who is this felipe tofani?

To help you, Beloit College creates the "Mindset List". The purpose of it is to remind teachers what kind of world new college students (18 year-olds) was brought up in. I have selected a few to illustrate what kind of world students know today (or rather don't know).

• They have never feared a nuclear war. "The Day After" is a pill to them ...not a movie.
• The internet has always been around and, for most of their existence, been the dominant source of information and entertainment.
• They never had a polio shot, and likely, do not know what it is.
• Atari pre-dates them, as do vinyl albums and cassette tapes. They grew up with CDs, but don't use them anymore.
• Popcorn has always been cooked in the microwave.
• The Vietnam War is as ancient history to them as WWI and WWII.
• They have no idea that Americans were ever held hostage in Iran.
• Women have always been traveling into space. And traveling to space has always been accomplished in reusable spacecraft.
• Yugoslavia has never existed.
• They have probably never dialed a phone or opened an icebox.
• We have always been able to reproduce DNA in the laboratory.
• There have always been ATM machines.
• "Spam" and "cookies" are not foods.
• Thongs no longer come in pairs and slide between the toes.
• Hard copy has nothing to do with a TV show; a browser is not someone relaxing in a bookstore; a virus does not make humans sick; and a mouse is not a rodent (and there is no proper plural for it).
• Drug testing of athletes has always been routine.
• Volkswagen beetles have always had engines in the front.
• The U.S. and the Soviets have always been partners in space.
• Computers have always fit in their backpacks.
• Datsuns have never been made.
• They have never gotten excited over a telegram, a long distance call, or a fax.
• Stores have always had scanners at the checkout.
• They have always had a PIN number.
• Banana Republic has always been a store, not a puppet government in Latin America.
• There have always been non-stop flights around the world without refueling.
• They don't remember when "cut and paste" involved scissors.
• Heart-lung transplants have always been possible.
• Iran and Iraq have never been at war with each other.
• Pixar has always existed.
• Digital cameras have always existed.
• The Soviet Union has never existed.
• "Google" has always been a verb.
• Bar codes have always been on everything, from library cards and snail mail to retail items.
• They have always been able to watch wars and revolutions live on television.
• They have always had access to their own credit cards.
• Dolphin-free canned tuna has always been on sale.
• What Berlin wall?
• They never "rolled down" a car window.
• They have grown up with bottled water.
• U2 has always been more than a spy plane.
• Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.
• Commercial product placements have been the norm in films and on TV.
• High definition television has always been available.
• Virtual reality has always been available when the real thing failed.
• MTV has never featured music videos.
• GPS satellite navigation systems have always been available.
• Shampoo and conditioner have always been available in the same bottle.
• The Warsaw Pact is as hazy for them as the League of Nations was for their parents.
• Schools have always been concerned about multiculturalism.
• Employers have always been able to do credit checks on employees.

1. Be a patient listener (it is this, not fast talking, that gets a con-man his coups).
2. Never look bored.
3. Wait for the other person to reveal any political opinions, then agree with them.
4. Let the other person reveal religious views, then have the same ones.
5. Hint at sex talk, but don’t follow it up unless the other fellow shows a strong interest.
6. Never discuss illness, unless some special concern is shown.
7. Never pry into a person’s personal circumstances (they’ll tell you all eventually).
8. Never boast. Just let your importance be quietly obvious.
9. Never be untidy.
10. Never get drunk.

People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.

- Banksy

... the people who REALLY taught me "How To" do anything worthwhile, didn't write a big ol' list of instructions, didn't hold my hand, they just led by example. The great British advertising man, Dave Trott once did that for me, back in the day...

THIS is what REAL leadership means. THIS is what REAL inspiration means. 

And you'd better get used to it. Because in the world we now live in, there are no more jobs. There are no more bosses. There are only clients and customers from now on.

The employees who don't get that, are dead in the water. And so are the "bosses" who still like to be treated as "bosses". Good riddance to them all.

via gapingvoidart.com

The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.

Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.

Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.

2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.

3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.

6. Check your quotations.

7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.

8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.

9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.

10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.

David

so long as we have a monetization model of information that prioritizes the wrong stakeholders — advertisers over readers — we will always cater to the business interests of the former, not the intellectual interests of the latter.

We get a lot of infographic pitches. Almost all of them suck. Why? Because while they may well be "information plus graphics," they often lack what designer Francesco Franchi calls "infographic thinking." This isn’t just "how to make some numbers and vector graphics look clever together." It’s a narrative language--it’s "representation plus interpretation to develop an idea," to quote Franchi. He’s the art director of IL (Intelligence in Lifestyle), the monthly magazine of Il Sole 24 ORE, one of Italy’s top financial newspapers, and if you look at his work, you quickly get the sense that he knows what the #*(@ he’s talking about. He lays out his thoughts on "infographic thinking" in this video podcast from Gestalten:

Franchi issues a lot of wisdom we’ve heard before--"If we don’t have content, we can’t have design," "You have to be informative but also entertain the reader," etc.--but he also distills the essence of visual communication down into some brilliant insights that go beyond art direction. He talks about "the nonlinearity of reading" an infographic, which is something that can set a true example of the form apart from its faddish imitators. Infographics aren’t like Powerpoint presentations -- they don’t have to be one-dimensional. In the hands of a Fathom or a Felton, even a static infographic can feel immersive and interactive because of the way it offers multiple paths for discovering stories.

We have the great honor of nominating Private First Class Bradley Manning for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize. Manning is a soldier in the United States army who stands accused of releasing hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblower website WikiLeaks. The leaked documents pointed to a long history of corruption, war crimes, and imperialism by the United States government in international dealings. These revelations have fueled democratic uprising around the world, including a democratic revolution in Tunisia. According to journalists, his alleged actions helped motivate the democratic Arab Spring movements, shed light on secret corporate influence on our foreign policies, and most recently contributed to the Obama Administration agreeing to withdraw all U.S.troops from the occupation in Iraq.

Bradley Manning has been incarcerated for well over a year by the U.S. government without a trial. He spent over ten months of that time period in solitary confinement, conditions which experts worldwide have criticized as torturous. Juan Mendez, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on Torture and Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment, has repeatedly requested and been denied a private meeting with Manning to assess his conditions.

The documents made public by WikiLeaks should never have been kept from public scrutiny. The revelations – including video documentation of an incident in which American soldiers gunned down Reuters journalists in Iraq – have helped to fuel a worldwide discussion about America’s overseas engagements, civilian casualties of war, imperialistic manipulations, and rules of engagement. Citizens worldwide owe a great debt to the WikiLeaks whistleblower for shedding light on these issues, and so I urge the Committee to award this prestigious prize to accused whistleblower Bradley Manning.

Sincerely,

Birgitta Jónsdóttir

Margrét Tryggvadóttir

Þór Saari

Members of the Icelandic Parliament for The Movement

It’s part of the tearing down of the Society of the Spectacle mandated by late capitalism; unstructured dérives or drifts across the urban landscape cut across the predetermined routes of commercial necessity which were best defined by a graffito I once saw on a supermarket wall outside Yate in Somerset: ‘Work, Consume, Die’. What I think of as ‘the man-machine matrix’ wants you tramelled on EasyJet watching a six-inch screen implanted in the back of another human’s head, wants you stuck in a car coughing out lead particulates, wants you staring at a VDU, doesn’t want you on foot, transgressing.

It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around. [...] That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.

Photography by professional photographers is a luxury. “Everybody” has a small camera in the form of a point and shoot or of a smart phone. “Everybody” knows an uncle Harry that just bought a brand new Nikon. That's a camera that take great photos. “Every company” has an Harry in accounting who just bought the latest Canon. Those are cameras that take outstanding photos. Harry will take the photos on Sunday afternoon and have everything delivered on Monday by lunch time.

There are some other industries that are in the same boat or even worth. Take a look at the watch industry, it ranges from the $10 watch to the $10,000 and more watch. They all tell you the same time. A 4:53pm is the same time on a $10 watch or on a $5,000 watch.

Far and away, the biggest lesson I took away from co-founding a design studio was that almost nothing matters more than people. How well a team works together, through good times and bad, day in and day out, is a bigger determining factor in building a successful business than the contracts you win, the work that you do, the press coverage you get or even the money you make.

The way to form a good team is to gather people of complementary talents and temperaments and unite them under a single vision. By contrast, my former partners and I started our studio primarily because we were thrown together by circumstance — in the fall of 2001 and in the aftermath of 9/11, with no one hiring, we had almost no other choice but to form a company of our own. But our disparate attitudes, approaches and visions for the business inevitably led to strife, and before too long I could no longer answer the question “Do you like working with these people?” with a “yes.” If you’re going to undertake the hard work of building a company, the answer to that question should always be a resounding “yes.” Life is too short for it to be otherwise.

In the beginning, we had packaged software and we had sneakernet. We had floppy disks in ziplock bags, in cardboard boxes, hung on pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. They were eminently susceptible to duplication, were duplicated quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who made and sold software.

Enter Digital Rights Management in its most primitive forms: let's call it DRM 0.96. They introduced physical indicia which the software checked for—deliberate damage, dongles, hidden sectors—and challenge-response protocols that required possession of large, unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy.

These failed for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the legitimate purchasers. Honest buyers resented the non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports to the authentication dongles, and they chafed at the inconvenience of having to lug around large manuals when they wanted to run their software. Second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to patch the software and bypass authentication. People who took the software without paying for it were untouched.

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