It Has Come To My Attention That This Year Had Produced Many Memes—

—most of them trite and overused, as can be seen here. My three top favorites:

• (something) is the new (something).
• “Organic” (noun or verb).
• Random.

However, I think that “organic-anything” might be more suited for 2006.

I Have Been Very Lucky To Have Plenty Of Occasions Where I Worked Alongside Wonderful People And Teams—

—wherein I started to notice patterns from the group members that can determine if:

1. The project is going to succeed.
2. We all could learn something and have fun doing it.

Sure, smart & Get Things Done and self-awareness are all important qualities to look for in team members, so is brilliance. But they’re quickly becoming a given in the industry, so you have to look deeper. Ready?

• Good work ethic. Work ethic is what sort of things one does and how one does it when nobody is there watching. This quality will mostly remain hidden to the public’s eye (it can be otherwise, but the result is usually pretty messy) because nobody will probably know it except for the said individual. But good work ethic is such a rarity (even rarer than the so called ‘brilliance’) that I would recommend you to hire anybody who has it right away and keep him/her happy. It also happens to be the single. Most. Important. Thing. that will bring the project success. Believe me. You can deliver kick ass strategies and heartrending executions all you want, but this quality will make those deliveries consistent.
• Better than me. No, seriously. If I have to work with someone, I’m going to make sure that he/she can do things better than me (in different or similar areas.) This way, not only can the team produce better results, but I can also learn a thing or two from him/her. I find that a good rule of thumb is to work with or hire somebody that I admire. This quality is somewhat easier to spot, because the ‘more better’ he/she is, the more he/she will scare the team with his/her works. And a scare is good because it forces everyone to stretch him/herself beyond the comfortable.
• Genuinely good-natured and humble. Look, it seems that everyone in the advertising, marketing and design industry have a big ego and lack an ability to play well (read: giving up his/her ideas to be ripped apart in a brainstorming meeting and then buying the ‘ripper’ coffee afterwards) with each other. I truly think that the world needs a different kind of shop. A shop whose people will actually be nice to everybody while still being genuine at the same time. One that’s built on The Power of Nice (okay, kind of like Kaplan Thaler but with the two above qualities added.)

And there you have it. Good night.

I Have Been Waiting For A Chance To Say “Ding!” Again, To Indicate How Apple Is Well On Its Was To Become The Next Microsoft

Apparently, today is the day. Fake Steve Jobs got a letter from Apple’s legal team, compelling him to shut down.

Good night.

You Might Have Realized That I Don’t Use Twitter To Keep Track Of What I Am Doing At A Certain Moment, But Rather, To Record Epiphanies And A-HA Moments

These are officially called ‘Snackbytes.’

I Have To Admit, Not Many Blog Mastheads Had Achieved This Degree Of Typographic Complexity

Or, rather, as the author would’ve said it, “typographic folly.”

Amazing.

Internet Explorer 8 Had Gone Sour

In a good way.

Good day.

Following My Last Post About My Overarching Playlist Criteria

Here are some qualities that I judge a piece of advertisement by, two of them taken from my last post, proving once again that even the two most disparate fields of knowledge—in this case, music and advertising—do intersect somewhere. Here they are, in no particular order:

• Adherence to creative brief. Sure, customers (and sometimes creative team) might not care about this, but I do. Advertising that doesn’t serve as anything (or practiced for its own sake) is simply bad practice. Go as experimental or viral as you want, but do have a sound strategy to back it up.
• Wittiness. The ad has to engage me in such a way that I’m thinking and (preferably) smiling at the same time—whenever appropriate. I say this because that may not apply in certain cases, like a donation/begging ad. If one manages to make a donation/begging ad witty, he/she must be a rock star—because not many people possess the ability to do that sort of thing.
• Authenticity. You know what I mean. We got so good at this, we can even sniff out even the most sophisticated Astroturfing in mere moments. Remember, genuineness isn’t something a brand say, write or think about, it’s something it does, by nature.
• Narrative. Even a blipvert must tell a story successfully if it is to succeed. This is one of the reason why things like 1/60th” spot (!) would never work.

Good night.

Notwithstanding The Fact That I’m Both A Multi-Instrumentalist And An Avid Music Listener

I can only think of two reasons why certain songs are on my playlist while others are not. They either:

• Challenge and stretch aural perception, or
• Tell stories and evoke places.

Those that do both ranks up higher, with preference given to the former item. Simple as that.

Not incidentally, these two factors relates closely to my measurement of good design, good advertising, good reading matter, and good whatever else. In those context, ‘challenging’ becomes ‘witty’ or ‘shrewd,’ but ‘telling stories’ are still telling stories. Without challenge, a medium will not caught any attention. Without story, it will fail to be remembered and savored.

PLEASE NOTE that while these pieces are all instrumental, this fact shouldn’t be taken as an indication that I listen to elevator music all day (though there are certainly times that I do.) I do think, however, that lyrics tend to blunt the ‘telling stories’ aspect of the song—because, duh, words can’t not tell a story.

Q: Why Must Architects Be Freaking Punctilious At Everything?

And why do we designers seem to be so loose and easygoing compared to them?

A:

Firstly, because a building or a house is infinitely more complex than a piece of design. With lots of physical variables to consider (ie. gravity) and tons of things that can go wrong at the slightest miscalculation, architects HAVE to specify everything that they can or risk a ruined building.

Secondly, because a piece of design can be reprinted and revised even after production phase, and a piece of building cannot. Okay, they can, but it’s highly unlikely that anyone would want to destroy a house which they have just built.

In short, we work under relatively vague constraints and they work under very specific parameters. So they’re freaking punctilious because they have to. Let’s all be thankful that we don’t; that we only have brand guidelines to worry about and not the entire City Planning Commission.

Good night.

When I First Saw “I Can Has Cheezburger?”, I Always Knew That Dog People Everywhere Would Not Only Be Looking Into The Matter Rather Angrily

But they would also, someday, come up with a canine counterpart of their own.

I can now confirm you, dear reader, that the day fell on September 12, 2007.

Good night.