For those who attended the 99% Con­fer­ence a few weeks ago in New York, got a pre­view of stills from most of this com­mer­cial; but now that it’s be released to the pub­lic, we can all enjoy it:

What do you think, dear read­ers? Can a bank really stand for some­thing? Would you do busi­ness with Stan­dard Char­tered Bank if it were in your town? And how about the visual side of the piece? Love it? Hate it? Are you a fan of Sag­meis­ter and his work? Never heard of him before? What do you think??

Finally, the per­fect use for an iPad:

Next week holds the promise of the US release of the first film by Banksy. Last week, an extended teaser for the film was released which begins to out­line Thierry Guetta’s (aka Mr. Brain­wash) pur­suit of the mys­te­ri­ous artist. Check it out:

A list of venues and show­times across the US is avail­able on the film Web site.

Back by pop­u­lar demand, another install­ment of tips for life. Enjoy!

The end of print pub­lish­ing? Or?? Watch and see:

As a jump-start to the week, here is a gor­geous piece to get your cre­ative juices flow­ing, dear readers:

Have you seen Danny Yount’s titles for Guy Ritchie’s Sher­lock Holmes? Wow!

Read Art of the Title’s inter­view with Yount here and see the evo­lu­tion of his work on this project as well as the full cred­its themselves.

Image: Art of the Title

Today finds Charm City buried once again, in a blan­ket of sparkling white. The effect is beau­ti­ful, bewil­der­ing and even a lit­tle inspir­ing though at some point after hours of shov­el­ing, the snow will become less than charm­ing. In the mean­time, here is a piece of visu­ally stun­ning eye/brain candy straight from Japan for you, dear read­ers, snow­bound or otherwise:

Doesn’t this just make your eyes smile and the snow a lit­tle more fun?

You know, women work­ers can be sur­pris­ingly good pro­duc­ers.…

And remem­ber, this all boils down to four things:

• 1) Don’t mix plea­sure with business
• 2) Women can be awfully jeal­ous of one another
• 3) Avoid undue familiarity
• 4) Women are more sen­si­tive than men

This gives me flash­backs to Oakland…

A mod­ern ver­sion of the last film, nar­rated by Stephen Col­bert:

Remem­ber: Girls who park in cars, are not REALLY pop­u­lar…
and home, par­ents and per­son­al­ity ALL help boys and girls to be pop­u­lar… really…

I drink a lot of tea and cof­fee, thus mugs are one of the items that tend to join me in my fre­quent trav­els; but I wasn’t always a mug user.

Thanks to this handy instruc­tional video, though I was able to mas­ter the del­i­cate art of mug use and ownership:

It has always fas­ci­nated me how seem­ingly triv­ial things can trig­ger one’s mem­ory on a dime and trans­port you to another time or place in an instant– hid­den snap­shots of one’s life pep­pered through­out our daily com­ings and goings.

This morn­ing, pay­ing bills at my desk and watch­ing the rain pour down, iTunes sur­prised me with a mem­ory jolt– a musi­cal time machine back to col­lege:

This song always pro­pels me back in time to a rainy night in Pitts­burgh– bib­li­cal rain, soak­ing you to the bone and wait­ing on Car­son Street for the 54C back to Oak­land. The expe­ri­ence or night holds no sig­nif­i­cance to my present life, no new char­ac­ters came into my life that night, no pro­found obser­va­tions were made on that day, the rain did not cat­alyze any­thing other than hail­ing a taxi and yet it remains as a warm and vivid mem­ory: Crum­pled up in an old leather jacket, wait­ing beneath a street light flip­ping through sketch­books with the other reg­u­lar from my cof­feeshop (who was also wait­ing for the over­due bus), wet licorice streets, head­lights exag­ger­ated by raindrops…

It seems strange to me that such an insignif­i­cant moment in my life remains so firmly imprinted upon my mem­ory and yet it does.

What ran­dom moments are firmly implanted in your mem­ory, dear readers?

It’s just one of those days; we all have them– you wake up and the world feels grey and unwel­com­ing. You scuff around and feel sorry for your­self and maybe mope a lit­tle. Well today, I’m hav­ing one of those days.

BUT instead of mop­ing about like a fool when I feel like this, I rally my inner troops and forge ahead. This gen­er­ally involves a longer visit to the closet– pulling out espe­cially fun shoes and a col­or­ful jacket, a big­ger than usual cup of cof­fee, a longer lunch break and a tight­en­ing of the cir­cle of dear­est friends. When the world feels unwel­com­ing, I find it best to sim­ply become the ulti­mate host­ess– wel­come the unwel­com­ing and just out­shine the grey.

One of my longest stand­ing friends from child­hood, loved the Bea­t­les when we were kids; count­less week­end hours swam by to the sound­track of the fab four and today my mind has drifted back to those days:

Watch­ing this clip from the movie Help!, the semi-sad lyrics of the song mixed with the sub­tle silli­ness of Paul and George perks me up and makes me smile.

How about you, dear read­ers? How do you perk your­self up when you’re feel­ing down?

When I was an under­grad in design school , I was one of the weak­est draw­ing stu­dents among my peers our fresh­man year. My pro­fes­sors, patient and inspir­ing though they were, seemed to remain con­cerned about my weak­nesses in the fields of draw­ing and craft; it was the final pin-up dis­cus­sions at which I shone.

When the sec­ond semes­ter of my fresh­man year came along and my draw­ing skills still fell short of my peers, one of my pro­fes­sors, who held a master’s in draw­ing, pulled me aside and gave me some advice. He gave me a few tips on how to improve the qual­ity of my work, but above all advo­cated sim­ply for prac­tice. One of the exer­cises he rec­om­mended was to draw sim­ple shapes over and over again– to draw until they were com­ing out of my ears. By so doing, I would be train­ing my hands to be more skilled at qual­ity of line and form. So for weeks I drew obses­sively– cir­cles, squares, cones, pyra­mids, tri­an­gles, lines, lines, lines; it was the mad hatter’s geom­e­try and it was explod­ing inside my sketchbooks.

By the time I grad­u­ated with my BFA, I was selected as the designer of the year, so some­thing must have clicked along the way; the mad hatter’s geom­e­try had pushed me fur­ther. Today, sim­ple forms like those from my professor’s exer­cise tend to creep into the mar­gins of my sketch­books and meet­ing notes– an uncon­scious habit, it now seems.

When I came across the above video from the Design Coun­cil, one of the first things that came to mind was that exer­cise of draw­ing sim­ple shapes over and over and over.

Why be good when you can be bet­ter? What do you wish you could do bet­ter, dear read­ers? And how do you plan on get­ting there?

When I was a kid, one of the best things about the week­end was the extra hours one could spend run­ning around out­side but more impor­tantly it was the CARTOONS! Sat­ur­day morn­ings with Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes pro­vided a solid foun­da­tion for my humor later in life; I don’t think I shall ever tire of drop­ping anvils on my foes or order­ing office sup­plies from the ACME catalog.

Sun­days, on the other hand, were an utter dis­ap­point­ment in terms of enter­tain­ment. The best one could hope for was a left­over kung fu movie from the day before, assum­ing of course, there was no reli­gious com­mit­ment to attend. There was also Jonny Quest, and a few other odds and ends pulled together mostly from the six­ties. At first I really didn’t like Jonny Quest and his lameo friend, Hadji; and what was the deal with Dr. Quest and Race? But after what seems like years of wak­ing up to Jonny, now I sort of miss him. Sun­days just aren’t the same with­out cheezy car­toons from the past; n’est pas?

What week­end goofi­ness do you miss from your child­hood, dear readers?

Ever the type-geek, I couldn’t resist shar­ing this TERRIBLE (ter­ri­bly AWESOME, that is) video parody:

Kind of makes you want to grow a well-kept beard, n’est pas?

With the new year upon us, now seemed like an appro­pri­ate moment to share this short film:

Forever’s Not So Long, by Shawn Mor­ri­son and Gar­rett Murray

How would you want things to end?