A short set of interesting stuff from the interwebs.
I want one. Like. Now.
I’m a sucker for diagrams. Like these. I understand things better through visual representation – even nonsensical stuff like these. Hehehe.
Shooting the serifs has never looked this glamorous.
To kern or not to kern.
VCR
You used to have all the answers
And you, you still have them too
And we, we live half in the daytime
And we, we live half at night
Watch things on vcrs
With me and talk about big love
I think we’re superstars
You say you think we are the best thing
And you, you just know
You just do
I wanna find myself by the sea
In anothers company
By the sea
I wanna walk out to the pier
I’m gonna dive and have no fear
Cos you, you just know
You just do
Watch things on vcrs
With me and talk about big love
I think we’re superstars
You say you think we are the best thing
And you, you just know
You just do
A quick write up of this film discovery. :
/about/
Breathless (French: À bout de souffle; literally “at breath’s end”) is a 1960 film directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
Godard’s first feature-length film is among the inaugural films of the French New Wave. It derived from a scenario by fellow New Wave director, François Truffaut, and the film was released the year after Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Together the three films brought international acclaim to the nouvelle vague. At the time, Breathless attracted much attention for its bold visual style and the innovative editing use of jump cuts.
The walls were impregnated by a chocful of oriental goods, full of red , chinese flavour.
Brilliant video. The video is overflowing with fun. It’s so … free spirited..
You know it’s hard, babe (Make up your mind)
Come on, darling ( Don’t let me down)
You make me feel lost
Like I’m some kind of
Country boy in Chinatown
I thoroughly loved vietnam. I forgot to post about it, but it’s a fantastic place. I am definitely visiting Saigon again.
When I was a kid, I generally had no idea how sneaky advertising has crept up to the daily grind of the household. My earliest memory of an ad was the jolibee commercial in the 80’s; featuring a little girl who got left behind by her parents, looking for her doll named “Jennifer”. The scene ends with a warm bag of a Jolibee meal to assuage her fears, her parents give her a hug, and that was that. There was the frilly comfort of the 80s hair, the warmth of the horrible fashion mistakes that we took refuge on. And yes, the family featured on the ad was aspirational – the kid lived in a mansion, the car that pulled over the drive way was a box type mercedes. The ad was very emotive, and yes, the ad agency Jimeno Basic were very effective in eliciting brand recall. Especially with that little girls heart broken face. Their brand messaging has changed over the years, shifting from the elitist / aspirational ideals to a mass market approach, mimicking globalization giant Mcdonalds. There was always a jolibee jingle that followed through to cap things off.
We come from a non-advertising/ non-designer family. My great grand father apparently was an australian chemist who introduced soap to the pithy islands. My grandmother was a strong market woman, who was driven into a cinderella story when she fell in love with a man above her social stature. My father was, like my grandpa, a real estate enthusiast, motivated by the shiny feeling of new business ventures under his sleeve. We have lots of aunts and uncles sprinkled around america; before we know it, i’ve started to realize that the side of the family is the most exotic to date – half portugese nephews and nieces, half hawaiian kids, half whatever kids. I don’t even want to constrain them with labels any more. They simply… just … are.. interesting folks.
my mother, on the other hand, came from a string of doctors and nurses. they had the whole spanish thing going on – an intrusive belief in superior aura. They’ve had a long list of maids, helpers, maids designated to do very focused household tasks. My grand mother slathered on lipstick and thick wads of powder. She had high voices and worldly artifacts in their home, and a long list of colorful drama suited to daytime television. My uncles and aunts were a diverse bunch -nurses, an army man, a fertilizer specialist, a veterinarian – with their host of issues and quirks. Dare i say this, but i’ve always felt that the spaces in between us has grown larger over the years.
I’ve always had the impression that the hispanic in me was always concerned with putting up facades, saving one’s own grace; bereft of sincerity. Or, in other words, it was manufactured sincerity. Or maybe this was the filipino hispanic way. or maybe it was just my family.
Putting these cultural mores aside, i think it’s clear by now, that nobody really took the field of advertising that seriously. It was not something that was discussed. By the mere fact that it was closely associated with the arts (by people who can’t delineate the difference between arts and design) it was something that was dismissed with unruly fervor. A lot of countries have done this in the 90s / 2000’s – but I fought through some sort of awakening when I decided to abandon Export Management and trade it in to be an arts major.
I never thought I’d end up in advertising. Really. I took odd clubs in highschool writing and drawing for the school newspaper; my dreams were to become a lawyer or an artist somehow, living by the beach… and most of my exposure of what we deemed as art was limited to library books and cd covers. I remember looking at the nirvana (in utero) cd cover, as well as the oasis cover (definitely maybe) and thought “wow, that’s really rad. I wonder what this is called?!” – then somebody blurted out the magic words, that it was graphic design. And of course, the whole discussion becomes a bit more convoluted from thereon forward, realizing that graphic design plays a role in this well orchestrated magic called advertising. To me there was nothing more brilliant than seeing a piece of artwork – a poster, a cd cover, a starbucks napkin, a tea box – that solicited feelings.
Yes, I think that’s it. That’s what endears me about advertising: The ability to solicit feelings.
In fact, what’s so much more surprising about this discussion is that the facts back it up. The most effective advertising campains success [] are generally based on those which have minimal or NO rational content at all.
You think after all these years of Darwins’ evolution we would have grown into mature, rational human beings, but apparently not. We’re still the same, raw emotive human beings – with a ton of changing media outlets that deliver messages, that illicit feelings and responses.
There’s been so much material out there that discuss these things, specifically the outrage caused by having too much of it – a situation called advertising overload []. There’s not much we can do about it as consumers – ads will forever be part of our lives. They pay the bills, afterall. They make things free and affordable by grasping our psyches, and hooking us in. But as advertisers, the tricky bit is to be a bit more clever than the rest, to penetrate lives into seamless experiences that deliver brand beliefs.
Essentially, we need ads that we therefore want to be part of, not opt out of.
This is an important point that we need to drill in our heads, considering people’s general distrust towards media -and media mimicking consumer behavior and vice versa. The medium and the message has been blurred, and there’s so much information and loss of sincerity along the way.
It’s the same high brow mentality that is driven by top down advertising models that come up with elusive ‘big ideas’ somehow magically trickling down to the side lines. It’s the same old story we get when we have award hungry people rallying for advertisements claiming all the glory for molding an argument.
It’s a troublesome, exhausting, nauseating environment when you see so many people trying to rub shoulders against people just to get what they want. ( I’d like to expound, but I think it’s best to leave these scenes up to the imagination)
Okay, so here’s the cheese. I stumbled upon the advertising by fate, and I would like to keep it that way. Advertising needs value-driven campaigns. We need to give back. We need to actualize our names as ‘creatives’ and think of people’s motivations, and goals.
Advertising won’t probably give me the same high experience in that jolibee commercial in the 80s. Potentially, it can be all that and more, it’s just up to us to stop bickering, and start thinking of the bigger picture. Nuances are important, but nothing is accomplished without a solid framework. this is how advertising could be relevant, if not, up to date with technology – because we offer that emotive sense of pleasure better than any one else.
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. – Kafka
And, oh, yes, it feels way too good when it’s done right.
I’m including this snippet from the book I’m currently reading : “Beatrice and Virgil” – by Yann Martel.
Its amazing to note that most of his characters are colourful, multi-dimensional images of the human condition.
VIRGIL : The smell of a ripe pear has the same effect on the mind as these aromatic spices. The mind is arrested, spellbound, and a thousand and one memories and associations are thrown up as the mind burrows deep to understand the allure of this beguiling smell — which it never comes to understand, by the way.
The full conversation after the cut. A great way to introduce the idea of a pear to an animal who’s never seen it :>
Read the rest of this entry »
I don’t have time for a full post today – so here’s some inspiring lyrics to boot. I’ve always loved the Sundays,they are wonderful.
people I know, places I go, make me feel tongue-tied
I can see how people look down, they’re on the inside
here’s where the story ends
people I see, weary of me showing my good side
I can see how people look down
I’m on the outside
here’s where the story ends
ooh here’s where the story endsit’s that little souvenir of a terrible year
which makes my eyes feel sore
oh I never should have said, the books that you read
were all I loved you for
it’s that little souvenir of a terrible year
which makes me wonder why
and it’s the memories of your shed that make me turn red
surprise, surprise, surprisecrazy I know, places I go
make me feel so tired
I can see how people look down
I’m on the outside
oh here’s where the story ends
ooh here’s where the story endsit’s that little souvenir of a terrible year
which makes my eyes feel sore
and who ever would’ve thought the books that you brought
were all I loved you for
oh the devil in me said, go down to the shed
I know where I belong
but the only thing I ever really wanted to say
was wrong, was wrong, was wrongit’s that little souvenir of a colourful year
which makes me smile inside
so I cynically, cynically say, the world is that way
surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise, surprise
here’s where the story ends
ooh here’s where the story ends
