Tiny Gigantic

Oh man. I’d love to see The Pillowig catch on and spread throughout our culture. I’d love to see people resting their heads on their desks, or on eachother’s shoulders, or sleeping comfortably wherever they happen to fall. Brilliant.

We’ve been asked a bunch of times lately what it is we actually do at Language in Common. And the truth is, it’s not an easy answer. We don’t have an elevator pitch, cuz we don’t believe in them, and up until very recently, we didn’t think that we had a typical type of project. Turns out, we do: we make things that are worth talking about (for our clients and our communities), and that reward the attention that people give them, right there in the moment that they’re giving it. We do this because we’re tired of messaging. We’re tired of having our attention bombarded with bullshit. We think advertising is evil: it’s utterly disrespectful of our attention. And in an age where city dwellers are subject to up to 5000 ad messages a day, attention is precious. So we try to make things and do things that respect that.

So my questions:
What do you spend your attention on?
What’s worth talking about out loud and in public?

Here’s the latest project from our friends at Altitude. Awesome and brilliant and go participate right now. And if it’s not obvious, this is the next part of the 1000 journals project. Buy the book here.

Here’s an awesome blog post all about the making of Damien Hirst’s newest piece, For the Love of God.

via Fecal Face

Last week, Axel and I were in a meeting, and someone there was trying to sell a brand story to the potential client. And after his spiel, when the client looked like he thought maybe a brand story was a good idea, Axel said this: “Basically, brand stories are things consultants sell so they can masturbate.”

Amen to that.

I promise this will be the last post celebrating the success of replate. So far the project’s been covered in the San Francisco Chronicle, on NBC television, and ABC television. Before that, it had had some minor traction in a bunch of blogs but it wasn’t until the brilliant Joanna Della Penna A.K.A Joanna Currier wrote about the project for Daily Candy that it really took off. The kind of publicity Joanna’s article brought the project is worth somewhere around 2 million bucks in advertising buys. So, um, Joanna, we owe you. Big. And everyone else, feel free to send her as much cash as you have on hand. Seriously, she’s worth it.

So here’s an opportunity to participate in one of our projects right now. In fact, we need you.

We’re using the phrase Fuck_________ as a background texture, and we need y’alls to help us fill in those blanks.
Here are some examples:

Fuck this internets
Fuck your trip to catalina island
Fuck your dirty floors
Fuck cantaloupes
Fuck the horse you rode in on, and the road it rode in on too
Fuck this fuckety fuckety fuck

You get the idea.

C’mon, it’ll be fun. Just leave ‘em in the comments field.

Yup, you’ve done put replate all over news again (scroll down to the second chunk). Thank you all for spreading the word.

Last Thursday night, Josh and I were in a cabin in Napa working late on the book for our graffiti project Written on the City.

As the night wore on, we began to talk about our progress as a studio, and about the status of all our projects. We started to think that we had gotten lazy, that we had come out strong and then failed to follow through in some way. We beat ourselves up pretty hard, especially about Replate, which launched really strong just a month ago and had recently started to go quiet. We thought this was because we hadn’t put more energy into it. We decided we had been using the word “patience” to mask what was really just laziness. Did I mention that we beat ourselves up pretty hard? It SUCKED.

And then when we got to the city on Friday morning, we had a message from NBC saying they wanted to do a segment on us and Replate. And on Sunday night, ABC and the Chronicle contacted us too.

So were we too hard on ourselves on Thursday night? Had we let impatience get the best of us? Probably.

So here’s something we’d like help thinking through: How do you decide whether it’s time to push or be patient? And when you’re not putting energy into something, how do you know if you’re being patient or just lazy?

So we’re looking for an intern. Someone who knows how to find cool stuff and how to make cool stuff and how have a damn good time doing it. Specifically, we’ve got two big things we’ll need your help with. The first will be to help us keep this here inspiration feed super dope on a daily basis. The other big thing is our graffiti book. We need all kinds of help with it, so we’ll talk about how to start when you get here. One other thing: it’ll be part of your job to have your own kick-ass ideas for new projects. Because if they’re good, we’ll make sure they get done.

Don’t send us your resumé. Send us a conversation starter: conversation at languageincommon dot com.

Holy shit on a stick! Replate made the local news! And guess what—we just finished an interview with the the SF Chronicle. It’s prolly gonna come out on Thurs, but we’ll let you know when that comes out fershuer. Woot!

and

THANK YOU for spreading the word! Obviously, we could not have done this without you. Good work hacking culture for the better. You make us proud.

and thanks to Jeff and Danielle at The Vega Project for posting this shizzle on YouTube.

In which you write a letter to the future you in hopes of it finding you in 5,10, 20 years. Pretty cool.

Once, when I was freelancing (okay, maybe more than once) a client wanted to pay me less than what they’d agreed to. We emailed civilly back and forth for a while. I sent my argument. They sent theirs. And around we went without doing much more than deepening our disrespect for each other.

Here’s the problem: Most have us have become so used to communicating by email that it’s become our default way of communicating. We send a message and then we wait. And if a response doesn’t come quickly we feel slighted, we pout, and we wait another day or two to send a follow up. It takes some energy and some patience to pick up the phone and actually direct a conversation. Sometimes, it even takes courage. But you’re much more likely to get what you want, when you want it, by having a real person-to-person conversation than by waiting passively for the other person to take the steps you’re sort of maybe hoping they’ll take.

So here’s the challenge for the rest of the month: pay attention to your electronic conversations. Note when you’re frustrated with the person on the other end. Take just a moment out of your routine to figure out why, and what you want to do about it. And then, don’t write back. Call instead. Because, really, shouldn’t you be the one in charge?

Ladies and gentlemen, replate has hit the big time.First, Daily Candy wrote an article about it, which ran this morning. And we just finished being interviewed for tonight’s NBC nightly news show! If you’re in SF, watch channel 3 at 6pm to see us wax poetic about the project.

And know this: The project never would have made it with out you. So thank you all for continuing to spread the word. You fucking rock.

jck & aa

Lawrence Yang makes awesome, beautiful, neato stuff.

Via PoppyTalk

Axel sez: “Yup, wowza-fricken-doodle-dandytron. That Klingatron sure can cut.”

Via Wooster Collective, of course.

I found this ad for Shell across the bottom of a spread in Wired Magazine (the two panels aren’t meant to be stacked as they are here, but instead side by side), and I had a strange reaction.

I love the headline. It provides a useful insight and attempts to lead culture in a good direction. Really good stuff.

But the style of the piece is super problematic. What’s up with all the flower-power and psychedelic bubble type? Why would you dress a smart, current, and vital idea in smelly Birkenstocks? If Shell really wants to help, they need to make ecological thinking mainstream, and that means this can’t be about hippie shit anymore. Hippies aren’t taken seriously by the mainstream.

Pretty much any design solution would have been better, so I won’t make too many recommendations, but look to bp to see much smarter design.

BUT

I do have a coupla questions for you: Do you think Shell is consciously sabotaging eco-thinking? Or is it unconscious? Do you have confidence that they are really trying, or are they just pretending to try?

I had an interesting conversation this weekend about the problem with small talk. Our impulse, upon first meeting someone, is to search for common ground. To find something, anything really, to avoid the uncomfortable silence:

“Oh, you’re from San Francisco too? What high school did you go to? Do you know….” And on and on in the search for familiarity. It’s an easy direction to take. But here’s the thing: this kind of conversation won’t teach you anything new. Since you already have a shared context with which to understand each other, there’s not much reason to really get to know one another on any sort of real personal level.

And often when someone gives you an answer you can’t relate to—say they’re from a place you’ve never been—we often smile and nod, and then ask what they do for a living. But most of us are interested in going where we’ve never been. And we’re interested in making new connections with people (or at least we claim we are). So why not use the opportunity to explore?

So here’s an experiment: next time you’re at a gathering with new people, focus your conversation on the most foreign aspects of the people you meet. Avoid getting yourself into conversations where you’ve got opportunity to say, “Me too.” Look for chances to ask, “Oh, really? What’s that like?”

For a while I was drawing old liquor store signs on brown paper shopping bags. I found ‘em this weekend while pretending to clean the house, and I thought maybe I should make something with them. Anyone got any suggestions?