Tiny Gigantic

April is coming to an end, and so is our tenure as guest editors for Coudal Partners. It was super fun to speak through their channel, and they were exceedingly gracious hosts. Thumbs up to them, and muchas grassy-ass.

However, there were a handful of links that, as of our last day, they opted not to publish, but you might like ‘em. Here they are:

If you don’t laugh at this video of a cheesey girl falling off a stripper pole, you might be a better person than me.

Josh was raised by artists, so the phrase “Art for Art’s sake” got thrown about quite a bit. This spit-art is art for art’s sake and it’s pretty damn cool.

Here’s a gorgeous awareness campaign against vehicle emissions.

Here’s a pretty neat map of where each Wal-Mart store gets its goods.

Mims’s “This is Why I’m Hot”: A Graphical Dissertation on America’s Number One Song. Pure awesomeness.

Happily, I never saw the Alien Vs. Predator movie. But if alien and predator just loved each other I’d have seen it for sure.

This weekend one of our loyal readers asked us this question: why don’t we show a portfolio ?

Actually, we do. You’re lookin at part of it. And then there’s our manifesto series, Written on the City, all the stuff on this here inspiration feed, among others. Of course, our reader didn’t mean this kind of portfolio. He meant the typical kind, the kind that shows all work we’ve done for clients in the past.

We mostly don’t show work we’ve done before because we don’t want to attract the same old work. We believe that a portfolio should show the kind of work we want to do, rather than the kind of work we’ve already done.

The typical portfolio isn’t used to start a conversation about the possibilities of a new mutually beneficial relationship. It’s used to prove to a client that you can do the kind of work they think they want, and to get them hire you. It sets up a buyer/seller relationship where the party with the money has the all power, and that doesn’t leave much room for real debate or collaboration. If someone sees an old brochure or website we did, and thinks, “Oh, I want something like that,” they’re not going to get anything different. It’ll be the same thing in a new color, which will do nothing to further our client’s cause.

We’re in the business of pushing ourselves and our clients to do new things that give help and hope. And our portfolio should show it.

It’s seventy degrees outside, and sunny, with very little wind. It’s play time…

Have a kick-ass weekend!

On Saturday night, I attended a party with my girlfriend’s extended family, some of whom I’d never met. I don’t have much problem talking to new people but still, starting conversation is hard. It’s hard because when you don’t know someone, you don’t know what you want to talk to them about, and when strangers use small talk to explore one another it actually becomes harder to really get to know one another.

Usually, it goes like this:

“So, what do you do?”

“Where are you from?”

“How do you know so-and-so?”

Translation: “I’m not trying to connect with you. I’m just trying to pass the time.”

And so you do the same, asking the same tired questions, barely listening to the pat answers, and scanning the room for someone more interesting. This is a great way to make your community smaller.

No doubt, becoming a better conversationalist takes time. It’s an ongoing practice, with good seasons and bad, and it’ll change as much as you do. Weening yourself away from small talk will certainly have its awkward moments, but if you’re conscious, those awkward moments will help you do it better the next time.

So in the spirit of diving deeper into this practice, Axel and I are declaring a moratorium on small talk for the month of May. We’re going to put a lot of intention into how we meet people, and we’re going to create a lot of conversation with others about how they approach meeting people. Wanna join in?

Leave us a comment letting us know what worked and what didn’t. And at the end of the month, we’ll talk about what we learned. Good luck!

This morning we found this ad in The Onion. And it seems like the Vertical Response marketing team figured that since their ad was gonna run in The Onion, they should be funny and irreverent. That was a good impulse. But here’s the problem:

For adults, merely saying “balls” isn’t really that funny. Unless you’re drunk, or in conference room. For this ad to be successful the joke would have to: 1) be a real joke [as in funny] and 2) have something to do with what their audience would rather be doing at work.

And you can be damn sure that no wants to fuck their hand in a cubicle. At least not during work hours.

Here’s a good New Yorker article on a beautiful emerging sport called parkour, which is the art of moving fluidly over any terrain.

Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever lies in his path—a vocabulary, that is, to be employed in finding one’s way among obstacles. Parkour goes over walls, not around them; it takes the stair rail, not the stairs.

Read the rest here.

Don’t miss this sweet VIDEO here.

Even though I’m over 30, I still pride myself on being able to make a mean and delicious condiment supper. Hell, if I had this collection, I’d eat like a king for years. You can sort by sauce or brand, and you can submit your own.

This weekend, when I asked my friend and trainer Alexis why she doesn’t have a big mirror in her dance and bodywork studio, I got a meaty response: “Dancers,” she said, “are often so concerned about looking like a human that they forget how to be one. Blech. It’s the main reason so few dancers are actually cool.”

I don’t know very many dancers, but I do think Alexis has expressed a general and useful sort of truth: your presence will be more appealing and your relationships will be stronger if you are authentic, and being authentic requires doing the hard work of becoming conscious enough to outgrow self consciousness. I won’t belabor this point because it’s pretty obvious. What’s worth talking about is Alexis’ no-mirrors thing. If you take the mirror as a metaphor for all the external feedback systems we use to get a read on ourselves, it goes pretty deep:

Your friends aren’t reflecting smiles back at you? Stop trying to make them smile. Relax. Get comfortable. If you’re lucky, you’ll relax enough to sport the first organically grown smile in the room.

Doing your strategy by focus group? Ask yourself why you don’t have the courage to design a strategy that teaches and leads (or at the very least anticipates) your market instead of merely following it.

Looking at your “competitors” for ideas on your next move? Don’t worry about what they are doing. Find your innovations by looking to your passions. Allow your business to expand beyond the category and peer-group pigeonholes you’ve put it in.

This is all easier said than done, of course. But definitely worth exploring.

I have a hunch that the mirror metaphor can be applied to more than the three instances above. Any ideas?

Yesterday Josh and I went back to school. We packed a lunch, complete with Capri Suns and note from Mom telling us we were her special boys. Actually, we’d been invited to be guests in Christopher Simmons‘ Graphic Design 2 class at CCA.

“Professor” Simmons had given them the raw text from our manifestos (Dear Bosses, How to Clean out Your Desk, and How to Be a Better Lover) and asked them to turn it into a designed piece. Yesterday was the review of their conceptual directions, and we played the role of (friendly) client. There were about 10 students in the class, and we were inspired to see the courage of their explorations. No one’s stuff looked like anyone else’s, which is more than you can say for most of the stuff coming out of design shops today. Thumbs up.

It was obvious they’d put in a lot of thinking already, so it was easy to have a useful conversation. But we think we could have been more clear, so we’re gonna give it another shot here:

Make sure each concept you show is actually different from the rest.
It often happens that a client will want to see a few different design directions. Yesterday a lot of students showed three directions—one real idea, and two watered-down variations of that idea. This won’t actually work when there’s money involved. The first problem is that you’re putting all your eggs in one basket, because three directions so similar will live and die together. The second problem is that the client may feel like they’re not getting their money’s worth. And the third, and most important, problem is that this kind of creative shortcut will erode your creativity in the long run.

Commit to the concept
There were some great ideas yesterday. But very few students took the ideas as far as they could go. Lots of students were compelled to find inspiration in other formats—manuals, boxes, gifts, official forms, letters, etc—and so they made their directions “like” those formats. This is a good, good thing. But we think it’s more powerful to take it all the way. So don’t make it “like a manual,” make a manual. Don’t make it “like a gift,” make a gift. Don’t make it “like a box,” make a box. Why fake it?

Make sure you know your concepts and can talk about them
Articulating ideas about something as subtle as communication is not easy, but it’s ridiculously important, precisely because the stuff is so damn subtle. While a concept is still just a concept, everyone is going to need help seeing what you see. And not just what you see, but why you see it that way. And not just why you see it that way, but why others should too. Here’s one last thought: if you can’t articulate your concept in a way that makes sense, that’s a big sign that maybe it doesn’t make sense.

I’ve got a friend who’s the new marketing director at a big downtown company. After his second week in the suit and tie, he called me sounding super-frustrated. Dude, he said, our creative department sucks. They have no vision, and they don’t want to make the changes I keep asking for. How do I get them to do what I want?

See the problem? My friend sees the creative department as nothing more than a tool, instead of a strategic partner. He thinks they’re a bunch of automatons who will write, design, and build what he tells them, and in doing so, all will be happy and bright. But the folks in the creative department are kept isolated in their little pod without any say about the communications they’re being asked to make. So they’ve begun not to care. And the work shows it.

Unfortunately, my friend’s problem is a common one. Marketing treats their in-house creative group as a vendor. And every single in-house creative team I’ve collaborated with has talked about having “clients.” They they call the people in their own companies “clients!” And they relate to them that way too, which is to say that they feel adversarial towards them, and suspicious of them, and dependent on them, and insecure around them. This, in case you hadn’t figured it out, is FUCKED UP.

There are two reasons you want to make sure your in-house creative teams (or at least the senior members of the teams) are part of the conversations that determine the future of your company. The first is that it’s good for the conversation, because, well, these people are likely very good at thinking. The second is that it’s good for the creative teams (and hence the work they produce), because they’ll really understand what they need to create.

So back to my buddy. Here’s what I told him: Invite them in. Forget the vendor/client model. Realize that these people are actually strategic partners and bring them in at the beginning of every single marketing project that you embark on. And don’t forget that partners need to drink a little whiskey together every now and again.

In thinking about negativity in brainstorms, I had an idea:

Negative reactions can be useful if they lead to new directions, new ideas, and good times. So what if—for your next project—you planned two brainstorms, one for negativity, and one for positivity. And plan them in the same week.

Start with the negative brain storm—for lack of a better term, we’ll call it a reverse brainstorm. Spend an hour coming up with as many bad ideas as possible, and then build on them, making them even worse. After a while, go around the room and spend some time explaining why these ideas don’t work. It should be easy, so get creative about your critiques, have fun shooting stuff down. Embrace your inner snark because while you’re articulating the obvious problems you’ll also be creating criteria for good ideas for everyone.

By the time you get to the brainstorm session, you’ll have exhausted the devil’s advocates, a bunch of bad ideas, and maybe even stumbled upon some good ones that you can build on in the positive brainstorm.

As my old writing teachers used to say: before you can write anything good, you’ll have to write shit first. Once you get the shit out, the good stuff will likely follow. So use the reverse brainstorm to get the shit out first. And then move on to the good stuff.

Vinchen, an artist who has contributed to our Written on the City project, now has this piece displayed at an Ohio Hilton, though they don’t know it.

The body copy reads:

For over 60 years, the Hilton name has been synonymous with elegance and class.

A tradition that continues today.

Via Wooster

A few weeks ago, Axel’s mom called him an “aging hippie.” And then Richard Oliver called us hippies. So we got to thinking about the values that the hippies espoused and how we use them to make life and work better. That, after all, is all the hippies really wanted. That, and good free drugs.

But there’s one thing we didn’t give much space to: the power of intention—the idea that thinking something is a powerful step in making it happen. Abso-fucking-lutely. Happily, Steve Pavlina is two years ahead of us. Here’s a taste:

You might assume that the cause of an effect would be a series of physical and mental actions leading up to that effect. Action-reaction. If your goal is to make dinner, then you might think the cause would be the series of preparation steps.

To an outside observer, that certainly appears to be the case. The scientific method would suggest that this is how things work, based on a purely objective observation.

However, within your own consciousness, you know that the series of action steps is not the real cause. The actions are themselves an effect, aren’t they?

What’s the real cause? The real cause is the decision you made to create that effect in the first place. That’s the moment you said to yourself, “Let it be” or “make it so.” At some point you decided to make dinner. That decision may have been subconscious, but it was still a decision. Without that decision the dinner would never manifest. That decision ultimately caused the whole series of actions and finally the manifestation of your dinner.

Steve, we hereby set the intention to one day thank you in person. Rock on.

They’re boring. They don’t spark conversation. They don’t ask questions worth answering. They most often sound like this: “the new logo we created for (client name here) uses powerful diagonal lines to symbolize (generic brand values here).” Fucking kill me.

Okay, okay: I’ll back up a little.

We’re in a business that deals with the messy goo of creativity, something that, all by itself, is hard enough to grow and manage without having to figure out how to sell it to someone else. But we do sell it. And so we need proof of its worth, something potential clients can look at to get a feel for what it is we do. Enter the case study: a rehashing of an old creative brief, a glorified description of old work, and some pretty pictures.

The problem with the case study is that it only shows what you have done. Showing old work will only bring more of the same. If a client sees something you did in, say 1999, and it matches the thing in their head that they think they want, you’re going to wind up replicating it. So it can’t be different. And different is what the client came to you for.

This why we rarely show our past client work (not to mention that none of our potential clients really wants to see some brochure we made for a company they don’t care about). We’d rather have a conversation that gets the potential client excited about the possibilities of newness, that shows them the depth of our thinking, that poses questions they’d like to have a hand in answering. Of course, it’s only certain kind of client with a certain amount of courage who signs on to work with us. And that’s good. It means we won’t be sentenced to do the same work over and over and over.

I know. Easier said than done. But, if you must cite past work, for god sakes, don’t put the emphasis on what you did (brand refresh, new logo in blue, bold website design) but rather on what you learned about communication that can help others.

So what should you show, if not past client work? One good option is to show your self-initiated projects. You do have some of those, right?

Georgia Russell makes gorgeous, gorgeous, books. More here.

Made by Andrea Galvani.

This is a picture I did not take of a prostitute in front of four men on a street corner at dawn, asking them a question with her hands out, to which the men replied in unison, like a choreographed dance troupe, by pulling the lining of their pockets inside-out to show they had no money.

This “photograph” is from Unphotographable, a text account of pictures missed. It’s a beautiful thing.

Oooh. These are coooooool. Handblown glass mushrooms that hold a cup of water and deliver it at the rootmass via a long spike. But that’s not all, folks! In true mushroom fashion, there’s another layer of work going on: These little guys have phosphorescent chips in the glass, so they soak up light all day and then glow in the dark. GIMME GIMME GIMME.

via notcot.org

p.s. look at the pic again: anyone else think the pairing of the mushrooms with the ferns makes perfect, cosmic sense?

To continue the conversation:

What if every brainstorm began with a meditation on impossibility, failure, stupidity, shame, etc? It might do wonders to get all that stuff over with before the brainstorming begins.

Yes! And here’s why: Idea generation sessions are often mistaken as idea selection sessions. There’s an expectation that part of the job of a brainstorm is to play the devil’s advocate, to make sure that nothing short of brilliance gets through to the execution phase. And as its much easier to write cheesy poetry about being sad, angry, or depressed, it’s also much easier to be negative and judgmental, than it is to find the worth in every idea. So ideas get killed in the moment they’re born. And that sucks, because:

1. If all ideas get shot down, participants will be much less likely to continue to contribute. And when nobody contributes, you get no new ideas.

2. Negativity is as contagious as positivity. If one person is bludgeoning every idea that gets floated, it gives others license to do the same. And again, you get no new ideas, only old dead ones.

The beauty of Axel’s buddy’s exercise is this: it sucks to wallow in the shit. It’s toxic. And you can only handle toxicity for so long. So it stands to reason, if you spend time exhausting all that negativity, letting the toxic stuff run its course, that by the time you get to the brainstorm you’ll want nothing more to be full of positivity, hope, and acceptance. And if you want to be it, you can.

Has anyone tried this or some other perhaps less formalized way of exhausting negativity? We’d love to know about it.