whizdumb

Book cover designs wanted

That is one stinker of a book cover. 

Paul Isakson heard from the author who is looking for a little design love to rescue the cover.

As Paul writes:

Can you design a better book jacket/cover than this?

If so, Tara Hunt would love your help.

There really are no rules. Just take the words that are there and make the thing look better.

Post a link to your design in her Flickr comments for this image and she'll check them out.

If you don't have a blog, web site, Flickr account, etc. to post your design to, just create a drop for it and put that URL in the comments section.

Also, please spread the word to others if you can.

I didn't get a deadline from her, but I'm sure it's something that's needed sooner than later.

Any help you can give her is greatly appreciated.

That is one stinker of a book cover. 

Paul Isakson heard from the author who is looking for a little design love to rescue the cover.

As Paul writes:

Can you design a better book jacket/cover than this?

If so, Tara Hunt would love your help.

There really are no rules. Just take the words that are there and make the thing look better.

Post a link to your design in her Flickr comments for this image and she'll check them out.

If you don't have a blog, web site, Flickr account, etc. to post your design to, just create a drop for it and put that URL in the comments section.

Also, please spread the word to others if you can.

I didn't get a deadline from her, but I'm sure it's something that's needed sooner than later.

Any help you can give her is greatly appreciated.

Obama with a side of Red Bull

I've never read a pop political autobiography.   It seems like a good idea I guess. Get to know a candidate in their own words, in a depth that you can't get from news soundbites.  But I guess I don't have enough depth of curiosity to get me through 384 pages of it.  Apparently doing so requires a good dose of Red Bull, as it did for at least one reader of Barack Obama's book that I saw in a bar recently over lunch time.

The other book of lists: Milk Eggs Vodka

Bill Keaggy, an early blogger and collector of pointless things (like rocks shaped like shoes.  Really.) has published a book of equally mundane yet slightly more significant things.  Shopping lists.  Discarded shopping lists to be exact. (By the way, if you're into other people's discarded things and haven't read Found magazine it will be your Nirvana.   The mag is better than the site.)

For awhile he's run the site grocerylists.org and I've checked out a few lists here and there.  But now they're combined into a book called Milk Eggs Vodka.  I haven't read the book yet, but I was amused at something he's published online as a teaser for the book.  It's a serial narrative based on the lists themselves, strung together to tell the life story and romance of Allan and Janie.  I like the creative license there, in fact it makes a pretty plausible story. 

The role of the lists themselves as the key players in this drama kind of raises the whole Shopper Culture thing again.  No sooner has Meg written another excellent article on the subject, called Culture of Shopping.  It introduces a study that us Integer planners have just conducted about the role of shopping in American Culture.  Anyway, give it a read and share a thought or two.

Kevin Roberts video interview

This is a short but very direct interview that Ad Age did with Kevin Roberts on what Saatchi is up to with the Lovemarks books.  His new one is The Lovemarks Effect. 

I was interested to hear him talk about the power shift from brands to retailers and below-the-line services.  Haven't read the new book yet.

The scented brief

Studio 360 did an interview with Chandler Burr, the New York Times' first ever perfume critic.  He recently wrote a book called The Emperor of Scent.  In it he recounts how physicist Luca Turin demystified the sense of smell.  The guy was renowned for his combined prowess in both scent and the written word.  He could go into great - and accurate - detail on the origins of a scent, and could wax poetic on its inspiration. 

Chandler Burr recounted one story where Luca Turn visited a perfume manufacturer in France.  He made friends with the perfumers, the genius scent architects for the perfume houses.  They trusted him.  Enough so that they shared with him their internal brief for the perfume, the coveted document that led to the famous scent.   But they wanted him to describe the scent first. 

He took one whiff, thought about it and said it made him picture Thai silk scarves, whose colors shift and shimmer in a changing light. 

The perfumer almost fell over in disbelief.  She took out the brief and read it to him.  It instructed her fellow perfume scientists to create a scent that would shift in identities, like a fine Thai silk scarf shifts in different light.

What a nose. What a mind.  And what a wonderful way to think of a brief.  Imagine how you would write a brief if it were meant for a scent instead of, say, a print ad or event.  The visual sense is so dominant in our work sometimes I think we almost forget about the others.  Not just in our execution but in how we get there. 

Why your pet does that thing

I've heard Temple Grandin speak a few times on NPR. She's a wonderfully talented autistic woman who has a teacher's intellect and enough self awareness to share her insight with others. In Animals in Translation She discusses a lot of her history and how there are striking similarities between the way autistic people and animals see the world. If you have a dog or any livestock it will give you a new understanding of what the hell they were thinking when they barked at the paper bag. Just an example. But as a planner I loved spending time in her shoes as she would walk up to a scene, say a slaugherhouse in trouble, and instantly be able to assess what the problems were. A piercing interpretation. The mark of a pro.

Unpublished Ogilvy

Walking down a sidewalk in Washington, DC recently, we saw a cardboard box full of old books on someone's front lawn, with a handwritten note that said FREE BOOKS.  There at the bottom of the pile was this gem. 

As a surprise for his 75th birthday his peers collected numerous internal memos, speeches and other private papers, published them in a book and presented the first one off the press to him as a gift.

It's got entertaining stories and bits of insight on training people, communicating within an agency and speaking clearly for what you believe.  And more than a few examples of his eccentricities.

Here are a couple excerpts.

A memo to the board:

October 11, 1978

A TEACHING HOSPITAL

I have a new metaphor.

Great hospitals do two things.  They look after patients, and they teach young doctors.

Ogilvy and Mather does two things: We look after clients, and we teach young advertising people.

Ogilvy and Mather is the teaching hospital of the advertising world.  And, as such, to be respected above all other agencies.

I prefer this to Stanley Resor's old saying that J. Walter Thompson was a "university of advertising."

D.O.

*  *  *

Memo to the heads of U.S. offices, preceding a swing around the country:

February 2, 1981

MY VISIT

I have already sent you my schedule.  Now Bill Phillips has suggested that I should give you "some idea of the things you would like to do in each city."

In principle, I place myself in your hands.  However:

(1) The fewer speeches the better.  I have to make big ones to an American Express meeting in Florida this month, and to the 4A's in April.  I don't have much left to say, and writing speeches takes me forever.

(2) Maybe you could invite some people (staff and clients) to see my film The View From Touffou.  To be followed by questions?

(3) I have cocktail parties.

(4) I would like to visit with your best Creative people.

(5) I would like to meet major clients--but only if I know something about their business.  Which is not the case, for example, with Mattel.

(6) I get tired after 11 PM and go to bed.

(7) Please give me a little time off to visit friends.

(8) Please don't meet me at the railroad station, and please don't see me off.  I hate that.  Let me arrive and depart on my own.

(9) Don't put me in a suite at the hotel.  A bedroom is what I like.

(10) Please give me an office, however small.  And a copy of The New York Times every day.

(11) I hate drinking in bars, and have to start eating the moment I sit down in restaurants.  Waiting for food puts me in a foul mood.

D.O.