5 Cool Things

The internet is one dark field of battle. The pictures out of Paris bewitch, bother and bewilder. A smart storytelling publisher chases commercial storytelling gigs. As you document the world, your smart phone camera goes wide and long. Alexey, with love for photography, from Russia. “The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.” ― Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

1.

Global Cyber Attacks, Live

Sort of a terrible beauty isn’t it? Cyber security is becoming an oxymoron. Breaches are nastier and more frequent. The stories are amazing and the person of the hour is award-winning investigative journalist Brian Krebs, independent reporter at krebsonsecurity.com.

A former Washington Post reporter, he’s broken huge stories — most notably the Target breach. He’s been threatened by Russian gangsters. His site was disrupted by the Sony hackers. Hackers stole his identity. He found the crew that shut down PlayStation and Xbox at Christmas.

Krebs posted the map above. It’s from — IPViking — and includes a wealth of live data about attacks. Who’s attacking, the target city, and who’s on the short end of the stick. It’s worth a look >>

Krebs just published a best seller, Spam Nation, The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime – From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door. So much is Krebs the man of the hour, there’s a movie in the works. Who’s making the film, you ask? Sony.

Brian’s three big security tips: 1. If you didn’t go looking for it, don’t install it. 2. If you installed it, update it. 3. If you no longer need it, get rid of it. The full security post is here >>

2.
Images from Paris’ heartbreak

“Luckily the world is evil. I could not bear to go wrong in a world that is well,” Wolinski is quoted as saying. He had reason to say this. Eight months after Georges Wolinski was born in Tunisia, Adolf Hitler became Fuhrer. His father had fled to Tunisia to escape Europe’s pogroms. The senior Wolinski was later murdered by a disgruntled employee.

3.
Storytelling and brands at Narratively Creative

5 Cool Things has covered Narrative.ly before mainly because it’s gorgeous and savvy – a brilliant way to tell stories on the internets. Now they’ve introduced something really quite new. Narratively Creative wants to take its storytelling chops to the business community. They’ve worked with GE, Sundance TV and others. Here’s the pitch:

We’ve entered an exciting age in which everyone needs to be a storyteller. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a budget-conscious non-profit, you have consumers to reach, stories to tell and a perspective to share. You’ve seen the power of Narratively’s editorial product—now let us leverage our unique storytelling abilities and our 1,500+ top contributors to meet your organization’s content needs.

Through Narratively Creative, we develop and distribute high quality and engaging content and craft winning content strategy for clients in sectors ranging from tech to real estate, auto, education and entertainment. Custom, publish-ready content can be delivered straight to your brand and/or hosted on Narrative.ly, where it reaches our hyper-engaged audience. The following are a few examples of our work.

 4.
For Moment lenses, made in Seattle, words matter

So cool. I had a chance to visit Moment (“World’s best mobile photography lenses”) in their space in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. Most of the team were onsite including founder Marc Barros, who told me that Moment had sought $50,000 funding on Kickstarter and raised $450,000. We hung out for a bit, chatted and I was on my way.

This brilliant idea — executed flawlessly — is just about the best thing that could happen to any Instagram junkie or mobile photography freak. There are so many great camera apps now, just look at VSCO. And now we have superbly crafted lenses to go with. The wide lens is equivalent to an 18mm. (Deduced in the blink of an eye by one @terphoter.)

You really should read how Moment — described in incredible detail — went about the work of crowdfunding. It’s a small masterpiece. On the narrative:

Scripting Your Story
Long before you get into the logistics of your crowdfunding campaign it’s super important to create the narrative. This is not something to leave until the end, but to start at the beginning of your project. It takes time to really craft the message, words, and imagery that will captivate potential backers.

The Moment crowdfunding approach >>

5.
Alexey Brodovitch

Step into the 20th century pantheon of great photographers and in no time at all, you’ll bump into Alexey Brodovitch. Read about Irving Penn and there’s Brodovitch. Same with Robert Frank. Cartier Bresson. Brassai. Bill Brandt. Avedon, too. Quite the genius, Alexey Brodovitch was art director at Harpers Bazaar for nearly 25 years. He was hugely influential. The AIGA website has a section called Inspiration, where I found this fine piece on Alexey. It’s a great story >>

Alexey Brodovitch is remembered today as the art director of Harper’s Bazaar for nearly a quarter of a century. But the volatile Russian emigré’s influence was much broader and more complex than his long tenure at a fashion magazine might suggest. He played a crucial role in introducing into the United States a radically simplified, “modern” graphic design style forged in Europe in the 1920s from an amalgam of vanguard movements in art and design. Through his teaching, he created a generation of designers sympathetic to his belief in the primacy of visual freshness and immediacy. Fascinated with photography, he made it the backbone of modern magazine design, and he fostered the development of an expressionistic, almost primal style of picture-taking that became the dominant style of photographic practice in the 1950s.

Harpers Bazaar

In addition, Brodovitch is virtually the model for the modern magazine art director. He did not simply arrange photographs, illustrations and type on the page; he took an active role in conceiving and commissioning all forms of graphic art, and he specialized in discovering and showcasing young and unknown talent. His first assistant in New York was a very young Irving Penn. Leslie Gill, Richard Avedon and Hiro are among the other photographers whose work Brodovitch nurtured during his long career. So great was his impact on the editorial image of Harper’s Bazaar that he achieved celebrity status; the film Funny Face, for example, which starred Fred Astaire as a photographer much like Avedon, named its art-director character “Dovitch.”

Harpers Bazaar

Despite his professional achievements and public success, however, Brodovitch was never a happy man. Born in Russia in 1898 of moderately well-to-do parents, he deferred his goal of attending the Imperial Art Academy to fight in the Czarist army, first against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and then against the Bolsheviks. In defeat, he fled Russia with his family and future wife and, in 1920, settled in Paris. There, despite the burden of exile, he prospered; in 1924 his poster design for an artists’ ball won first prize, and in 1925 he won medals for fabric, jewelry and display design at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts (the landmark “Art Deco” exposition). Soon he was in great demand, designing restaurant décor, posters and department store advertisements.

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5CT Super Bowl prediction:
NE by 3.