Invented names with latin roots

• Aquilent, Taligent, Acela, Agilent
• "Safe" choices, hard to remember, a blank slate. Generally too clever by half. Hey, did you think it was clever to name a company as a cross between "agile" and "intelligent"? Nobody cares!

Invented names that are fun to say

• Snapple, Oreo, Kodak
• Fun to say, opens the door for lots of positive associations with strong branding

Experiential names (names that describe the experience of the company or product)

• Navigator, Safari, TrailBlazer, Fidelity
• Intuitive but common, doesn't differentiate, a workmanlike approach for a product

Evocative names (names that evoke feelings about the experience you will have with the company—those feelings may even be initially negative)

• Caterpillar, Apple, Amazon, AirPort, Target, Yahoo, Virgin
• Connects emotionally with people because they have lots of previous experience with the word. "Scary" choices that are hard to get a committee to agree to

We often are are asked why we're named "Juice"—Igor is the answer. When we go places, people say "Heeey, Juice guys!"—if you're a client, be aware you're not the first one to use that line. We benefit from every dollar Nantucket Nectars spends on their "Juice Guys" ads and we love it. Every dollar Tropicana spends helps you remember our name. Even OJ Simpson is on our branding team.

If you're naming an internal product, steer toward descriptive names or evocative names. If you're creating a reporting portal, don't be afraid to call it "Report Portal". Or call it "Butterfly" or "Moonbeam." Brighten people's lives by delivering fun, or ease their lives by not making them remember some obscure acronym. Most of all, remember to be a servant of your customers and that clever is not equal to smart.

Check out our followup post that describes how we created a downloadable Windows application or an excel spreadsheet you can use to create these graphics.

One of the troubles with Tufte is the frustrating infeasability of his approach to design for real people in business. One of his recommendations is to use Adobe Illustrator.

Adobe Illustrator is a big serious program that can do almost anything on the visual field (other than Photoshop an image). Most of my sparkline work was done in Illustrator. Fortunately all graphic designers and graphic design students have the program and know how to use it, so find a colleague who knows about graphic design.

Raise your hand if you have a graphic design assistant at your beck and call. I thought not.

One of the tools we use for rapid prototyping at Juice is NodeBox.

NodeBox is a Mac OS X application that lets you create 2D visuals (static, animated or interactive) using Python programming code and export them as a PDF or a QuickTime movie. NodeBox is free and well-documented.

All true. But it's more helpful to think of NodeBox as a free Adobe Illustrator that you can program in the world's easiest programming language. Oops, here's the right link.

I wanted to see if we could reproduce the following graph from The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, p 158.

Here's the code. It's 11 lines of code if you exclude entering the data and setting things like fonts and colors.

size(500,700)
font('Palatino'); 
fontsize(12)  
stroke(0.4)  # a medium grey for lines
fill(0.2)    # a slightly darker grey for text  

<h1>data = (label, first, last, label-fudge-factor)</h1>

data = [ ('Sweden', 46.9, 57.4, 0., 0.),
         ('Netherlands', 44.0, 55.8, .3, 0.),
         ('Norway', 43.5, 52.2, 0., 0.),
         ('Britain', 40.7, 39.0, 0., 0.),
         ('France', 39.0, 43.4, 0., 0.6),
         ('Germany', 37.5, 42.9, 0., -0.4),
         ('Belgium', 35.2, 43.2, 0., 0.),
         ('Canada', 35.2, 35.8, .8, 0.4),
         ('Finland', 34.9, 38.2, -0.5, 0.),
         ('Italy', 30.4, 35.7, 0.3, -0.3),
         ('United States', 30.3, 32.5, -0.3, 0.),
         ('Greece', 26.8, 30.6, 0.4, 0.),
         ('Switzerland', 26.5, 33.2, -0.2, 0.1),
         ('Spain', 22.5, 27.1, 0., 0.3),
         ('Japan', 20.7, 26.6, 0., 0.), ]

text("Current Receipts of Goverment as a Percentage of "
      "Gross Domestic Product, 1970 and 1979", 20, 70, width=215)
text("1970", WIDTH*.28, HEIGHT*0.03)
text("1979", WIDTH*.68, HEIGHT*0.03)

def ypos(val):
    # calculate a vertical position by scaling between 10% and 90% 
    # of the height of the image
    return HEIGHT * (0.9 - 0.8 * (val - minval) / (maxval - minval))

<h1>find the minimum and maximum values in the range</h1>

alldata = [d[1] for d in data] + [d[2] for d in data]
minval, maxval = min(alldata), max(alldata)

for label, start, end, startfudge, endfudge in data:
    align(RIGHT)
    text(label, 0, ypos(start+startfudge)+4, width=0.25*WIDTH)
    text("%0.1f" % start, 0.25*WIDTH, ypos(start+startfudge)+4, width=0.07*WIDTH)
    align(LEFT)
    text(label, WIDTH*.75, ypos(end+endfudge)+4)
    text("%0.1f" % end, 0.68*WIDTH, ypos(end+endfudge)+4, width=0.07*WIDTH)
    line(WIDTH*.33, ypos(start), WIDTH*.67, ypos(end))

Here's what the result looks like.

We have some great followups to this planned for next week. We'll reimplement this code with the Python Imaging Library, which will open things up for Windows users. We have some great plans for mashing these graphics up with our just released Google Analytics API.

Check out our followup post that describes how we created a downloadable Windows application you can use to create these graphics.

Stephen Colbert has mentioned that he’s having trouble getting guests during the writer’s stike. We find this puzzling, given the supposed benefits of the Colbert Bump. Does being on the Colbert Show really provide a bump—a critical leap that vaults a writer, or a politician to superstardom?

We know that Colbert isn’t a big fan of “facts,” and only needs his gut to tell him the Colbert Bump is real. At Juice, we let the data decide what’s real or not, so our apologies to Stephen for not taking his word for it. Intrigued, Juice Analytics set out to find out the truth. We gathered data about Amazon sales rank for 20 authors that appeared on his show in recent months. How did those ranks change in the days immediately before and after the authors’ appearance on the show?

Hmmm, there might be something there but those sales ranks don’t tell us much. Fortunately for Stephen, some “eggheads” have worked out roughly how Amazon sales rank corresponds to actual book sales. We calculated the sales, and normalized the data so that the week prior to appearing on the Colbert Report was equal to 1.0. Here’s a picture.

That looks like a bump, Conan. In fact, being on the Colbert Report increases sales by 10 times on average. That bump doesn't last forever, but, let's face it, what does?

We also wanted to know, what kinds of books are Colbert’s audience going crazy for? After all, Colbert is well known as a rock-solid conservative. He’s tight with the Bush Administration. Even though he debates a few liberal (“pinko”) authors now and then, most of his guests are writers of pop-intellectual studies of the Gladwellian persuasion.

Here are the authors and how we categorized them:

Pinkos: Jessica Valenti, Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters, Wesley K. Clark, A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country, Robert Shrum, No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner

‘Publicans: Tom DeLay, No Retreat, No Surrender: One American’s Fight

Pop Essayists: Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel B. Smith, Muses, Madmen, and Prophets: Rethinking the History, Science, and Meaning of Auditory Hallucination, Michael Gershon, The Second Brain: A Groundbreaking New Understanding of Nervous Disorders of the Stomach and Intestine, John J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Frank J. Sulloway, Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives, Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Richard Preston, The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Bjorn Lomberg, Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, Michael Wallis, The Lincoln Highway: Coast to Coast from Times Square to the Golden Gate

Popular: Stephen Colbert, I Am America (And So Can You!), John Grisham, Playing For Pizza: A Novel, Tina Brown, The Diana Chronicles

How much of a bump did each of these groups receive?

It’s a shock! Liberals and high-minded eggheads do better than popular or conservative books. I’m not sure if Colbert knows this, but his audience isn’t who he thinks they are.

Here are all the authors and their normalized sales around the time of their appearance on the Colbert Report.

This post was a collaborative effort of the entire Juice team. Pete Skomoroch concocted the idea, wrote copy, and found the study linking Amazon Sales Rank to actual sales. Zach data mined. David May whipped up elegant, instant visualizations. Sal Uryasev munged data.

Tipped over: social influence "tipping point" theory debunked

Gladwell's model posits that a few hyperconnected "influentials" are the key to the runaway viral spread of fads, fashions, ideas, and behaviors. What turns out to be the deciding factor is not the "influentials," but the people who are easily influenced.

Information Architects Japan » Blog Archive » Web Trend Map 2008 Beta

Map of the internet using Tokyo area subway as the charting coordinates,

Edward Tufte has produced a illuminating video tour of the user interface of the iPhon