I ripped the outer Advil label off of the industrial bottle we keep at the office and found this. I guess this is what happens when you don’t need all the warning labels, ingredients, bar codes, sales copy, random high-tech health imagery, legal, etc. All that you’re left with is 100% pure, not-from-concentrate brand. Even though the Advil logo is crap, I love this. And it reminds me of this.

I participated in Movember this year. Not much to tell, except that my beard grows in red, slow and itchy. This is probably where I should get introspective about the purpose of Movember, but I still can’t figure out what all this has to do with prostate cancer. I guess the lesson I learned is that some people just aren’t meant to have beards.

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Every year, the tee shirts for the Army Ten Miler get worse. They hold an annual contest for the shirt design, and as always, spec work leads to design like this:

Someone tell me what’s going on here. The flag appears to be bleeding or torn to shreds, and stars are positively pouring from it. The designer chose to put brick detail into the Washington Monument, but nothing else, creating a weird focal point. The skyline is way too dark to see the runner silhouettes against it. The stars on the banner are too complicated for printing on a apparel, and start to look like spinners. The banner itself doesn’t appear to be connected to the flaps behind it.

Now, I could ignore all of the poor design,  but the real problem here is that the concept is totally flawed. From the Army Ten Miler Fast Facts PDF: “the mission of the Army Ten-Miler is to promote the Army.” This is why it’s so weird that the soldiers on the tee shirt would be saluting the runners and the DC skyline. If anything, shouldn’t it be the other way around?

How many years of bad tee shirts am I going to have to endure before I finally give up and do spec work for the Army Ten Miler?

Every finisher gets a token at the end of the race. I actually like the token. It’s dignified and simple, and although the text is a little clunky, it’s a nice giveaway for finishers:

Unfortunately, the back looks like this:

On the other end of the spectrum, I was very pleased with what I saw at the race expo. MiO, a water flavor enhancer, had an fantastically interactive setup. They had an area where you could create signs for your fans to hold up, and then a photo booth to show it off (which you could send to your Twitter, Facebook or email):

The best part about the MiO booth was that if you checked in on FourSquare, you unlocked a special prize. We checked in and received special gift bags with all of the MiO flavors, as well as small cardboard speakers:

No, they don’t sound great. But as far as cool giveaways for doing next to nothing goes, they have won me over. I was shocked at how much MiO gave me for just checking in. I guess they assumed that I’m going to automatically Tweet my check in (I did) and that I have a lot of followers (I don’t). The speakers are MiO-branded but have a lot of white space for me to draw all over them, or as they like to call it, “make it yours.” Not bad, MiO.

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