...and there are nearly 150 speakers for DLD (Digital. Life.Design), which seems like the European equivalent of TED (Technology. Entertainment. Design). They even have similar logos. I'll report back when I finish. It's a serious list with everyone from Jimmy Wales to Jonathan Harris to John Naisbitt to Reid Hoffman, Aaron Koblin, Al Seckel, Hubert Burda, Jason Kilar, Andrew Robertson, David Kirkpatrick and Reinhold Messner - and even another guy who has reached both poles - seriously... let me check, Obama may be doing this one...
Just a note that the Catholic church seems to have no involvement in helping the victims in Haiti. Why? Or why not? Haitians are primarily of the Voodou religion. Funny how Jesus takes care of his own, but not others. As a young Catholic kid, I remember being told that if you weren't Catholic, you would go to hell. Seems they will let you go there all on you're own if you don't go to their church. Makes us all wonder.
Aww hell. I was going to take a week off and do some real work when the Conan Obrien story popped up last week. For those of you, outside the US, you may not give a #`%&, so let me explain. For years the Tonight Show has been an institution on NBC, the National Broadcasting Corporation in the US. After Steve Allen, Jack Parr, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, the Tonight Show replaced it's nightly host with the spritely and reddenhaired Conan Obrien, a man who had performed the requisite amount of indentured servitude to the network with a late night show at 12:05. And when the time came to reward him, and the American viewers with his own spot following the news, they did. And then fucked him 7 months later. It seems that this time they had saddled the new host of the network's previously unrivaled post news show, with the unsightly experience of getting the old guy, Leno, right before the news?
WTF happened? Ratings took a nose-dive for Tonight. Why? Because, you idiots, you gave the viewers the chocolate they wanted right before the news, and then when the news was over, they simply went to sleep. Local stations around the country revolted. Hold on, said the unhappy husband to his network wife of the moment, "I used to get my BJ at 10:35 but now I get it at 9:35 so I should stay up for what? - Screw that! It's time for a cigarette and I'm history!"
Whaah waahh. Noodle-dick takes over.
And so Conan has spared no expense in sticking it to NBC in his nightly monologue and taking about $40 million with him on his exit. I love it! Screw you? No screw them. He deserves it, if not a bit more. Tiger Woods' wife will probably do better and it's only because Conan didn't shag anybody in the deal. In fact, his network shagged him.
Part I in a II part Series: For Part II click here.
Please take a few minutes with this video. (Pause the podcast in the sidebar first) This is Kseniya Simonova a Ukrainian artist who works in a sand painting technique using a large light box and a pre-recorded soundtrack - but what's interesting, or what I found interesting here, is not the technique particularly but how she is able to stimulate emotion and visual learning throughout the eight minute film. Look how the audience reacts to her work as she paints. Their vocalizations. Understand how you went into the piece and how you forgot your logic and your bearings about two minutes in - because you didn't know what was going to happen next. That's what happens with visual communication through media. It engages our suspension of disbelief. It takes fantasy and makes it part of our reality for the time being. Because reactions to visual stimuli are part of our natural intelligence, not something we've learned so much as something we've acquired - More nature vs. nuture in a visual sense. Alphabets and organized aural communication are learned and nurtured later - but nobody needs to tell us what the meaning of 'scary bear' is or how to cry or scream at the sight of it. That's natural, at any age - as is your reaction to Keseniya's hand painted story. That's our visual learning gene kicking in. So when are the social networking sites we all use going to start taking advantage of this innate human sense we have and are actually yearning to use, the same as we use everyday in real life? And why are they largely ignoring it in what they all trumpet as their "attention to user experience"? Have they forgotten that our eyes can be used for so much more than reading - and that it's a whole lot more than me just having a Star Wars skin as the background to my homepage? Or are they just at a stage where it's a natural progression to go there next. The latter is where I think we are now. .
That's Hugh MacLeod from his book, Ignore Everybody. Last year Hugh managed to hit both the Amazon and Wall Street Journal Top Ten Lists for business books with a book of what? Well, cartoons for at least 1/2 of it, and smart ideas about creativity for the second half. And do you think anyone in New York was looking for a business book with cartoons in it before Hugh? Well, of course not, but he hit a nerve that had probably been long under-tapped in that his book managed to combine both words and pictures in a way that spawned new ideas - and a valuable following of readers and social participants as well.
You see, Hugh's book isn't just a book, it's more just the tip of an iceberg of a philosophy and a business that includes active participation in his blog and his web community of "Crazy Deranged Fools"- many of whom buy art and wine and other things that are part of Hugh's total product mix. I've known Hugh for twenty years nowand I can tell you, he has never been able to work in just words or pictures alone - he has always required both. And I think a great many of us are the same way. It's just that the Internet, or at least the social networks have not found the value in addressing us that way yet. Now we want our crayons back. We want to be able to communicate in the way that is most natural to us. We want our communication and indeed our networking to be well, easier, more comforting.
This whole train of thought for this post started for me weeks ago and it has occupied a number of A4 sheets of discarded printer paper of which I use to keep errant notes for blog posts although many of the ideas have been drawn from my life in communications and percolating for years. This iteration began by seeing Mark Pincas on The Charlie Rose Show, followed by Director, Tim Burton discussing a retrospective of his artwork at MoMA in New York. Mark Pincas is the founder of Xynga games and for those who don't know, that is the company responsible for the Mafia Wars and FarmVille games, most popularly seen and played on Facebook. But that was not what interested me, nor the supposed 15 billion dollar market in virtual games of which he said 1-2% of the players actually pay for. What interested me, is that these are primarily 'visual' concepts, as is online Poker - and I couldn't think of very much that was visually driven about the primary social networks I have been involved in. I'll get back to this idea a bit later because I think I know why.
So I needed to take a look again and see what these networks were missing. (For those who will wonder why I haven't included Second Life in this comparison consider this: When the US, Japan, most of Europe and China open embassies on SL, I'll consider them part of the same market. Until then, their level of suspension of disbelief is just a boatload higher than most people are willing to go for a real social network. You wanna hire my Avatar? I didn't think so. But apparently you can sleep with it. More of a pure game, albeit a social game but way far out of reality's scope here both in concept and excecution.)On the left side of this page, you'll see screenshots of my Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter and Friendster accounts. And on the right side, you'll see the leadpage shots of the website from probably the most awarded advertising agency in Germany, Jung von Matt. Notice any difference? I thought you might.
Starting with Facebook, it has always perplexed me why the thing needs to look so boring. Blue, like Windows classic blue. Icky. Sure, you can run around the program and get special 'skins' from third party suppliers, but as I understand, they either have a short shelf-life, as Facebook keeps changing their codes, or only work for your computer screen whilst everyone else sees the same boring blue screen they have always seen - so your skin change is not communication at all, just some king's new clothing for you while everyone else gets to see you naked - as usual. And all the other third-party apps? Most of them run as stand alone things and don't integrate into your workflow in the system. Oh, they'll send you a ton of crap later but visually they don't play nice with your homepage and require you to gotto 'apps' and activate them. Clumsy, I think. Much like the way they handle groups. Why don't I get a cool little audio/visual ding-dong when someone adds something to my group (the ones I moderate)? Could be insightful.
Moving along to LinkedIn and Xing (I categorize these together becausethey are both 'business' networking sites), we get - well, surprise - more blue or teal and green in Xing's case, just a slight rotation of the colour wheel. Now here we mean business and it's pretty obvious from both sites lack of personal colour choice that we shant be messing with business by painting it like a Grateful Dead album cover or god forbid Daft Punk or some sort of other electronica rot like that. No siree. In fact, a quick Google for LinkedIn skins or Xing skins gives you well, nothxing. And neither site offers anything in the way of helping yourself - so forget it. If you don't want to work for IBM, go away. Big Blue rules here as well.
But how much sense does that make when the agency on the right handles work for Mercedes, Nikon and Deutsche Post? Is the post office cooler than a business social networking site? Maybe. But it needs to be remembered that business takes many forms and many shapes and colours as well. Just think about all the logos and companies you already know about and how different they all are. Companies all have their own language of visual communication - and even Jung von Matt knows that. The work they do for their clients doesn't look at all like the leadpages on their website. That's just their way of representing themselves in this particular instance. And that's how it should be. Visual communication, as opposed to verbal or written communication, is like the thousands of characters in the Chinese alphabet compared to the 26 characters in the Roman alphabet or 24 in Korean. It's a world of pictures out there to the Asians and those quicker to realize and capitalize on that will be further in their user community's minds than the next guy. With Twitter, Xing and Friendster on the rise, Facebook is looking like the next guy, and already blocked in China.
Next up Twitter. Need I say more than 140 characters? By restricting our BS, Twitter has allowed us to create 140 character novels, post pictures and even have clever little skins and widgets that personalize and communicate along with all the terse verse we can compose. But we get to do it with a wee bit of style in keeping with their wee bit of philosophy. Fair enough.
And finally, Friendster. Never heard of Friendster? Well 100 million other people have and a lot of those people are Chinese. Compared to 90 million on Twitter, 55 million on LinkedIn and a growing but not quite there yet 8 million or so on Xing, Friendster is on the cutting edge of visual communication in social networking, but that really is not saying so much. The site was relaunched recently with intensified visual themes to more widely appeal to an Asian audience. They feature a ton of custom skins and decorations for your own pages - and like MySpace, everyone gets to see them. I've spoken before of how living in Asia can make the web a third world country when moving back to the west because the sheer activity, not to mention rocket ship bandwidth and speed in Korea and other fast ramping Asian markets, but so much because of the history and tradition of visual communication.
Remember, Chinese characters are pictures - not letters that mean sounds or syllables like other modern alphabets and whilst Korean 'Hangul' is a mathematical and phonetic construction, Korean newspapers still feature Chinese characters interspersed with their more modern (circa 1500s) alphabet because Koreans still know what a limited amount of Chinese characters mean and relate to them intrinsically. And since the Chinese invented paper and the Koreans preceded Gutenberg with movable type by 78 years in 1377 with Jikji(Which was originally individually cast Chinese Characters) these people know a thing or two about the written word in pictures - and getting it out. Think also of the Japanese fascination with Pokemon and it's later storm through a western kid's vernacular and you'll get where I'm going. Pictures speak louder than words. And mostly to the audience to which the social networks will be making all their money off of for the next ten or twenty years - unless holographic or 3D networking wipes it all out in 2 or 3 years from now ... Continued in the next post orclick here for Part II.
So what exactly does a Creative Director do? After seeing a television commercial Ihad done on national TV one day my father queried, "So you're not the actor, you didn't do the voice-over and you didn't shoot the film. What did you do?" I tried my best to explain to him that I had thought of the idea based on solving a business problem, but to him that didn't seem like much work, and that I had walked it all through the hundreds of people from the client and agency hierarchies to storyboard artists to producers, film crew, actors, music people, editors and - by then his attention had turned to other things. My dad is an engineer, and trying to explain the birthing of things like commercial artistic expression to an engineer can be, well, like trying to explain engineering to a commercial artist. And that seems like where a lot of the web gets its feet stuck these days. Technical people, business people, writers and designers don't exactly hang out in the same bar do they? Maybe only in Silicon Valley, Hollywood and Stanford they do - or at Nintendo in Redmond, Washington.
And so that's where I wanted to look today. At instances where the combination of logic and creativity, solved a problem and illuminated a whole new landscape that had maybe not been seen before. A landscape of behavioral, written and visual communication with the emphasis on visual. "Take a point, stretch it into a line, curl it into a circle, twist it into a sphere, and punch through the sphere." - Albert Einstein's visual attempt at realizing a fourth dimension. Recently, Mark Pincas of Zynga mused that we were only 10% of the way into the digital revolution - about the same percentage of brain power Einstein thought most of us were using. I think they both just may have been correct.
At The Richards Group in Dallas Texas, we all learned about the giants in the communications business through a Wall Street Journal series that profiled the tops in the business called Creative Leaders. These were Creative Directors who significantly impacted the business of communications. That's why WSJ was profiling them. As a punk art director, I had to retouch Stan Richards' photo for the full-page spread at lunch one day, uhh, with an Xacto knife, trimming down his earlobes. Ha! I have had the good fortune to have worked directly withseven of the entire series of less than 90 - you do the math - including, Ron Anderson (CD at Bozell), Gabe Massimi, (CD at Earle Palmer Brown, D.C.)Cheryl Berman, Ted Bell and Rick Fizdale(Cheryl ran McDonald's, Ted was President and hired me, and Rick was our CEO at Burnett), Stan(The Richards Group is now the world's largest Independent advertising agency.) and Bill Westbrook(Bill was CD at Earle Palmer Brown. He would go on to be CD at Fallon, and I would see him later at the McDonald's worldwide convention in New Orleans before starting my own company in Korea.) The only person I think WSJ missed was Michael Conrad, our global CD at Burnett and founder of Michael Conrad and Leo Burnett in Frankfurt(Michael sent me to Korea in 95). The actual WSJ ads were different in reality than you see here in that each ad featured a rather large portrait of the subject and much smaller copy. But during my time in Dallas, I was influenced, not only by Stan but by a host of other luminaries in the profession including Don Sibley, Rex Peteet, Woody Pirtle and Fred Woodward. All wonderful designers and Creative Directors.
And so it is with Fred and his contribution to media and the visual arts that I look at the business that he described as being so much more of an art than a science - but realize that it is, in the end, a business. In Dallas in the mid-80s Fred worked as the CD for 'D' magazine. the city monthly. Then for Texas Monthly and eventually for Rolling Stone (He is currently CD at GQ). Rolling Stone was an icon for us. The image of an unruly child, finally grown up, but still unruly. Each month, or every two weeks in Stone's case, Fred would shine a light on a world which was just fleeting by. In art, in pictures, in designs designed to leave an indelible stamp on our psyche as the hours ticked by. Fred duly documented and heralded the little moments that made our lives worthwhile. Someone close to me said recently, "But David, you've done the most in your career, you've made the top", but I can tell you, when you have the images that Fred gave us every couple of weeks, you just sit and wait for more - and try to do more. And that is one thing that social media lacks today. Ownership. Who can tell me today, what the Tweets meant yesterday? Who can give me a look and feeling into what's going to be happening in two weeks, or a month? I believe, only imagery and creative direction can. Creative direction of timeless magnitude. The design of a sociological physicist with the power to stop the hands of time, and tell us all what it means.And who am I to predict the future of social media? Well, I'm not sure I want to predict it as much as I'd like to give it some direction.
How is it that magazines like Vanity Fair and GQ have circulations of only just a million or so, yet they have Creative Directors and 4 of the top 5 social networks, with up to hundreds of millions of members don't? Aren't the social networks really the magazines of our time - all be they with user generated content? What seems to be missing in social media management today is a sense of really looking at their members as readers as well. Consumers of a communicative product. The same as people consume magazines or TV. I want someone to stop the Twitter, to pause my Facebook and give me an idea why I've LinkedIn to Xing for the next round of battle. I want to stop, if only for a second, to revel in the majesty of just one moment - a single Tweet. Even if it is not my moment. Just so I can have some idea of what is going on. And that can be done, in pictures.
Korean artist, Paik Nam Jun, famous for sculptures with 100 TV sets each playing rapid-fire video, coined the term "Information Super Highway" in the 1970s. His idea was that media was becoming so plentiful and so fragmented that soon people would just not absorb anything after awhile. After a while, it would all just be high-speed wallpaper. And that's where I feel the social networks may be headed. Without packaging, reforming and refining some of what's going on I fear the social networks are doing both themselves and their readers a disservice. For all the information they get in, couldn't they give something back and get something in return again? I sense it's very possible.
With the coding from a certain set of parameters of member input data, keyed to corresponding visuals such as women, men, sports, music, etc. Facebook could essentially, with art they already have, spit back a film not unlike the Paik Nam June piece above. Interesting? It very well could be, and entirely user generated and constantly updating. A running documentary that is never twice the same and constantly changing.A visual document of what is happening. Yes, in the world of bits and bites it will be subject to algorithms and matrices that will try to underlie and monetize what it is, but I can live with that, for with just one simple picture, or a whole shitload of them, it could all make sense and send the bean counters home another day to figure out just how we turned commerce into art and back to commerce again.
Visual stimulican also be used to gather psychographic and behavioral data to match a service's demographic data thereby giving advertisers and recruiting firms a much more interesting picture of the people they are really talking to.
The business of traditional publishing, as well as televised media is being steamrolled by the business of instant gratification, but in instant gratification we forget to stop, smell the roses and take stock of what is really important and what really communicates. Pictures do that for us and can give us valuable feedback in return. If these industries, both waxing and waning could work together, we just might see the dawn of an era we all can be happy we lived to see. Click. And make a few bucks in the making. Social media is the chronicle of our time, but without a stronger attention to our visual world may just be selling itself short by just talking the talk. Pictures, editing, smart design and timeless creative direction should be part of the conversation too.
"Disregard all the the nasty things I say to you, when I am mad", she said. I began to understand that all the things she said when she was happy, meant the same"- Travis
"Let's see, do I need the regular one or the BIO one?" The BIO one cost a Euro more and it's a little smaller. But oh the nutritional value and my financial ability to keep those bad corporate farm chemicals out of my system make it worth it, doesn't it?
Bollocks. Or so says Michael Spector in his new book, 'Denialism, How irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet and threatens our lives'. Spector is a respected New Yorker writer and takes on big pharma, big farm-a and a host of other big Washington lobbyists in stating his thesis that big corporate interest is screwing our planet and our people over somehow.
That said, reviewer Tom Philpot takes Spector to task for his premise and basically says that he points the pistol but doesn't even fire a shot at the interests he purports to be taking aim at.
Answer just four simple questions and find out exactly what type you are. Click on any style above to take the quiz. Make sure to use the password "character"and your name. No email required. Are you my type? I hope so.
"I had no idea. Thank you Mr. Woods. Thank you. After a year of no comedy with Obama, YOU have made it all possible again. Thank you, Tiger. Thank you Buddha! Thank you Chinese. Thank you universe! I hated 2009." - Travis
...and there are nearly 150 speakers for DLD (Digital. Life. Design), which seems like the European equivalent of TED (Technology. Entertainment. Design). They even have similar logos. I'll report back when I finish. It's a serious list with everyone from Jimmy Wales to Jonathan Harris to John Naisbitt to Reid Hoffman, Aaron Koblin, Al Seckel, Hubert Burda, Jason Kilar, Andrew Robertson, David 
Kirkpatrick and Reinhold Messner - and even another guy who has reached both poles - seriously... let me check, Obama may be doing this one...
