The lovely folks at helloyoucreatives held a Pumpkin Carve off.

(download)

Click here to download:

1980-s-british-rail-posters-czxukCHcrfdwBknlrGJt.zip (29.43 MB)

It's amazing how many people walked past this little lot, paying them no heed whatsoever. One chap who saw me taking these snaps, wondered if it were some kind of retro campaign.

Turns out that Richmond station's getting a spruce up and all the Adshells have been removed. Low and behold, behind them is a treasure trove of lost 80's era rail posters.

Personal faves are 'Catch the train and you've caught the plane' for Gatwick Express, 'Railcards available to Men of 60 and over', and the info-poster for 'Open & Shut on the Southern', there'll be a whole generation that take sliding doors totally for granted, but there was a time when it was important to inform people how to enter/exit these new trains!

Lovely.

ExtensionFM, to give it's full title rolled out a complete overhaul to it's Chrome based social music sharing service today, and what a beauty it is.

As a Chrome extension it came in handy now and again for playing embedded audio files across various sites, but that seemed like all it was good for. Now however, them team at http://ex.fm/ have revamped the extension into a full-fat audio tool, stuffed it full of social features, trending tunes, mixes, genres searches et al. Now as a Music Discovery Platform its ramped up to 11.

The design is clean, and the experience sweet. Fast in Chrome and really easy to move around.

There are a couple of issues though, like not being able to upload a custom background (as the browse button was not visible in Chrome), and, on the iPhone App (pretty tasty too), the LastFM integration did not work properly.

Other than that, it's getting some exhaustive testing here at wearesuburb, and we're loving the new roll-out.

Just need some friends now.

Lovely.

I get a lot of junk email. We all do.

In fact, I get so much of it now that I reckon it would take me a whole day just to go through and unsubscribe from almost everything. It's easily done, sign up for this, buy from here etc. Of the ton I get, I know I only ever look at three HTML emails.

I have to also confess, that as a digital agency, we help produce a fair amount of said emails for many of our clients and plenty of big household names.

We try our best to try and make them as engaging and as relevant as we can. We like to try and see if there are little touches we can add using some pretty cool tools. Sometimes we can, and sometimes we can't.

Yesterday, I received a brilliant email from Pizza Express, and the little touch that for me makes it brilliant, is my name written in the flour. Now that's dynamically done, and it's a brilliant idea. Simple, personal, engaging. It wouldn't have been the easiest of things to do technically (imagine the size of the list Pizza Express manages!), there would have been plenty of things to consider.

It of course goes without saying, that that email worked its magic, I'm all booked in to take the wife and kids at the weekend. I'm certainly not turning down a free drink (but hang on, it's not really free as it'll cost me a pretty penny feeding Les Famille), free drink is free drink though, right?

Pizza Express have up'd there game with their DM focus, working the discounts to help drive up sales, personal birthday emails, along with their very handy iPhone App (pay at your table directly from your phone, which I love), the overhaul of their restaurants, and the very cool flagship restaurant in Richmond, with it's red seated circular booths with iPod docks (reminding me of 50's US diners and Italian Trattorias). I sometimes wonder though, if there is a tipping point, at which the brand might start to suffer - thinking more Pizza Hut than Italian cool.

For now though, and by all accounts it's working, it's another example of keep it simple, make it personal, and it'll be a winner. And I won't be unsubscribing anytime soon.