ICM - Leeds Design Agency

Last week amongst the news of volcanic ash clouds bringing the country to a standstill I decided to join in with some of the fun on Twitter.

So for a joke I ‘Photoshop-ed’ a quick picture:

…with the line Ash starting to appear over Leeds

It was retweeted a few times. A retweet is when a Twitter user ‘re-broadcasts’ your message to their followers – thus broadening the audience.

In a few minutes the image had been viewed over 100 times.

Then it was retweeted by Suzi Perry from Channel Five’s Gadget Show. Suzi has over 40,000 followers – suddenly my image is being viewed (and retweeted) by thousands.

Then Paul Daniels retweeted Suzi’s retweet to his 25,000 followers. By the end of the day the image had been viewed nearly 10,000 times.

At the latest count we’re on over 14,000 views!

I’ve been doing quite a lot of motorway driving recently and there’s something that has me digging my fingernails into the steering wheel in frustration every time. Thought I’d share it to get encouragement that it’s not only me…

I’m not sure whether it’s the bad use (or misuse) of punctuation or the disregard for the brand but it makes me wince every time I see one of the illuminated motorway messages that read ‘Think don’t drive tired’ or ‘Think take a break’. Surely with all of those little lights someone could make an exclamation mark so it reads ‘Think! Don’t drive tired’ thus preserving the Think! Road Safety brand and making the sentence actually make sense?! It would make me a much happier motorway driver.

Whilst I’m on, I actually saw one the other day that read ‘Don’t hog the middle lane’. This upset the linguist in me as I’m sure it would cause confusion – is there not a better verb to use than ‘to hog’? Perhaps not, but I’m sure we could do something about that exclamation mark.

We have a winner!

Congratulations go to Tracy from Skill Sells Consultants who was drawn first from the hat of Easter Egg Hunt winners.

We had plenty of entries so have decided to draw some egg-stra runners-up prizes – if you are one of the ‘c’lucky few, congratulations! A prize will be on its way.

Many thanks to everyone that took part, keep an eye out for more features coming soon.