Busy... You guys take Friday off? I need to convince my DVD distributor to hire Campfire for the DVD release this fall... I guess I'll have to wait 'til monday...
- Paul Krik
Busy... Hey, Megan, why thank you! Where are you based?
- Steve
Busy... As one of my favorite companies to watch, I can't be any more excited to see the new campaigns and ideas that come out of the agency. Each campaign is unique and innovative in...
Steve Jobs simple but amazing 2005 Stanford commencement speech touched on issues that are very much alive today: getting fired, being poor, pursuing innovation, inventing the Mac, Windows, the Whole Earth Catalogue as the first Google, and his dictum, “stay hungry, stay foolish”. And discovering he had cancer and being told he had only months to live.
Of special importance to me is his telling the story of learning calligraphy at Reed College (from the great Lloyd Reynalds, who I also studied under), and applying the art of calligraphy to the first Mac, which then “was copied by Windows.” From Jobs commencement speech:
“Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”
I wrote about calligraphy and Reed a while ago in a note on the internal Campfire Hub:
When I was in college at Reed (back before they invented the electric light bulb) there was an electrifying art history professor, Lloyd Reynolds. His class covered the history of art, education, what he called “significant gesture” in great art, Zen Buddhism — it was the first introduction I had to many of these subjects. The class was always mobbed and nearly impossible to get into, despite the fact that Reynolds was an incredible curmudgeon who would regularly attack his students as idiots.
The reason I bring this up is Reynolds was a world class calligrapher who insisted all his students buy an Osmoroid pen and learn Italic Cursive. For him intellectual work had to be intimately associated with craft and work.
For forty years (1948 on) Reynolds had every student at Reed writing in Italic cursive and talking about the drawings of William Blake. His lectures are still vivid in my memory. And among the digital luminaries he inspired are Steve Jobs, Howard Rheingold (Wired, etc.), Peter Norton (Norton Utilities), Sumner Stone (who for Adobe and then his own company developed many of the digital typefaces we use today), etc. Here are a couple quotes from a longer piece about Reynolds:
“The hands think,” said Reynolds. “The nervous system is continuous, so how can we say that the hands don’t think? Often the conscious mind merely interferes with the hand. Students learning to write reach a certain proficiency, and their eyes, like a police matron, take all the freedom away from the rhythmical movement. I tell them not to watch grimly because the eye is a cold judge that frustrates spontaneity. Let your hand move!
“To think that art has two parts, one intellectual and the other servile . . . no. It’s a false dichotomy, absolutely false. Universities from the Renaissance on have put criticism above work, above action. They claim that there is the thinking or philosophical man and the man of action—that the two cannot be in one person. This is one of the worst heresies in Western civilization. It accounts for much of the mess that we’re in, in colleges and universities, where if a work is rational and analytical, it’s respectable.”
I love baseball. It’s the perfect blend of nuance and number-crunching. GDIP, WHIP and BABIP. Deep flies to left field to score a runner from third, long leads off first that draw a throw from the catcher.
And then I catch the Home Run Derby last night. All sizzle and no steak, the marketing equivalent of a :30 spot in the Super Bowl. Sure, it’s fun to laugh at anthropomorphic animals, beer-hungry fools, and women who bathe in peanuts to make men swoon. But I still prefer more compelling entertainment: the complex conversational sell, the pitcher who can induce the double play, the brand story infused with character and nuance, VORP over HRs.
So let’s enjoy Josh Hamilton’s epic performance (he really was mashing the ball!). But let’s also remember that his team, the Texas Rangers, still can’t pitch a lick and haven’t made the playoffs in nearly a decade.
For more interesting baseball content, check out this DIY segment from My Home 2.0. It features Ryan Howard of the Phillies (a monumental slugger) and a bat we hacked to measure his swing speed.
I grew up reading the San Francisco Chronicle, home of Herb Cain, the best columnist in the country, as well as a famous story about “Snakes in Toilets,” and a derogatory reference in All the Presidents Men (Jason Robards, as the Washington Post editor says, “Naw, we can’t publish that, give it to the San Francisco Chronicle.”)
The Chronicle may not have always got it right, but they told a great story. And because I have a number of friends who work for newspapers, I’ve been fascinated by the struggles of newspapers to adapt to the challenge of the new media.
Newspapers are famously losing ad revenue to Google and Yahoo, readership to some of the same portals; and their reporting is being challenged by bloggers and even posts to YouTube.
But as my reporter friend Henry Weinstein said when receiving a journalism award a couple years ago, “Who the hell is going to gather and write the news in the future? — Elves?”
How can newspapers adapt and provide some of the three-dimensional story-telling that the big platforms, blogs and forums can’t?
Check out this piece from MediaStorm, by Luis Sinco, a “traditional” photographer for the much troubled LA Times about the Iraq vet portrayed above. MediaStorm is a marvelous project designed to teach journalists the new way.
Rob Norman wrote a fascinating piece on his On Demand blog, taking a stab at how we’ll create, consume, and measure media in the future. From where we sit, his “Work of Fiction” doesn’t seem all that fictional at all.
We know that content is migrating to smaller and smaller screens, that distribution channels are expanding faster than the content creators’ ability to fill them, and that looking at small screens the same way we look at TV and movie screens is a fatal flaw.
As we’re hearing from our friends on the brand side and on the entertainment side, everyone is gearing up to deliver entertainment to mobile phones, computer screens, digital readers, etc. in the ways that people are consuming content today. The real issue–and what makes Rob’s post so prescient–is predicting how we’ll leverage all these platforms to tell brand and entertainment stories tomorrow.
Wayne Gretzky’s cliche’d aphorism applies here: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” Yoda couldn’t have said it any better.
Kluster.com just might be onto something big. They’ve created an online social community! Wow… OK, sarcasm aside, there is, of course, a bit more to Kluster than being a simple online community. The site and the community have actual purpose. Put simply, the site brings together talented people to work towards, and actually accomplish, common goals.
Once you sign up for the site, you’ll go through the standard steps that you generally need to deal with once you join any other online community: background, interests, avatar selection, etc. However, for each segment of your profile that you fill in, you’ll also receive a quantity of “watts” that get added onto the 1,000 watts you receive for signing up. I’ll get to what these are for in a bit but think of Watts as your Kluster currency. However, in an effort to avoid getting ahead of myself, let me explain what the site is all about. (more…)
More than any other candidate in this year’s race for the White House, presidential hopeful Barack Obama has gone above and beyond his opponents by embracing the ever-popular social networking site Facebook into his campaign strategy. The overwhelming turnout of the usual lazy voting block of young people aged 17 to 29, has help put Obama ahead by one delegate for the Dems.
This is due to the help of Obama supporter Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, who had a leading role in creating my.barackobama.com, a Facebook clone designed specifically for the campaign.
View more from the original article here. [bloomberg.com]
I’ve been interested in the American newspaper’s progress during the digital age. It’s been a major struggle, as even the best of print journalists have very little understanding of new media.
But there’s a terrific slide show from John Moore, a Getty photographer, who attended Benazir Bhutto’s last rally, where she was assassinated, and posted on the New York Times site.
Moore talks in the first person over his photos, bringing you into the story far more effectively than in your typical print story.
And there’s also an “interactive timeline” provided by the Times that’s simple, but informative. Nothing spectacular — but they are making progress.
“Brazilian ice-cream company Kibon … [is] including the actual prize inside the popsicle: they will manufacture 10,000 specially made propsicles, identical in size and color to the actual thing, frozen with iPod shuffles inside.” (Gizmodo)
Books have been written about it. Songs have been sung about it. Wars have been fought over it.
Salt is a magical compound that enlivens vegetables and meats. It lowers the freezing point of ice and raises the boiling point of water. People use it in their soups and on their driveways. What can’t salt do? Apparently, it can’t penetrate the Campfire pantry.
Here at 62 White Street, it’s been weeks since we’ve had a salted chip, even longer since we tasted a salted pretzel. Just minutes ago, I caught Mike Monello dousing a walnut with saline solution just to give it some flavor. This is true insanity. Send help (or soy sauce)!
I’m begging you, Orderer of the Fresh Direct: please please bring back the salt!
We had a wild time at the first of five home parties Saturday as we revealed a complete FiOS makeover of the Kaczor Family’s home in Yardley, Pennsylvania. The campaign includes a large interactive web site, reality TV show, and carnival like parties, which included a lengthy chat with James Earl Jones about his early acting experiences.
Over 500 people attended and enjoyed themselves as the Kaczor family saw the complete hi-tech makeover of their home by the Verizon FiOS team.
The Kaczors now have a fabulous FiOS-equiped house, with a home office to rival Campfire World Headquarters, completely webcam-ed home, and an entertainment center with massive flat screen, Surround Sound system, and a secret lever that reveals disco lights and bowling lane — all designed by our techno-geek show hosts, Brian, Lloyd and Yue.
Kluster.com
