Precisely, Saul Bass. Precisely.

Stolen from Ben's blog.

Lunch, Leon, lions, lezzers

I've always found lunch to be a rather depressing meal.

Just the relentless tedium of deciding what I'm going to post into my horrible mouth, chew up and swallow at the same time every single fucking day makes me want to cut myself. Recently I've take to going to Leon, because it was founded by and is often staffed by lesbians (and like Larry David I'm a friend o' the lesbians) and because it serves exactly the kind of low calorie balsa wood pabulum that hot, semi-anorexic girls eat for lunch. Just going in there makes me feel like a hungry African lion stalking bow-legged gazelles at a dusty savanna watering hole.

Raarrrrr.

Erm.

Oh yeah, and the branding is great. Take note, brand managers everywhere.

So standard Leon type is this very tasteful Sans Serif:

I think typographers like to call this a 'grotesque', but they only do that to trick you into saying 'but I thought it was quite nice actually'

But then look, here's a cup. And the type, right, is totally different, and what the fuck is that, if not a full point on the end of the logo?

Bagaguagio indeed

And then when you look around the place you notice that they've done things like sew the name into quilts. Look, they haven't even tried to copy the type they use in the regular logo - they've just done their own thing. 

Digging the revival of quiltwork amongst new wave feminists. The bald man is also a nice touch.

So, being relaxed about the branding like this has at least two excellent effects, one direct, one inadvertent:

1) it makes you look relaxed about the branding. Like you've got better things to do, like cooking sweet potato fritatas and keeping hot semi-anorexic girls from growing white fur all over their bodies.

2)  it makes it look like the brand has heritage. People are really good at reading this stuff, and they do it totally intuitively - seeing more than one extant version of the logo makes you believe that it's gone through many iterations, it's a bit like the way they put pictures of kids from the 70s on the walls - it provides an artificial aura of nostalgia, and creates a sense of trustworthiness.

Consumers have been around branding for nearly a hundred years now - or longer if you count things like flags and crucifixes - I think they can handle this kind of thing. Marketing managers like brand guidelines, but it's quite possible that customers don't give that much of a shit.

Happy Australian Day Skippies

A deeply scary animation

via Mal Bonnington

Tajazzle your vajazzle

I had lunch with this dude I know yesterday, he's running a company that helps chronic insomniacs get back to sleep - but without using drugs. They've  packaged a load of proper CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, not Cock and Ball Torture, Gaydar fans) with a load of modern jiggery-pokery like iPhone apps and online sleep diaries. The clinical trials show what he's doing to be extremely effective, which is not surprising given that it's the NHS prescribed therapy for insomnia, but getting people to pay for it takes a bit of doing. The problem is that he's not selling a tangible thing.

This is a really modern problem.

Over the last hundred years you and I have spent our working lives trying to convince people that objects will make them happy. Physical things that they can run their hands over, line up in rows, fill shelves or rails with, polish and clean and otherwise interact with on thoroughly tangible level.

You might remember this exchange from Jurassic Park, which, sadly I can't find on the interwebs as a video. Geoff Goldblum's character warning the kid off his Buffallo Bill nightvision goggles:

Donald Gennaro: Hey, where'd you find that?
Tim: In a box under my seat.
Donald Gennaro: Are they heavy?
Tim: Yeah.
Donald Gennaro: Then they're expensive, put 'em back.

Increasingly though things that aren't heavy, are, or should be, expensive. Things like information, music, books lose value as soon as they become digital, because they've lost their object.

There are lots of good arguments for why these things should cost money - but, importantly, they are arguments. Ironically argument the one thing that modern good advertising does not deign to engage in.

So basically, we all better get good at making Tajazzle infomercials.

This is a truly wonderful video

EL GUINCHO | Bombay from MGdM | Marc Gómez del Moral on Vimeo.

I really need to spend more time in Spain.

Stolen from Brother Stevie's new improved blog.

Fail Better

Haven't posted for a while.

If you're bored, I suppose you could read this article about failure that some bloke at Wiedens wrote.

It's a fine line between reassuring and threatening

One that George Irvin's funfair doesn't walk entirely successfully IMHO. Does make for a very compelling tone of voice tho. Shepherds Bush Green isn't all that safe at the best of times, but when there's a fair on it, you might as well just stab yourself before you head out.

Proper cockney use of the word 'levied'

All faiths will be respected right? Or your knees will be broken due to my use of this hammer

All profits from this, once we've paid the new system, who we call Harry the Hammer

And 16 years porridge is no picnic, Sunshine. Just ask Harry

Christmas with Mr. Creosote

I went into HMV in the Westfield yesterday night.



Britain's last entertainment retail chain is apparently on the rocks. It's interesting to watch because businesses of this size seem to go through a period just before they die where they become grotesquely inflated versions of themselves. Like stars, or Elvis.

So HMV now looks the way that it might if it had been laid out based on a description of HMV given over the phone by someone really out of their mind on cocaine.

Just shitloads of CDs and DVDs and shit everywhere, piles of the fucking things all up the counter in sort of like drifts. An loads of people an babies crying an vomiting.

Look neither to left, nor to the right

The queue to pay is corralled into an S-shaped rat-run lined with consumer sweeties like burnable DVDs, copies of Up In the Air and the new Take That documentary, and rubber earbud ends.
The counter is constructed entirely from Inception DVDs.

Inception is the perfect supermodern film, confusing and larded with special effects so that every one that saw it in the cinema felt like they could maybe do with watching it again. No one really needs to see Inception again, you won't learn anything from it, and the film's internal logic loops pointlessly back onto itself to deliberately confound sensible interpretation. It's not profound, it's just facetious. Like that joke 'what would you rather be or a wasp?' but told to you and then explained in arcane detail by a frowning Leonardo DiCaprio.

If you manage to get out without a copy of Inception you have won.

This retail experience, which is the kind of 'things you might like' cross-selling you get on the internet but made physical could be applied to all kinds of funnelled crowd. So if you forced all the people getting on the tube to walk through a tunnel filled with products some of them would definitely take something even if they weren't 'shopping'. The fact of the thing's merely being available is advertisement enough. All we need to do is streamline the process of paying for things so that as soon as you pick something up, you have already paid for it.

The idea of ' shopping' is sort of old fashioned anyway. We're always shopping, even when we're at work.

Ten years ago we might have said that the Internet was like a big department store, in fact what's happening is that big spaces like the Westfield are becoming a sort of physical version of the internet  'events' and curiosities with shops in between.

PS: I've been blogging about 2 years now. That's weird isn't it? Check out this post from 2008,when I thought the world was about to end.

PPS: Tits and Bums Magazine have posted my Will Self piece in full. I still have the transcript of that interview, which I might put on here next year, if you're lucky.

Don't normally post this kind of smut

Super Sexy CPR from Super Sexy CPR on Vimeo.

Apart from when I do.

It's all getting a bit Noddy Holder

Voices by Tony Law, who is Canadian.

Fakin' Bacon

This is like the Jack Black reality nexus but done with a bit more style and a better script. It won't be long before we do away entirely with the concept of 'characters' in films (ie actors playing other people) and all screenplays will be written around the behaviour of celebrities. So Pirates of the Caribbean would be a film about Johny Depp playing a pirate in the film called Pirates of the Caribbean.

In fact, here's a mediocre article about the very same phenomenon.

Black Ops

I spent the weekend playing Black Ops in the shadow of my 8ft Christmas tree. You know you have a problem when you start leaving parties early, claiming you have a self-help group first thing, in the certain knowledge that you're really going home to kill Swedish children (online right, Jeez, Thames Valley Police).

If anyone wants to form advertising clan, my callsign is NotVoodoo.

That's a great little video isn't it?

Inconvenience: the new convenience

I just bought an ancient iMac so that I can write in the mornings without web drift. It has no internet connection, and makes weird clicking and whirring sounds as the hard disk drive spins. I think there may really be cogs in there.

The iMac runs OS9, but to run the edition of Word I like I need at least OS10. In order to update to OS10 you have to update the firmware, in order to update the firmware, you have to update the OS to 9.1. And to find any of this out, you need to spend a great deal of time searching arcane retro Mac forums. Which you can't do on an iMac which is not plugged into the internet.


Yes, but it was fascinating right. Not just because I'm likely to find any procrastination ritual around writing wholly absorbing. It was like a problem solving treasure hunt.

Also ...

This agency is on an eco kick at the moment, and they've installed these kettles. If you consider a kettle as a labour saving device, these are shit kettles, in that they make it harder to boil a cup of tea. They have two chambers, so you have to fill one chamber, and then pump the water into the other chamber to boil it. The mechanism forces you to actively choose how much water you're boiling. They also sometimes squirt boiling water out of the spout when turned upright, which I think is just an unintentional piece of design, rather than a ploy to put you off the whole idea of drinks served at boiling point.

Also ...

Video games too, have this same balance of toughness and easiness. Part of their appeal is to allow you to achieve virtual mastery of very hard things on a much more forgiving learning curve than in reality. Think the scene in the Matrix where Keanu Reeves masters kung fu in 5 minutes. Or Guitar Hero. They are designed to be just hard enough that you keep playing, but not so easy that they're no fun. Essentially they're designed for difficulty. Overcoming the difficulty induces satisfaction.

Design used to be about making our lives easier. But now our lives are easier I reckon DESIGN IS ALL ABOUT THE PROPER ACTING OUT OF OUR FUCKING NEUROSES.

Right, I'm now going to get dressed up as Victorian dandy and go the office Christmas party.

i is not selling enough papers is i?

Britain's newest daily? WTF is wrong with you?

In our business it's easy to get resentful when, as happens from time to time, someone tells you your idea is shit.

In fact, one of the great drivers for career progress in advertising is to reach a level of seniority where if anyone tells you your idea is shit, you can sack them on the spot. Whole agencies have been built on this principle.

Personally I believe there's nothing like a bracing blast of unstinting honesty to stimulate those  sections of the imagination that are powered by doubt, fear and resentment. What is cut down grows back twice as strong. It's worth learning to love criticism. Without it you might do something mad, like recording a three hour long hip-hopera, making a Star Wars prequal, or publishing a not quite free-sheet in competition with your own newspaper.

According to industry sources, the circulation of 'i' is now down to well below 70,000 per day. They've also cut 10,000 from sales of the Independent and enraged the journalists union by employing no new people to publish double the number of the newspapers. A newspaper that is failing, quickly becomes a failure's newspaper. No one wants to justify to their friends why they're paying 20p for the only rag worse than the Metro.

The name 'i' is confusing, fiddly to type with autocorrect, impossible to search for online and makes a nonsense of almost any sentence you care to put it in. Basing a headline campaign around the paper's title is up there in the bad decision stakes with the bad decision to publish the thing in the first place. At best the headlines sound like they were guest written by Sacha Baron Cohen, at worst, just plain illiterate. A consequence perhaps of employing an agency whose creative department is drawn almost entirely from the JLS fanbase, without an English GCSE between them.

So look, Alexander Lebedev, you ridiculous ex-KGB oligarch, I'm going to tell you because someone needs to: your idea is shit.

Never forget ... the possiblity of rape

Because there's really nothing worse than being locked out, or having to borrow a fiver off one of your mates, or, you know, being brutally raped.

This a truly weird product, a rape alarm, that's also a stylish urban fashion accessory. Am I right in thinking that BBH developed it?

Ad agencies have a weird relationship with rape, they're largely male environments and there's something about the riskiness of rape as the ultimate shocking form of coercion. Creatives bring a special nasty relish to these briefs: 'yeah, shocking innit? Well it's meant to be love.'

You can't really advertise a rape alarm without also making women mindful of the real and constant possibility of rape and therefore spreading fear. Their sales figures would serve as a barometer for just how unsafe women feel. The best viral campaign would be an episode of Sex and the City that opened with Sarah Jessica Parker walking along talking to herself and then suddenly being sexually assaulted. With the line 'rape can happen when you least expect it.'

Yep, it's a brief I would happily turn down.

New Wave Coffee Shops

When you give up alcohol you end up spending a great deal of time in coffee shops. There used to be two kinds in London which sold passable coffee:

Italian coffee shops, eg Brunos, Bar Italia, Ponti's

They were making lattes when Starbucks was still the Seattle Coffee Co. They buy eye-poppingly strong coffee from the Algerians in Soho on a contract going back 70 years. They'll sell you a gristly bacon sandwich, but for cultural reasons are generally unable to make tea. Coffee comes in an unbranded Styrofoam cup and costs £1.50. There is rarely music, other than the sound of media types affecting allrightmateyeah camaraderie, like they spent the day digging up a road, rather than hatching a really exciting social network strategy for stock cubes.

Chain coffee companies, eg Starbucks, Caffe Nero, Costa

As stand-up, Rick Shapiro, says Starbucks is a true representation of modern America: 'fag food, at Jew prices, in a WASPY environment'. (It's funny when he says it, trust me, and/because he is Jewish, and used to be a rentboy). There isn't really anything I can tell you about Starbucks that you don't already know. I don't like Starbucks, and yet it is a business I patronise on a daily basis, more than almost any other (apart from Amazon). Everyone feels this way about Starbucks, and you can tell from their toilets. There is always someone in the Starbucks toilet, and no matter how meek and apologetic they look when they come out, it always turns out they've enacted a hideous dirty protest all over the loo seat, the back wall, the mirror etc.

These days there is a third kind of coffee shop:

Boutique coffee shops, eg Nude Espresso, Flat White, Wild and Wood, Store Street Espresso

You don't have to have a sailor tattoo on your fucking neck to work in these places but it helps. Fewer Eastern Europeans, and more people who look like they might be in a band, but aren't actually in a band - beards and piercings also encouraged. Don't even think about asking for an extra shot, or hot milk with your americano, because it will 'ruin the flavour' of the coffee. The soundtrack will be some combination of Beck, MGMT and Fleetwood Mac. Coffee is venerated in these places, in fact the point of this post, was that I realised on Saturday that the whole aesthetic of these cafes, including the staff who'd rather you weren't there, is taken from galleries. Look, check it out:

Store St Espresso

Hmmm. What could it mean?

In some places, like Nude Espresso, the prints on the wall actually show coffee.

The point is to venerate the product, by giving it the trappings of art.

You could probably break most kinds of advertising or branding down along these lines also. Things are made to appeal on price, convenience or sensibility. Agencies too, fit the typology - think CST, JWT, Mother.

Another thing that Nude Espresso proves is that the only good thing about antipodeans is that they're usually not pretentious.

PS: I should probably mention that the Coffee Plant on Portobello Road, is not just my favourite coffee shop, but one of my favourite places in the world bar none. Doesn't really fit any of the above types, and they will often be playing The Idiot at 8.00am. 

Hang on to the end for the best pun ever

Hate Norman Foster?

I do.

I once worked for a particularly horrible agency in Canary Wharf, a place that was about as friendly and characterful as your average Jubilee Line carriage in rush hour, and my life was not at all improved by having to pass through Canary Wharf station every day. The chrome and glass and echoing spaces of the station tactlessly underlining our status not as workers or individuals, but components. Which, right, I get, but what does that make Norman Foster?

It's all so bland as well. So Blairite.

So the municipal bombing of large sections of central London, the demolition of great big residential chunks of Soho, which should really just be sex shops and brothels in dirty white 18th century buildings, to make way for more Norman Foster steel and glass stockshot utopia fills me with depression.

Crossrail is going to be shit anyway, because it doesn't serve the Westfield.

Sex scene from Ghost

Was just thinking how strange it was that Patrick Swayze is actually dead now, so presumably whenever anyone sits down at a potter's wheel they are in danger of severe molestation.

I think one of the good things about porn is that women have stopped expecting all that fiddly pre-sex messing about that was actually invented by Hollywood as a replacement for sex.

As you may be able to tell, I'm trying to break my blogging drought by just posting whatever I happen to be thinking. I had this really solemn post lined up about Borges and inevitability and the beefcake with a brain Dan Snow, but there was just no way of making it funny.