Here’s a curious anecdote. I live in a town rich in brick walls of every age and description. I like photographing them (I wrote a post about this a while ago). I put several of these photographs on my Flickr site, should anyone want to look at photographs of brick walls for themselves.
Time moved on, and a web designer got in touch with me. He had been looking on Flickr for photographs of walls and just happened to like one of the ones that I had taken. Would it be possible to use it? Sure, I said, what for? For the website of a taxi firm, it turns out. His commission was to come up witha website for a taxi company that wanted to promote booking its vehicles through a phone app. I wondered to myself how a photograph of an ancient brick wall and pavement could be used to denote taxis, but I’m not a designer. I’m not a photographer either, but I said he was free to use the photograph and he promised to get back to me.
Time moved on again, and the website is ready. It’s for Streamline taxis of Headcorn in mid-Kent, and their booking site is called Scan, Click & Go (smart move to have secured that web address, certainly). And sure enough, there’s my photograph, greyed out, with coloured lines to demonstrate travel, a pink car, and a QR code for you to scan with your phone. I’m still not quite sure why you need to show a brick wall, when cars travel along roads, but what the heck. It certainly is different, and I think gets its point across.
But there’s more, because I hadn’t realised the full extent of the design plans. The photo, design and QR code appear not only on the website but on the taxis themselves. All across mid-Kent, Streamline taxis are heading out to deliver passengers with my photograph splashed across the side of the vehicles. It’s the oddest thing. I’ve been racking my brain for a moral to the tale, but maybe it’s just a case where curiosity is the story in itself. I took a photograph of a brick wall. I put it on the Internet. Now it’s on a taxi. Rum world.
Links:
- The web designer is Clever Little Fishes
- My photographs of walls and pavements are a set on my Flickr site