Art Directors and Designers have been known to collect these for the covers alone, so you aesthetic geeks, rejoice: here is a timeline of all the Blue Note covers.

My favorite? Glad you asked. Must share Lee Morgan and the sidewinder which is both a great album and a fantastic cover, the usual for Blue Note then. ;)

Whole foods have stirred up controversy in Manhattan for having a sign outside featuring a sketch of Obama announcing deals on chicken. They obviously forgot the advertising rule that if has anything to do with chicken or watermelon, you can not have black people near it as that could be seen as a racist stereotype. This rule even applies to Australian KFC who used an Aussie fan ending up in the seating area of the West Indies fans in one of their ads, and he got out of that awkward situation by offering a bucket a chicken. The one thing the two opposing teams fans could agree on.

A Virginia Beach Pizza shop offers a 15% discount to any gun owner who either shows his weapon or concealed weapons permit. And here you were thinking that people poking guns in other peoples faces would get free pizza. That only happens in the movies.

All Around Pizza owner, Jay Laze started the offer after a Utah frozen yogurt shop made headlines earlier this month for also giving gun toters discounts.

“I thought it was a great idea and I was wondering why nobody here was doing it,” he says. “It should be happening all around the country.”

Hey kids, thank Nike Skourtis, Jesse Reed and Hamish Smyth for their efforts with virtual beers, social media shares and possible facebook pokes or something - because they put the New York City Transit Authority Graphic Standards manual designed by Unimark/Vignelli online in an easily pinnable, sharable and look-through-able form. For those not familiar with design manuals, this is why art directors sneer at you creative recruiters when you come with braindead input like "this might have been better with a different font*" while looking at a national telco campaign. The design manual, the design manual rules. Capiche?

* Typeface. Typeface you fool. How did you even get this job?

Writer Joe McCambley tells us to stop selling ads and do something useful. As the co-founder of the Wonderfactory and part of the team who created the worlds first banner ad he has some experience in the ever-evolving landscape of online advertising. (*coff* understatement *coff*).

Learning to help instead of sell

"Customer service is the killer app of the Web," Google's Eric Schmidt, then with Sun Microsystems, said way back in 1998. Brands such as Google, Zappos, Amazon, eBay, and others win because they ask "How can I help you?" instead of "What can I sell you?"

What happens if you team up Swiss and Brazilian creatives? They come up with Beertone the beer color reference guide, and then they hustle you for money so they can buy a lot of beer, make this brilliant thing happen. Of course they'll buy beer for the money, how else can they photograph and catalogue each bubbly hue of brew? This is scientific, each beertone page will look like this, have a photograph of the beer, the bottled and color Information, RGB, CMYK, Web, SRM ( that's the beer color scale). This is beergeekery on an epic level. Pre-order now and you'll even get a old school postcard from Switzerland mailed to you.

Gizmode reports that you'll get around 95 wears out of these magic jeans that can moisturize your legs with Aloe Vera, Olive extract or the "Smooth legs" version with caffeine, retinol, and algae extract that can help you fight cellulite. Brilliant! I predict they won't be able to keep these on the shelves. The jeans are due to be released in Wranglers "Denim Spa line", and will be available online at the end of the month. In the future, might we see tanning jeans, and (ow) waxing jeans?

When I first read it in the Daily Mail that Ronaldo was going to transfer to the UK as an advertising student, I thought someone was joking. It's not as if his own sports marketing agency 9ine which he has been running for the past two years, isn't doing quite well already.

But it can always do better, and we are all students in life. The Drum confirms the story that Ronaldo will be under the wing of Sir Martin Sorrel himself.

It's a new tactic by any means, we've seen it before where jobless adgrunts puts up billboards looking for work. Adam Pecatti "I spent my last £500 on this billboard" leads you to employadam.com. He wants a job in production or advertising. His website shows off what he's done so far, and his twitter account is getting mad retweets right now. Go on, give him a job, just don't ever let him take you out on a Karaoke night.

So you've made a mad dash to the high-street and found some wine / bath stuff / a book / a whatever that'll do for everyone on your list, and as you kick off your shoes at home you realize.. crud, you forgot the wrapping paper! No worries, crapping paper to the rescue, just download and print and you're set to go. There's even a clever little crapping paper generator at the bottom of the page for that extra special box of tea & maltesers you got aunt Sally. This has been an Johnny & Angus production.

Over at Digiday we have this article: How brands deal with legal, and it in there's quite possibly the worst advice ever given:

Brands want to move fast and be innovative, yet there are big hurdles to that, notably the fact that legal often gets involved too late in the game and doesn’t approve what a brand has created.
To avoid this hurdle, digital leaders at brands say it’s important to include legal from the very beginning of the campaign-planning process. The legal team should be at the brainstorming meetings so that no time is wasted getting approvals at the end.

It's about time! TV commercials re to be quieter, starting this Thursday at midnight, commercials will legally have to be within two decibels of the programming during which they air. HALELU-YEAHHHHH. Oh, wait, at what point of the programming are we measuring from? Because I tend to watch a lot of action films where the dialogue is practically whispered and the they nuke the Large Hadron Collider or something with an extremely loud BOUHM and anything two decibels above that will likely shatter my windows.

Oh goodie, TV guide has an answer to my query.

Oh hey, what do we have here - Warm wishes from Ad Land?
Adfreak points out : "'Warm Wishes From Ad Land' presents some choice anonymous comments left on ad blogs AgencySpy, Ads of the World and Campaign Brief. (None are from the Adland blog itself, or from AdFreak for that matter.) The potty-mouthed trolls spew syntactically daring slime of a frequently scatological nature in response to blog posts about new campaigns, executive hires and account moves. Deadpan recitations of the rants are accompanied by jolly seasonal graphics and a tinny version of 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas.'"

Marc Paskin who appeared on the show “Secret Millionaire,” paid $4,000 for a billboard that said: "All I want for Christmas is a Latina Girlfriend." According to fox news that billboard has already been defaced.

A day after the sign went up, someone ripped off Paskin’s email address. By the weekend, the whole billboard was apparently taken down by vandals.

Someone ripped off the email address alone first? Perhaps it was a lady that didn't want competition?

As they perceive it these side careers are independent from — and as important as — their status as reality-TV idols. As Ms. Polizzi put it: “I don’t care if I’m famous or not. I just want to have my brand.”

Invites to umptebillion holiday shindigs and nothing to wear? Wanna out-do that hipster kid and save puppies too? Fret not, Sweatertee.com offers six screen-printed proper "ugly" holiday sweater designs, and 100% of the proceeds —$22 for every shirt sold — goes directly to the APA. Ugly and nice. Get one with a faux knitted pattern of beer or Holiday Donkey Kong today.

Their prices might not be "Sofa King Low", like the Sofa King slogan claimed theirs were before the slogan got banned in 2005, and ended up on our top ten banned ads list in 2010. But the Sofa King Juicy Burger are determined to take on the sofa king cheeky name and have already caused a stir in Red Bank where their sofa king name has raised a few brows for being "odd". Not everyone are sofa king fast at picking up on the joke:

Whatever happened to the Christmas bonus? In L.A. it's been long gone.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (naively) asks Reddit for help in crowd sourcing a copyright bill. Keep in mind, this is the same site that birthed the notorious jailbait-photo-posting, racist-acting troll, Violentacrez.

Do you know which President who was said to drink Coca cola regularly? Can you name the St. Louis-based baseball team whose logo is a bird? Which candy is "the freshmaker"? What brand do choosy mothers choose? Can you fill in the blank here: "It's ____ or nothing"? Geek, meet your trivia-game the Logo Board Game. Yep.

Sharpsuits.net are making fab looking creative posters from bad creative advice they heard from clients. We all have our ways of dealing with it, some slam their heads repeatedly into their keyboards, others just crank up the creative output and make "we need to remove the babies ear", "Irish people can't read italics", and the ever present "Make it pop" look good. "They" you say, who is "they"? The idea was brought to you by Mark and Paddy. If they ever leave the office, y'all should buy them a pint.