Rizen Creative Ideas, advertising & design for underdog brands

There’s almost no such thing as a good ‘Coming Soon’ page, but if you’re going to put one up you might as well include an animated GIF. Karlssonwilker’s home page takes the visitor back in time to the late 90’s, with their own twist and surprise on how cool 256 animated colors can be.

One thing about Rizen Creative: we don’t worship at the idol of advertising. We like good advertising. We like creating effective advertising. But we certainly don’t see advertising as the solution to the vast majority of marketing communications problems.
That’s why the title of this book grabbed us.
We’ve helped create many ad-free brands and were excited [...]

There’s a new e-book of poetry floating around the kindle world, and it happens to both fantastic and local. Eat Art and Utter Poems, by j.a. Briggs (father to our own web developer, John Briggs), is “Contemporary Poetry with attitude…Frost in a blender with a dash of dada,” and it shares nothing with the fluff [...]

Yes, one of the best Springsteen songs, but also a great book by Christopher McDougall. No, you don’t need to have one of those 26.2 stickers on your Suburu to read the book. It’s full of great stories about the desire or just plain need to run (eat or be eaten).

So strap on your FiveFingers and run to your [...]

We find ourselves constantly looking for great books to read on business, design, creative, strategy, etc.
We came across this book “I Love You More Than My Dog” by Jeanne Bliss and loved the title. As a marketing firm that works with underdog brands of all shapes and sizes, any mention of “dog” grabs us.
And we’re glad [...]

Brain Pickings has an interesting post on the history of quite possibly the the most world-changing invention ever: the alphabet. It’s all based around a book, Shapes for Sounds by Timothy Donaldson.
This is a great read and a visually stunning stroll through a topic we use every day.

It’s one thing to talk about building a great company. It’s another to actually pull it off. Well Starbucks chairman, president and CEO Howard Schultz has done it. Twice. Now, in his new book Onward Schultz goes in depth into the process of defining who you are, then creating an organization that is true to [...]

We were recently asked for a few recommendations for books on marketing. Well, the fact is there are too many good ones to list. But here are the ones that came right to mind… what are some of your favorites.

On strategy…
The Brand Gap ( http://amzn.to/IzviE ) **Brilliantly Simple**
Eating the Big Fish ( http://amzn.to/hgpdQ9 )
Positioning: the [...]

Seth Godin’s first release from his new Domino Project, “Poke the Box” is now available (we mentioned it last week, but read it this week). It’s a concise manifesto encourage readers (you!) to ignore the naysayers, stop fearing failure and do something. It’s short. 85 pages. So if we go any further in describing it, [...]

Seth Godin has a new book out this week titled “Poke the Box“. While our copy is in transit, thought I would share some quotes from it.
“There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth. Not going all the way and not starting.” (Siddhartha Gautama)
“Please stop waiting for a map. We reward those [...]