Insight

Two parts documentary, two parts great advertising, one part creative mojo, and a splash of ego, shaken not stirred, served in a camelot glass.

Art&Copy is the creative world’s celebration of some of it’s most gifted professionals, their work, and a brief historical perspective from a few of the brilliant individuals that shaped modern advertising.

With internal teams and agency partners, communications are often on brand only from a technical standpoint. Fonts, palates, templates, and other systems can make work visually compliant, but a well orchestrated layout does not make a brand image.

Over the holiday season I choose to brush up on my Ogilvy. Reading “Ogilvy on Advertising”,”The King of Madison Avenue” and “Confessions of an Advertising Man”…again. For whatever reason, Ogilvy's prose and insights always seem to rekindle my passion for advertising. Below are a few of my favorite Ogilvy-isms.

With Blak 2 launching this month, I thought this would be a great time to write a little something about the similarities between product design and advertising. Much like creating a campaign, product design requires many of the same fundamentals, in particular consistency. In the case of the new Blak2 line, that was materials, the ebony, mincarta, gray pearl, leather wrap, and stainless steel were my brand guide, and the strategy was to create modern elegant designs that exuded an upscale image that were different from the competition.

Hog-isms /hȯg-ˈi-zəm - s/: A collection of recent tweets, online posts, random mumblings, little ditties.

Sally Hogshead created these wonderful sheets and has them posted on her blog, if your looking for a little extra creative mojo, or an entertaining read, have a download of issues 1 and 2. I would anticipate that there will be more to come soon, and whats not to love about lines like "Oh, caffeine, t'tis mental K-Y Jelly for the act of writing" or creating for that matter, and "Avoid fanny packs if only for their name".

In todays new digital landscape, you can connect, re-connect, comment, post, reply, friend, un-friend, become a fan of, and much, much more. So given the digital worlds capabilities and fairly open access, it’s safe to say that for most of the 15-45 year old demographic has some sort of digital presence. As we learn how to manage our digital lives, I think it’s important, and prudent to look at two aspects of personal content.

Prior to 6 months ago, I had a development team that worked through all the trials and tribulations that come with cross email client compatibility issues, A special thanks to those unsung heroes of the code. As XHTML Strict and CSS have finally become standard throughout the digital world, and depreciated tags are being phased out through attrition, at least by most savvy and informed web designers and developers, email clients and there software generating counterparts have taken no steps to develop in standardization for email client support as it pertains to HTML email.

I’m not a big fan of career oriented books, but the other day I had the opportunity to work with an outstanding creative director, who just happened author one one. I enjoyed working with Sally Hogshead enough to purchase her first book entitled “Radical Careering: 100 Truths to jumpstart your job, your career, and your life.” More than anything I was hoping that she found a way to channel her razor sharp wit into the book,  Suffice it to say she certainly did.

The 960 Grid System was created by this guy Nathan Smith. It’s a cool way to streamline web development workflow, and it’s based on a width of 960 pixels. The 960.gs was made for quick prototyping, and cutting down on development time for what I would coin an arduous process, but it’s also well suited for any web design project. In my opinion it gives you a solid foundation to start from, and in fact I used it for this site!

A buddy of mine called me yesterday and was asking me about a non-compete agreement that his employer was making mandatory after he had already worked for them for more than a year.