My ongoing quest to win a D&AD Yellow Pencil is looking up. Well, sort of. They just announced that from this year, projects selected to feature in the Annual, will all win a physical award. It’s not quite a pencil, but rather cute little slices from one. In fact, if your work is actually nominated for a pencil, you get a bigger slice.

So given that the Vodafone Music project I worked on was featured in-book in 2009, I wondered if I might be able to get one of these slices retrospectively. Using the power of Twitter I enquired, and it turns out that anyone featured in-book since 2000 can apply retrospectively for a pencil slice coaster award by emailing the D&AD at celebrate@dandad.org

So if you’ve had a close shave (pencil shaving awards would have been a great idea) with the D&AD this millennium, drop them an email and you could be entitled to a part-pencil.

Nice. Now I just have to work on getting my hands on a whole one…

I saw this picture in the paper at the weekend. It’s our new Prime Minister jogging at the G20 summit with the Spanish Prime Minister. Thing is, seeing as we are both rivals to host the 2018 World Cup, Mr Cameron has cheekily donned his England United, The World Invited T-shirt. The Spanish guy seems to be a bit annoyed. I was quite pleased.

Only just over two weeks left to make use of that slogan, as the decision will be announced on the 2nd December.

Fingers crossed…

The BBC are randomly asking today Do typefaces really matter?

It all stems from James Cameron’s controversial use of Papyrus in Avatar, before Bruno Maag dives in and aims a punch at Helvetica.

Still, I guess we should be glad Comic Sans didn’t turn up.

Incidentally, the article is worth checking out if you’re one of those people who is still unclear as to the difference between a font and a typeface…

This made me laugh. From The Independent’s Dave Brown.

Although, if Gordon Brown is toast, David Cameron is crackers.

(Maybe that makes Nick Clegg marmalade?)

International readers: If you don’t know what this is all about, it’s now known as ‘Bigotgate’

There’s a new Doctor Who logo. Some people don’t like it. I do.

It’s a hell of a lot better than the awful eye of Sauron London taxi logo we’ve had since the show came back…

In fact it’s closest really to the very first logo, from the William Hartnell era, let’s hope the Radiophonic Workshop theme tune comes back too…

…and if it’s possible look past the Photoshop lens flare and the MASSIVE letter W, it has a quite old fashioned quirky silhouette. I’m not convinced by the need for a TARDIS symbol, but hey. It looks like there’ll be a whole new dark and vintage feel to the new show’s identity in 2010.

Where were you when you heard Michael Jackson had died? It really doesn’t matter I’m afraid. Sorry.

We’re living in a time when information is more mobile than ever and things happen FAST even in your pocket. You don’t need to be there, you just need a hotspot. The video above shows the news breaking on Twitscoop, which tracks Twitter trends. It’s fascinating, this is how information behaves in real time, it’s alive.

All of the frantic information, rumour and then iPhone scrambles for valid news sources to verify the story, led to a massive spike in internet data usage. Twitter was groaning under the strain, think of the poor birdies trying to lift that massive King-of-Pop sized whale…

In fact Twitter became the star of the show, as in addition to the turmoil in Iran, Michael Jackson’s death was something which offered one of its first true tests, the world was really relying on it to find out what was happening. It’s no good Googling “Michael Jackson Cardiac Arrest” in the middle of the night when you suspect someone is surely pulling your leg, there’s no cached information to draw on. MJ hadn’t had the foresight to put out a press release or preschedule his multiple organ failure to coincide with the evening news (although Uri Geller seemed strangely available for comment). No, Twitter is the immediacy search engine™, the only way to find out what’s going on right now. No wonder so many important people are frightened of it.

And so maybe it’s fitting that Twitter also offers up the best tribute to Michael Jackson I’ve come across so far, the inspired Billie Tweets by 9Astronauts. I could try and explain but it’s easier if you just click this link and see it for yourself.

Amazing.

These really are fascinating times we’re living in.

Rest in peace Michael.