TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "advertising"
Over at Penny Arcade, they do a better job of than I did of responding to that LucasArts’ eulogy:
The cost of our games, including the 18 hour work days, the ruined relationships, and the isolation from friends and family, is incredibly high. Reporters joke with each other whenever we tour a studio and see the free coffee, the cafeteria, the movie theaters, and the showers; the nicer a corporate office looks, and the more features it offers employees, the less likely it is that you’ll ever leave the premises for things as mundane as a well-rounded personal life. That expensive coffee machine and climbing wall isn’t a free perk, it’s the payment for when you’re asked to skip that funeral or work through the weekend.
I’ve talked to too many people in this industry to wonder why so many of our games feel adolescent; many of the artists who make the games are given a job, they begin to live at the studio, the hours grow long, they cease to grow as human beings, and they’re stuck with the same influences, passions, and sense of humor they had as a teenager.
Emphasis mine. The very same could be said for advertising or any “creative” [shudder] agency.
(Source: amandalynferri, via parislemon)
Copycat Movie Posters
Nobody copies like Hollywood and advertising. Put them together? Things get even worse.
But before you get too upset, remember what these posters are for: they’re a kind of visual shorthand for genre. The fact that they all look alike is, to the marketing department, a feature, not a bug.
The first thing I learned as a librarian: you can judge a book by its cover, or at least its genre.
Big agencies seem to spend more time making PowerPoint slides than anything else. I think the current term of “rapid prototyping” is total agency bullshit. Big agencies wouldn’t know where to start with truly implementing an agile system that pumps out prototypes and lets them loose on the world warts and all. They are just not set up that way from a structural and emotional point of view. Software companies put out a release and say to people: “We know it’s not perfect, tell us the bugs and we’ll fix it.” No client is prepared to do that. They are all too scared of losing their jobs.
Filed under: advertising
Vonnegut’s “How to write with style”.
Series ran by International Paper and included in Spin, January 1986. Pages 20,21.Oooh, I’ve read transcriptions of this but never before seen the original.
Filed under: Vonnegut
Life’s A Pitch by Roger Mavity & Stephen Bayley
This book is more interesting than the cover would suggest. The first half (by Mavity) is a straightforward “follow these steps” approach to pitching and the second half (by Bayley) is a series of looser chapters on the nature of self-presentation, self-invention, etc. Lots of interesting stuff. I posted some of my notes/scribbles to give you an idea of the contents.
Suggested under the “Sell Yourself” heading of Mike Monteiro’s reading list in Design Is A Job.
Filed under: my reading year 2012
How HBO Made It Look Like Critics Liked ‘The Newsroom’ - Forbes
Salon’s Willa Paskin is quoted in the ad calling “The Newsroom” “captivating, riveting, rousing.” Here’s what she actually wrote: “The results are a captivating, riveting, rousing, condescending, smug, infuriating mixture, a potent potion that advertises itself as intelligence-enhancing but is actually just crazy-making.”
Welcome to the world of contextomy, or quoting out of context.
Movie studios do this all the time, and this is, essentially, how I make all of my art.
Blurbing = blackout poetry.
