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$8.95 | VOL 25, NO 4 | OCTOBER | 2010 [ CaNada’s VisuaL COmmuNiCaTiONs magaziNE ] 0 3 56698 85420 04 A LITTLE BIT OF EVERYTHING the photography and illustration awards

Applied Arts - Marcela Huerta

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3rd year Communication Design student, Marcela Huerta's submission to the Applied Arts Competition

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$8.95 | VOL 25, NO 4 | OCTOBER | 2010 [ CaNada’s VisuaL COmmuNiCaTiONs magaziNE ] 0 356698 85420

04

V25 #04

a little bit of everythingthe photography and illustration awards

contentseditorial features portfolio special section

Client SideAlain Leduc

10

Kevin Brooker

Raring to Go

44

Shooting the Twilight Zone

Philip Jarmain

47

Design Deconstruction

Hans Kleefeld

16

Kevin Brooker

Illusion of Movement

50

Designer John Larigakis and Photographer

Ian Willms

Young Blood

54

Global Persuasion

Chris Daniels

42

Outer Limits: Look in Wonder

69

Applied Arts

Student Awards

60

Simon Duhamel

Career in Motion

57

WYS Isn’t WYG

Rod McDonald

14

Design Rant

Barry Quinn

20

Missing WordsDoug Dolan

22

Design Unlimited

Pamela Young

30

Web WatchRyan Wolman & Keith Prestwich

26

Why RFPs Should RIP

24

Designing the Future

Robert L. Peters, FGDC

34

GDC Scholarship

Awards

36

RGD Student Awards

38

ABC40

E

Peter Giffen, editor

here

To see the some fine examples of this new creative thinking in action, turn to our Student Awards, starting on p.105.

Each year when we run the winners of our Student Awards, it’s natural to want to look ahead. Reviewing

the huge volume of advertising, graphic de-sign, interactive, video, animation, photogra-phy and illustration entries sent from across Canada and the United States, and from as far away as Beirut, one begins to detect the shape of the industry in years to come.

To help our distinguished judging panel get the best view of emerging talent this year, we decided to let them concentrate on spe-cific areas of expertise. In the past, all judg-es would judge all the entries, which could make for a daunting task, given the rising vol-ume of submissions. So for the 2010 Applied Arts Student Awzards, the advertising judges took care of ads and photography, the design professionals looked after their field and illus-tration, and the interactive judges reviewed the interactive work and loaned a helping hand to advertising.

For his part, judge Colin James, associate partner creative at Grip Limited, in Toronto, felt that “the work ranged from extremely polished and intelligent to conceptually weak and poorly executed. Some of the video-based work really impressed me—students pushing the animation quality to very high levels. Some great exploration of style and techniques in those categories.” While find-ing much of the advertising work “quite clev-er,” James was less impressed by the Website submissions. “Schools seem to have a gen-eralist approach to teaching bits of all the disciplines (design, writing, programming, animation) and the work shows it,” he said. “I think that with interactive work, in particu-lar, the production is so complex and time-consuming that it would benefit from having

small teams of students [from different dis-ciplines] work on single Websites together.” James concluded: “There were some real standout projects from super-talented indi-viduals. The very best students are already better than at least half the creatives working in the industry.”

In Victoria, B.C., judge Darren Warner, of dwarner6.com, thought, “The photography series were very strong, so I judged them as if they were ‘professional work’ versus ‘student work.’” As far as advertising, he explains, “it’s not always good enough to hope your work ‘sells itself.’ With a little panache an idea can be elevated in competition. The video pre-sentations of several campaign ideas really helped showcase the thought and creativ-ity that went in. Of course a mediocre idea is still mediocre no matter how much flash you dress it up with.”

Joanne Beauregard, CD of Sudler & Hen-nessey, in Montreal, was “left with the impres-sion that many of the ad assignments were for low-probability, low-profitability/high-impact advertisers, such as the WWF. It would be a far better measure of their maturity and creativity to give them assignments closer to what could be called ‘real life’—the kind of projects agencies require to pay the bills.”She added: “On the whole, how well prepared the students are for the working life will depend more on their own qualities, like tenacity, stamina and drive, rather than talent alone…. And then again, how many of us were really prepared for the working life?”

The idea of fresh talent and enthusiasm creating a new future is also raised in a cou-ple of ways in the issue’s regular content. In his extended essay, “Designing the Future” (p.24), Robert L. Peters, principle of Circle Design in Winnipeg, argues that the design-ers with long-term vision, who embrace

globalism and deploy sustainable practices, will play a key role in creating a blueprint for a better tomorrow.

“Design shapes culture and it influences societal values,” writes Peters. “Designers act variously as surrogate dreamers, initia-tors, inseminators, creators of desire, propa-gators and propagandists. Never has there been a greater need for our design profes-sions to dig deep, to exercise whole-brain (lateral) thinking skills, to understand chan-nels of influence and patterns of intercon-nectivity, to join peer networks, to collabo-rate with other experts and to leverage the multi-perspective advantages of teamwork.”

Writing a guest column, “The Next Van-guard” (p.14), Barry Quinn, executive cre-ative director, brand design at Juniper Park in Toronto, feels that the new crop of graduat-ing visual communications students will ride the flux of changing technology and culture to transform the industry. The importance of design will shift from creating artifacts to de-veloping ideas that “must be able to morph to accommodate different media, operating systems, devices, environments, cultures, etc…. Design thinking will become more important than design doing. As technology makes the act of creation easier and the base level of aesthetics higher, the effectiveness of items will be measured not by how they look but how they work. The design process and the designer’s mind will be the part that can’t be replicated.”

thE futurEstarts 8

While designers are excited about having their favourite fonts online, they have to realize that bitmaps can ruin the

look of the letters they love.

The year 2010 will undoubtedly be remembered as the year designers

finally got to use their favourite typefaces on the Web. More impor-

tantly they will know that anyone who visits their site will also see the

same typefaces. Good typography on screen has at times seemed an

elusive goal and the use of ‘real’ typefaces is a big step in the right

direction. Up to now designers really only had two choices when it

came to type online. They could use one of the ‘Web safe’ fonts, such

as Georgia or Verdana, that come with most operating systems, or

they could convert the type to outline and treat it as a graphic image.

Now at last designers can render html text in almost any typeface with

Web fonts that don’t need to be installed on the viewer’s computer. Of

course the underlying assumption is that things are going to be better

now that we are no longer limited to a few default web-safe fonts.

Now I’m as excited as anyone, and, as someone who actually has

fonts that may benefit from this emerging new market, I’m hardly a

disinterested party. But I can’t help but wonder just what people think

is going to happen when all these typefaces hit their screens.

We’ve been adapting old designs to new technologies from day

one. Gutenberg adapted the German black letter of the scribes to

make his famous 42-line Bible type. A little later punch-cutters such as

Nicolas Jenson adapted the Carolingian miniscule (lowercase) to har-

monize with the Roman capital letters to create the serif typefaces

we’re still reading today. But it didn’t take very long before those early

punch-cutters realized that letters carved in metal had quite different

qualities than letters written with a broad-edged pen. The type cutters

soon stopped trying to duplicate the written letterforms of the scribes

and began to develop their own forms that were truer to the material

they used—metal. When in the mid-20th century those same metal

typefaces had to be adapted to phototypesetting, the first manufac-

turers used their old metal patterns to create the new photo fonts.

But, just like the early punch-cutters, they could see that letters made

by flashing light through film onto photographic paper behaved dif-

ferently than letters printed from a piece of metal pressed into paper.

Once again we’re dealing with a new tech-

nology, only this one is radically different from

the previous ones. Like our predecessors we

also began by simply recreating our existing

font libraries. Then the development of the

PostScript language in the early 1980s made it

a little easier to create computer fonts because

now we could emulate traditional drawing

techniques. But that still left one major differ-

ence between the previous technologies and

the new digital one. Designers could draw

letters as they always had but they had to be

rendered as jagged, pixellized bitmaps on-

screen.

With the previous technologies, what you

drew was what you got. In the digital world, if

the bitmaps don’t work it really doesn’t matter

how good your drawings are. That’s why

when Matthew Carter designed Verdana and

Georgia he reversed the usual design order.

He reasoned that if the bitmaps are that im-

portant then they should govern the design,

so he drew them first and then ‘wrapped’ the

outline around them. He must have been on to

something because Verdana and Georgia are

still among the few typefaces that really work

on-screen.

The world of type design hasn’t changed as

much as people think it has, in fact most of us

are still designing typefaces for print. But once

we can see those typefaces on screen I don’t

think it will be very long before we realize that

most of them don’t really work that well. That’s

when we’ll start to see typefaces that will be

designed for the new technology—typefaces

with the bitmaps designed first.

So by all means enjoy the new Web fonts,

but I suggest you resist the temptation to fall

in love with any of these typefaces—because

there’s a good chance your favourite typeface

hasn’t been designed yet.

wys wyg

rod mcdonald

14isn’t

relationship to community, the physical environment and a “sense of place” is not well understood. It seems we may be “driving beyond the beam of our headlights” as we rush headlong into an increasingly unknowable future.

An example of our increasing abstraction is vertical specializa-tion—in ever-narrower terms of reference—a phenomenon affecting all professions, including graphic design. Sadly this tends to bring with it an erosion of the broader “whole-brain” thinking our species has enjoyed from strategists, visionaries and luminaries in the past, as well as the wisdom and holistic perspectives that “general practi-tioners” have traditionally brought to the table. Technology may have (arguably) made us stronger and faster, but it has not made us wiser.

More than half of the world’s top 100 economies are now corpora-tions, as opposed to nations. Ninety-nine of the top 100 companies are headquartered in industrialized nations. Of the nearly 70,000 transnational corporations now operating worldwide, more than three-quarters are based in North America, Europe and Japan. Although the majority of these highly successful corporations enjoy identities, brands, marketing tools, communications and information systems developed by talented designers, there is a growing debate within the worldwide design community about the dual (and often conflicting) role that the profession plays in both creating wealth and serving society through the sharing of such wealth and the nurturing of culture.

A decade ago, Naomi Klein described a growing backlash against unbridled consumerism in her widely read book, No Logo. “The cor-porate hunger to homogenize our communities and monopolize public expression is creating a wave of public resistance,” she wrote, documenting the reclaiming of public spaces and the revolt against corporate power. Many empathized with Klein’s attack on “the brand bullies,” and with Joel Balkan’s depiction (in his book and film The Corporation) of corporations as “soulless leviathans—uncaring, im-personal and immoral,” that are “using branding to create unique and attractive personalities for themselves.” It’s hard to dismiss the almost daily reports of small-town wars against “big-box retailers” (Wal-Mart, et al.), culture jamming, brand busting, and the growth of “hacktivism” and “digilantes,” as an ever-more informed populace

joins the fight of “citizenship vs. consumerism.” Not a new topic, really. Victor Papanek predict-ed the “Coca-colonization” and “Disneyfica-tion” of our entire planet a full generation ago.

Globalization has been defined as the ever-more-rapid process by which corporations move their money, factories, products and brands around the planet in search of cheap labour, raw materials and governments willing to ignore consumer, worker and environmental protection laws. Largely unfet-tered by ethical or moral considerations, global-ization tends to acquire and exploit the earth’s re-sources for private gain, concentrate and central-ize decision-making power (beyond the reach of the majority of people and democratic processes), create dependency and impose demands of stan-dardization or homogenization of almost every-thing on everybody.

Globalism stands in dramatic contrast to global-ization, taking the viewpoint that all people share a single fragile planet (Marshall McLuhan’s “global village,” or what Buckminster Fuller referred to as “spaceship earth”) that requires careful treat-ment and mutual respect by all concerned in order to survive and thrive. The concept of “Global Commons” is now used to describe the ozone layer, all land and oceans, and the earth’s rich genetic and cultural diversity. Like all ethical beliefs, global-ism requires active practice in the day-to-day lives of the broadest possible constituency, with a view to fostering understanding, sharing resources on the basis of sustainability and equity, and coming together for mutual aid in times of need.

Everywhere in our shrinking world we can witness increased homogenization, erosion of in-digenous culture, the emergence of non-places (uniform airports, generic shopping malls), and the

corporatism vs. the commons

globalism bests globalization

futurefor the

author

illustration

Robert L. Peters, FGDCAndres Guzman

35

designing

we live in uncertain times of tumultu-

ous political, social, ecological and economic instability. We’re told that

nearly 50 per cent of global wealth has been destroyed by the “global financial

crisis” within the past two years alone. Media reports of potential health pan-

demics trump the “normal” front-page news of the latest terror-ist attacks, counterattacks and “unnatural” disasters seemingly triggered by a rapidly warming planet. Information overload, an overwhelming pace of change, threatened eco-systems, and staggering social imbalances threaten our individual sense of purpose, place and well-being. Around the globe, wealth, health, knowledge and technological progress have never been shared equally—yet the awareness of these gaps between “haves” and “have-nots,” along with a growing discernment of the underly-ing causes of these global inequities, have never been more apparent.

Massive data storage capabilities now outstrip our human ability to access meaningful information and distill knowledge: We are drowning in data. Social scientists inform us that the typical “white-collar worker” now encounters more than one million words per week and the average urban citizen of the (so-called) “developed” world has more than 16,000 “brand en-counters” every day (if you sleep eight hours per day, that means you are subjected to about 1,000 brand impressions per hour). In addition, human “targets” are subject to ever more invasive and coercive advertising—in schools, hospitals, doctors’ offices, movie theatres, airport lounges, scenic lookouts, washrooms, elevators, on the Internet, mobile phones, fruit, public garbage cans, on bus wraps and via e-mail. Of the 200 billion e-mails sent every day, an estimated 90 per cent are spam.

Are we headed for a merciless state of total brand and adver-tising saturation? Will we even know if and when we’ve become overwhelmed? The communications revolution of the past decades has redefined traditional notions of time and space, just as global trade and finance have dissolved international borders. Comprehension of how these rapid social and technological changes (particularly “virtualization”) influence our fundamental

Designers with long-term vision, who

embrace globalism and deploy sustainable

practices, will play a key role in creating a blueprint

for a better tomorrow.

In this vein, I would encourage all designers to use cre-ativity, voice and communication skills to make a difference. We can choose to deploy our powerful talents and propa-ganda tools to further understanding and build empathy, to nurture tolerance, to resolve conflict, to build respect for diversity and “the other,” to expose injustice, defuse violence, promote peace, break down divisive barriers, counteract patriarchies, oppose hegemonic empires, alle-viate despair, and repudiate fanaticism and fundamental-ism of every kind. We have the power to expose the root causes of inequity, fear, despair and rage (the breeding grounds for terrorism). We can visualize long-term so-lutions, and we can use our unique mix of analytical and generative abilities to summon a sustainable response to looming challenges. We can promote harmony, raise the bar for civilization and civility, and above all, advance the characteristics that matter in making us truly “human” beings. Isn’t that exciting?

an increasingly vital role in empowering better decision-making, creating economic success, shaping communities and forming culture. De-signers today have real power. As such, we also bear considerable responsibility for how things are consumed and how change is deployed.

It remains then for designers everywhere to envision worldwide solutions, to create inte-grative synergies and to give form and life to universally equitable ideas. (While this may seem utopian, I envision designers as the ones questioning the status quo, re-examining the practices of past decades to homogenize, mo-nopolize and dominate markets, and initiating change toward lifestyles lived in a more holistic, inclusive, sensitive, eclectic, empowering and sustainable manner.)

Need is the father of thought. I would like to think that designing and dreaming have trav-elled in lockstep since our species began to walk upright. In response to need and with nascent, ascendant dreams in their heads, de-signers have since earliest times given shape to the tools, environments, messages and experi-ences that define human existence.

Graphic design is finally coming of age. Born in the last century of mother Art and father Commerce (and therefore named “commercial art” in its infancy), graphic design has finally de-veloped a sense of its own identity, along with an understanding of its role and responsibilities relative to society. No longer content with being the whipping boy of marketing, graphic design has evolved into a true profession and has adopted all that comes with professionalism—best practice models, codes of ethics, certifi-cation standards and considered criticism. As the developed world has evolved from smoke-stacks to information-based societies and now an “age of ideas,” the role of design has moved rapidly into the forefront of market economies.

Graphic design ignites passion, identifies, informs, clarifies, inspires and enables com-munication in our interconnected, interdepen-dent, real-time world. Design shapes culture and it influences societal values. Designers act variously as surrogate dreamers, initiators, in-seminators, creators of desire, propagators and propagandists. Never has there been a greater need for our design professions to dig deep, to exercise whole-brain (lateral) thinking skills, to understand channels of influence and patterns

advancement of what some theorists are calling “serial monotony.” Globalization threatens identity, the very cornerstone of culture, and the key to our understanding of “self.” Culture encompasses language, traditions, beliefs, morals, laws, social behaviour and the art of a community—understanding and protecting its inherent in-tegrity is imperative in avoiding identity crisis and rootlessness.

This shrinking world (with widened opportunities for designers in all disciplines) calls for extended vision, a broadened understanding of “the other” and an increased respect for our essential differenc-es. Aware of the advancing threat of monoculture, can the world’s designers help conserve and revive those things that make human culture distinct and unique? Is there still time to avoid losing our sense of who we are, where we’ve come from, where we belong and why these distinctions are so important?

Designers, more than most others, are in a position to actually cel-ebrate societal differences, to embrace the vernacular and to help avoid the unhappy melding of unique cultures into a bland global stew. In the face of globalization’s monolithic pressures to conform, I believe that designers with long-term vision, who embrace global-ism and deploy sustainable practices, can truly create blueprints for a better future by becoming champions of the unique things that dignify human beings, that make our civilizations meaningful and that make contemporary life worth living.

We know that in an age of information and ideas, communi-cation and experience design have incredible strength to mold societal values and to influence thinking—essentially, they are the new currency in today’s virtual world. As a result, designers play

It remains then for

designers everywhere

to envision worldwide

solutions, to create

integrative synergies

and to give form and

life to universally

equitable ideas.

of interconnectivity, to join peer networks, to collab-orate with other experts and to leverage the multi-perspective advantages of teamwork.

Today is the tomorrow that our species dreamed of yesterday. Today is also the past we’ll remember in the future—perhaps with nostalgia, perhaps with remorse. Although “design” shapes most of our modern environments, inputs and experience, the design professions are really only beginning to un-derstand the significant role we play in forming the world around us (consistent with the truism that the meaning of history is rarely apparent to those who shape it). A cautionary note for those of us living in the “developed” world is that over the past few generations we have become disconnected and separated from nature—for the first time in human history we are living by clock and calendar rather than by sun and season.

We live in shared and increasingly interwoven stories. The Maori say, “We walk backwards into the future,” recognizing that footprints we leave behind can actually inform forward navigation and future progress. Listening to the narratives of others helps pave paths to better understanding. Knowing our own past (and comparing our paths with those of others) allows us to celebrate achievements, learn from human foibles, redress omissions (often visible only through the lens of history) and correct our course.

Today, seeing is believing. We’re told that 85 per cent of what we know nowadays is learned through our eyes. This means that as designers of visual language, we play a crucial role in society. The world needs us—and as information designers in an infor-mation age, we find ourselves in a position of con-siderable responsibility, whether we like it or not.

I have long been a believer in the value of synergism, the strength of camaraderie to bridge adversity, the vitality of collective processes, and the solidarity of common goals regarding design and our planet’s mutual future. I remain convinced that our pro-fession will continue to play a lead role in forming culture, influencing values and shaping the world. I know we can achieve more, be more effective and act more sustainably by sharing our ideas, giving voice to collective values and integrating synergies through our professional associations and as a part of the global design community. I have no doubt that we are capable of doing much more together than separately.

Robert L. Peters, FGDC, is a graphic designer and the founding principal of Circle, a design consultancy based in Winnipeg. He is a former president of the Icograda, a foreign feature correspondent for Communication Arts magazine, author of the book Worldwide Identity (Rockport), and a Fellow of the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC). For the past 28 years, Peters has lived in a low-energy passive solar house that he designed and built in the woods of eastern Manitoba. ([email protected])

design gives form to dreams

seeing is believing

a call for collaboration

37

Canadian agencies span every kind of ownership permutation, from sole proprietors to part-nerships, to international conglomerates. But among them, Calgary’s Rare Method Interac-tive might have the rarest pedigree of all. Not only is this mid-sized, Calgary-based shop the country’s smallest publicly traded agency (TSX: RAM), it even has its own satellite office in the United States.

Not even its origins were commonplace. Rare Method emerged in 1997 under former president Roger Jewett, first as a shell company, then a tiny agency devoted to e-mail campaigns. But early on Jewett devised an unusual strategy: Take the company public quickly and grow by relentless acquisition, starting with numerous boutique shops in Calgary.

Then, three years ago, with Alberta business still soaring and revenues approaching $10 million, Rare Method went shopping for a ready-made U.S. footprint. Location-wise the agency focused on mid-tier cities like Phoenix, Denver and Las Vegas. In the end, it pounced on Blain Olsen White Gurr, a respected, tech-focused shop in Salt Lake City, Utah, whose clients include Telcordia Technologies, a remnant of the former U.S. Bell monopoly that now ranks as the world’s largest telecommunications software company. That cross-border merger yielded a number of success stories before it slammed into the 2008 recession. Total staff, once near 100, is currently at 38, two-thirds of whom work in the Calgary head office. Consider it a measure of the company’s elasticity that despite the tumult and having few employees who pre-date the 2007 merger (longtime president Tom Short left earlier this year, replaced by CEO Marty Park), Rare Method has managed to sustain continuity with a marketing culture in which interactive technolo-gies form the bedrock, but conventional media are never ignored in the overall package. “We like to think that clients come for the interactive, but stay for the creative strategy,” says Geoff Plewes, director of client services. Whereas the mix was once around 80/20, interac-tive to traditional, it’s now around 60/40. But as time goes by, that distinction only blurs. Noting that Rare Method’s tagline is Strategic Interactive Marketing, Plewes points out that, as everywhere in the changing industry, “Our clients are becoming less concerned about their media mix and more focused on results.”

And that’s something Rare Method feels uniquely equipped to de-liver. According to Calgary co-creative director David McKean, “Our culture definitely comes out of being a

45

author Kevin Brooker

Having survived the recession, Rare Method Interactive is poised to take off, with offices in Calgary and Utah, and a strong focus on

results-oriented work.

raringto go

Title of Piece-Year

“Companies are getting their marketing budgets back. We’re even growing our teams in both offices again, and that’s nice.” Add the fact that clients are more disposed than ever to think interactively, and Rare Method seems poised for a return to growth.

But new technologies alone won’t get the job done. “As everybody rushes to get interactive and social and all that stuff,”

Olsen reminds us, “we need to make sure that Rare Method is still being interesting and engaging.”

Web shop. We’re used to showing outcomes immediately, like clicks and site visits. Results come first, and that approach bleeds over to the entire agency. Having the coolest creative was never our first priority.”

Though Calgary remains distant from staple advertising fodder like national brands and product packaging, Rare Method services a diverse portfolio, including tourism, agriculture, oil and gas companies, and regional retail. Having been agency of record for firms as different as Bayer CropScience and Moxie’s Classic Grill, it has enjoyed particular success with a sexy rebranding of the latter, helping it morph from family diner to swank hangout for young sophisticates and go head-to-head with well-established chains, such as Earl’s and The Keg.

In Salt Lake City, chief creative officer Jeff Olsen feels the marriage has made both shops stronger. “Especially in this economy, it was great for us to bolster our interactive strengths. And merging was not as hard as you would think.” Though both offices retain a degree independence, he says, they are increasingly collaborative, espe-cially in strategy and business acquisition. “We do tons of Skype video-conferencing, and we shuttle a lot of work through a VPN.” Shuttling workers, alas, is not quite so straightforward, something Olsen says they’re learning to work around. Still, the two cities share much in common. “We’re both western towns, fairly young, former Winter Olympic hosts, both roll-up-your-sleeves places, and it’s the same time

zone,” he explains. Salt Lake City also comes with a built-in attraction for clients in the United States, especially easterners with mountain envy. With seven of America’s best ski resorts less than a half-hour from the airport, “there’s no shortage of executives who want to fly out for a meeting.”

On the creative side, reports David McKean, “Americans really do bring their unique voice to the table. We recently did some work on a Banff account and they nailed it with a tagline we would never have come up with: ‘Banff, the world’s finest national park.’”

Another bright spot: The economies of both cities seemt to be re-bounding. “We’re definitely seeing a resurgence,” says new CEO Park.

Kevin Brooker is an Applied Arts Magazine senior writer, based in Calgary ([email protected]).

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