After founding Tourism Solutions, a strategic consultancy, 18 months ago and collaborating with TimeZoneOne on various projects during that time, it became apparent to Daniel that there are endless synergies between the two. He could not be more excited about the next chapter in his professional career, leading the team at TimeZoneOne as their CEO.

TimeZoneOne is an international advertising and design agency specializing in combining digital media, traditional media, creative strategies and great design to create integrated campaigns with outstanding results.

While we have clients around the globe, our head office is right here in Chicago and our award winning creative team is based in New Zealand! The team has worked with some of the biggest global brands like Unilever, BP, Crocs, and Hennessy, as well as a wide range of smaller local brands and everything in between.

TimeZoneOne has been doing great work with a number of Chicago’s iconic attractions and institutions including The Magnificent Mile, RTA Chicago, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Chicago’s Essex Inn. TimeZoneOne’s skills in this industry are a perfect fit with Daniel’s own tourism expertise.

What can TimeZoneOne do for your business?

TimeZoneOne offers a flexible portfolio of services so we can provide full agency support or work on special projects like a website overhaul, a product launch, or a big marketing campaign.

• Logo and brand identity development
• Hard hitting advertising campaigns
• Strategic marketing support and campaign development
• Packaging, label design & point of sale material
• Beautifully designed brochures & printed documents
• Down to earth website design and development
• Search engine marketing & organic search optimization
• Social media marketing & email marketing
• Web writing & blogging services.

What can Daniel Thomas do for your business?

Having over fourteen years of management experience in the tourism industry, Daniel has both improved and overhauled marketing, brand positioning and the overall customer journeys at a number of businesses, as well as significantly increasing visitor numbers and financial performance. In addition, he has had the opportunity to truly innovate during his time in the U.S. and create exciting new visitor experiences like Skating in the Sky at John Hancock Observatory, to give just one example.

Creative New Zealanders (or Kiwis, as we like to call ourselves) tend to become the world-class designers, copywriters, and strategists that are in demand globally. I look forward to leading the team at TimeZoneOne to come up with creative solutions in our global market place.

Daniel will be working with TimeZoneOne’s clients (new and existing) to come up with results-driven marketing strategies to increase their revenue and meet their strategic goals. He is fired up about driving the talented TimeZoneOne team to make this happen and deliver great results and true ROI for your business!

Want to know more?

If you’d like to find out more about what TimeZoneOne can do to help your business please email Daniel Thomas at daniel@timezoneone.com or call 312-363-7093.

If you’ve ever used the internet, you’ve dealt with spam. As a site owner, if you have any contact forms or allow comments on your site, you probably deal with spam all the time. The problem here is, if you have a website that attracts good bots (Search engine crawlers), you’re going to also get on the radar of the bad bots (spam bots).

A lot of sites use CAPTCHA or variations of it, and that is usually the first thing people ask for when they start to get spam. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) fields are those annoying fields on forms that ask you to decipher some garbled, warped text. Often, I fail to solve them, and I’m a human with a creative eye. It turns out I’m not alone. According to this study, three human users could only agree on words contained in the CAPTCHA image 71% of the time. Overall the success rates were only around 85%.

As well as being difficult for users. Spammers have CAPTCHA figured out, they use OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software and there are even humans assisting spammers by filling out CAPTCHAs for money.

So with humans being kept out 15% of the time and spammers being able to crack them with ease, it seems that all CAPTCHAs do is slow genuine users down and reduce registrations. You are also, in a way, making spam your users’ problem instead of your own.

CAPTCHA fields may prevent blind people accessing you site, which isn’t very nice. Some CAPTCHA services provide an audio option, but again, I think they prove far too difficult for human ears to decipher.

So, what’s the best way to deal with spam?

Here’s the kicker. There is NO full-proof way to block spam and most attempts to block spam will also block some genuine users. But that doesn’t mean should do nothing. There are a few simple tricks, that will not impact your users, that can be used to trip up most spam bots. This is by no means a comprehensive list of ALL the things you can do to block spam, and all of these solutions have their pros and cons, but these are the quick and easy things that can be done to block most spam without too much effort.

Form Validation.

Make sure that the form checks for valid data and that is validates server-side ads client-side scripts can be easily disabled. Look out for anything unexpected  being posted in your form fields. For example, numbers would never appear in a name and spammers will try to post links to websites, so look out for too many links or test such as ‘www’ or ‘http’ where is shouldn’t be.

Add a ‘honey-pot’ field. I’m not sure why it’s called a ‘honey-pot’, but what it is is a field that is hidden from human eyes, which hopefully the spam bot will still fill in. The trick here is that because it is hidden from view, humans will not see it and will not fill it in, so if it collects any data, it’s a safe bet that a spam bot has filled in the form. But, again, it’s not full-proof as there is a small chance that the browser’s Auto-fill function could fill it in for the user. So you need to make it something obscure, that hopefully the user has never filled in on a form before, but something that hopefully the spam bot will understand enough to make the mistake of filling in… and it probably isn’t long before spammers get wise to this.

Check for rogue values. If your form has seven fields and the server receives eight values, that’s a spam bot, not a very sophisticated one, but one less that’s going to bother you.

Confirmation Page.

Add a confirmation page after the initial submission. This is simply a page which asks the user to confirm their details. This is not disruptive to the user and will not be completed by most spam bots as they wouldn’t have been programmed with the expectation of this extra step, but if your site is popular, it won’t take them long to figure it out.

Can’t someone else do it?

Yes, you could use a service such as CloudFlare, which can help to prevent blacklisted IPs from ever accessing your site in the first place, or Askimet, which prevents spam comments or have users sign-in and comment using their account from a third-party service such as Facebook or Yahoo! Again, they have their limitations, but more often than not will do the trick perfectly.

Keep on top of it.

The number one thing you should do is keep on top of it.  If spam is getting through, block the IP and email addresses that are sending it and delete it immediately or the problem will just get worse.

This evening I attended the Chicago Chamber of Commerce 2012 Daniel H. Burnham Award dinner.

It was a great event and this year the award went to Ellen M. Costello, CEO of BMO Financial Corp.

During the event the Chamber welcomed The School of the Art Institute (SAIC) as a new member and unveiled the new logo for the Tri State Alliance.

The logo was created as part of a competition open to SAIC students.

These photos show the winning logo on the BIG screen – doesn’t it look great!

Congrats to the winner – a great addition to your book.

Richard

As part of our creative expression process we often produce a “brand expression” board when developing a visual platform for a brand.

The example above was for the Herman Miller company, Sonare Technologies.

The board is a powerful way to communicate how a brand will be expressed in words, form, colors and imagery.

Cruising the interwebulator today for inspiration I came across these damn fine works from Korean artist Yong Ho Ji, made from car tyres.

Matt

This week our client, AuCom Electronics, launched their new motor control microsite ecomotorcontrol.com.

This site is designed for people interpreting and applying European legislation on energy efficiency in electric motor driven systems. The information on the website is also relevant around the world, as European legislation has far reaching influence.

The fresh, clean design of the site visually reflects AuCom’s positioning as an energy efficient motor control solution provider in the European marketplace.

AuCom briefed us to create a clean, contemporary design with a simple intuitive navigation that reflects the user friendly simplicity of their well designed products.

The design features a graphic that mirrors the impeller design of the centrifugal pumps at the core of many pumping applications that use AuCom motor control.

The Chicago Public Library Foundation is an independent, nonprofit, educational organization dedicated to working with the City of Chicago to enrich the programs and collections of the Chicago
Public Library.

Each year the Foundation holds its annual awards, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award Dinner, to honor a writer who has made a significant contribution to literature.

The Foundation asked us to create the invitation, program and other material for these prestigious awards. We worked directly with the board of the Foundation and designed a suite of material that honored the rich heritage of the Chicago Public Library and reflected the esteem of the Carl Sandburg Literary Award Dinner.

If you drool over a well executed pie graph, your heart races a little when you see a spectacular bar graph or your idea of a good-night-in is to pour over a centerfold of infographics then this is the website for you www.informationisbeautiful.net.

Kim

This is just one of a series of stunning pieces of art by Northland artist Dean Buchanan. The piece is called “Mahurangi” and is classic Dean Buchanan – his expressionist interpretation of Mahurangi peninsula, Northland.

The tree vines look like snakes slithering up the Punga trees…and there is just something mesmerising about these artworks.

Nigel.

Its that time of year again when local artists and designers get to show us the best way to wear and model everything from t-bags, insulation pipe, and feathers to fiber optics and plastic bags. The annual wearable art extravaganza originally began in Nelson, New Zealand and has grown from strength to strength. It is hard to describe the award ceremony, a montage of theater, dance, color, movement and art, a theatrical spectacular.

Kim