In September 2007, the world’s fourth biggest city was scrubbed of almost every type of outdoor advertising, even leaflets. It was all part of mayor Gilberto Kassab’s quest to eliminate visual clutter, making the city the focal point rather than coluorful, increasingly desperate marketing campaigns.
Outdoor advertising is so ubiquitous in almost every urban setting around the world, it’s difficult to walk down a street, take an escalator or sit on a bench without getting slapped in the face with one product or another. But the city of São Paulo, Brazil is like an advertising ghost town: all of its billboards stand oddly blank and empty.
“The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution..pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution,” said Kassab.
The results are astounding: gone are the 50-foot lingerie ads and oversized neon signs a la Times Square. In their place are strange vacancies, gaping holes… space. Suddenly, the architecture and natural scenery come into sharp focus.
While advertisers weren’t too happy about the law – $8 million in fines were levied against those who dawdled in taking ads down, and Clear Channel launched an unsuccessful campaign to raise support for putting them back up – the citizens clearly approve. Surveys found that at least 70% are happy with the change.
photos and videos can be found over at http://weburbanist.com/2010/03/06/clean-city-sao-paulo-scrubbed-of-outdoor-ads/ where the original article was spotted
It appears that Microsoft is as happy as anyone to see the death of IE6.
At the browser’s “funeral” held yesterday by a web design company in Denver, organisers received a bouquet of flowers from the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. The flowers were accompanied by a letter of condolence, saying “Thanks for the good times, IE6. See you all @ MIX, where we’ll show a little piece of IE heaven. Internet Explorer Team at Microsoft.”
It’s nice to see Microsoft has a sense of humour about the funeral, but it also reveals that Microsoft is about as sick of IE6 as web designers are.
It’s not hard to see why. Although IE6 is still their product, it’s positively archaic compared to the browsers that the IE team have released in the past couple of years. While IE7 and IE8 aren’t the best browsers on the market, they’re at least able to render unicode without crashing. IE8 in particular (especially when paired with Google Frame) is a legitimate competitor to Safari 4, Firefox 3.6 and Chrome.
Despite their hard work, neither browser has a commanding lead over IE6 in market share. IE7 and IE8 each have between 20% and 25% market share, the same amount as IE6 does.
The IE team’s note does reveal an interesting bit of information. They talk about revealing a “little piece of IE heaven at MIX” which suggests that they’re going to be showing off IE9 at the conference, which is less than a week away.
The IE team is no doubt tired of patching up the broken old machine that is IE6 at the expense of focusing on IE7, IE8 and IE9, but they have no choice in the short term. Even though Google no longer supports the browser, there are still too many business systems based off of IE6 for the browser to die right away. Indeed, Microsoft has said they plan to support the browser until at least the planned 2014 end of support for XP SP3. Here’s hoping that day comes quickly.
@iA about 25 times better than the current iteration, seems like some decisions they make are based on a coin toss. I like the column logic3 days, 20 hours ago
RT @iA: iA’s 2006 Facebook Designs, Redesigned http://is.gd/9YoSb [new iA blog post]3 days, 20 hours ago
