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In its confrontation with the Chinese government, the world’s most powerful internet company, Google, intends to ‘stay in touch’ with its moral values and that of its consumers, Nikesh Arora, the 42-year-old president of global sales and business development, told ET in an exclusive interview. Mr Arora, who joined Google in 2004, is an engineer from the Institute of Technology in Varanasi, an MBA from Northeastern University, and a CFA. He’s been in IT, finance, telecom and probably needs all those skills and more as Google battles traditional internet rivals and newer ones in domains as diverse as devices and enterprise software. Its recipe for success, said Mr Arora, is focus on providing ‘wow consumer moments’ before thinking revenue and monetisation. The regulatory environment across the globe seems to be posing challenges for Google. Around 20-25 countries have blocked You Tube and Google search, and now we are hearing about China. How is Google coping? Google is a search company, which has many other products that are exciting like Gmail, Android and Maps. We are a technology company, but we are not the Internet. Sometimes, what happens is we are made synonymous with the internet. That’s one challenge we run into. Actually what you are saying is that you can block the entire internet, and we are not the internet. If you look at past 10 years, I think the internet and the digital world have gone from the fringes to mainstream. Even in India, most people are on Facebook, every newspaper has a digital edition, and all of Bollywood is on Twitter. Everybody is out there and suddenly it’s become relevant, and it challenges the old structures. The first structural challenge is national borders. Now you have to decide if you want to control, and if you do, you have to block the internet. It’s a digital world and in a digital world you leave digital footprints. Now I’ve used my card for 20 years, and I am pretty sure my credit card company has way more information than any other company. But, I cannot remember a controversy around using credit cards — it’s become a part of our social norm because we have traded convenience for giving up some information about ourselves. Same thing about the internet — you are going to be trading some information about you for convenience. As long as you trust the people who own that information, it’s okay. As long as those people do not use that information specifically to do something bad or something targeted at you, that’s okay too. To go back to your original question, I think we are being held synonymous with the Internet. When fundamental structures get challenged, you have to come up with new structures. The choice is either to replicate the old, or to think of new ways in a new world and choose what you want to regulate. Does it mean you have to give up at times while trying to deal with these issues? If you look at a market like China, with 400 million users, that does pose some difficult choices. It’s important to understand (and this is not an arrogant comment I am making) that our DNA is very different — our DNA is the DNA of our founders and the values with which the company was built. The values are about solving technological challenges of scale. We want to solve big technology problems and we have some very simple principles — we want to stay in touch with our moral values and that of our consumers. It’s not about the economics. If you look at the Google portfolio, we have only few services that make money. Everything else is trying to solve the technology problem of scale. And, we keep saying to ourselves, how do we make money out of this? Maybe we will, maybe we won’t, may be it will help our brand. And, in that context, it seems to be fine, it seems to be working. Our shareholders are happy, our revenues are fine, our profits are fine. We don’t see any decision as an economic event, we see if it aligns with the values we have, we see if it aligns with what our customers and stakeholders expect us to do. I cannot talk much about China because we are in conversation with the government. What is the revenue model for You Tube? We are happy with the trajectory of You Tube. We are selling advertising on You Tube homepage, and last quarter we were close to 90%-plus sold out in the US. We are beginning to see in-video advertising for You Tube, and a market for short clips, which we didn’t think existed in the past. There’s no way you can watch a short clip on TV. If I hear Serena Williams threw a tantrum on court, I’m not interested in the match, but in that 1-2 minute argument. Now suddenly that clip exists. People are beginning to take the relevant parts they want to see, put it up there and share it with friends. There is huge space developed called the short clip market, and you can put advertising there. How do you plan ahead? The good news is that we don’t have five-year plan. We don’t even have a three-year plan because we don’t know how the world is going to look like in three years. We plan for about a year and we have reasonably good visibility for the year from a revenue perspective. This is about creating ‘wow consumer moments’, we want to create cool products — that’s Google, I really like it! And then, we plan about whatever can be sold. We have a good team of product people on the monetisation side. It’s hard to plan, but that’s why it’s fun. Because of your reach, whatever innovation you create lasts for long. What goes behind monetising these efforts? The model we follow is 70:20:10. The main task is 70% of efforts, 20% is on related tasks and many of our innovations, such as Gmail, have come from it. The remaining 10% can be about anything. During first four years, we did not have any revenues. Today we have around $20 billion in revenues and 22,000 employees. There’s been a stress on the system because if you look at it, no other company in the history of business has grown so fast. If you think about Google, we have consumer properties and we sell advertising. Here’s our search property and we sell advertising against it. We have operations in over 40 countries across the world and we serve over a million advertisers who advertise on our search products. Then we go to other people who offer search and tell them why don’t you let us advertise for you because we can figure out a way to bring a million people who want to spend money. If you look at our numbers, roughly 50% is made from our own properties and the rest from others properties, which we help advertise. These guys are not going to get a million advertisers on their own, and they have a lot of content. Even if they can sell 30% of their content themselves, they can’t reach out to million advertisers. We are serving over a billion searches everyday. We have been building our Maps product for five years and now believe it has become successful. Now, we are thinking of advertising. Trials are running in two US cities. If you’re on the map, we will enhance the listing for $25 a month. We are trailing that and we’ll see where it goes. We will wait for a robust consumer success before we trail monetisation. Why is search inferior in You Tube compared to Google? We are working on it. It is not as good. There are challenges, there are very different signals in the video space. A few days ago, we turned on subtitles for video, which is computer-generated. That should make it interesting because once you do that, it allows you much more corpus of content. The challenge with videos is that unless it’s tagged well, it’s hard to search. Can you talk a little about the cannibalisation of print and content? Internet is going to change the shape of every business — not just media, but telecom, music, entertainment, they’re all going to get impacted by — not Google — but the internet. Fundamentally, the internet is the world’s largest communication distribution network. It’s going to change consumption, distribution and production. My perspective is in the next 5-8 years, roughly 30-50% of the content in the world will be consumed digitally. In addition, there is ‘disaggregation of bundle’. Newspapers have been the only source of information for many years. Today, I can probably get better information at weather.com than the weather page of a newspaper. Our children are not going to consume the aggregated bundle that we create, but create their own. That is an editorial challenge. There’s $700 billion worth of advertising globally and roughly $70 billion is digital now. Is the convergence, that everybody is talking about, for real? The lines between devices and business models seem to be blurring every day. I have not been a believer of convergence because if you look at history, it’s actually gone more towards divergence than convergence. Things have become more specific. If you look at sunglasses, there are different ones available for biking and other activities. Suddenly there are 18 variants of mobile phones — one is better for web browsing, the other is better for something else and so on and so forth. We actually live in a world of divergence. Probably the most convergent device is the laptop — it does everything, but it’s not perfect in any one thing. |
Monday, June 28, 2010
Nikesh Arora
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Inspiring Tale or Wake-Up Call?
The lovely and amazing performance poet Gabrielle Bouliane performs for the audience at the Austin Poetry Slam.
This would be her last public performance.
Gabrielle was diagnosed with Stage Four Cancer shortly before this video was filmed. Our dear sister fought hard, but she ended her fight January 29, 2010. She was surrounded by family and friends, and her passing was in a very quiet, peaceful room full of love and affection. She was so brave.
Please share this video with everyone you know. I am sure it would tickle her to no end to have this video get as viral as a video can be. Tell the world.
Online Motivator: Gabrielle Bouliane - Austin Poetry Slam from Online Motivator on Vimeo.
This would be her last public performance.
Gabrielle was diagnosed with Stage Four Cancer shortly before this video was filmed. Our dear sister fought hard, but she ended her fight January 29, 2010. She was surrounded by family and friends, and her passing was in a very quiet, peaceful room full of love and affection. She was so brave.
Please share this video with everyone you know. I am sure it would tickle her to no end to have this video get as viral as a video can be. Tell the world.
Online Motivator: Gabrielle Bouliane - Austin Poetry Slam from Online Motivator on Vimeo.
Milton Glaser Interview better copy maybe?by Brad HollandMarch 15, 2002
As one of the founders of Pushpin Studios in 1954, Milton Glaser helped revive illustration in the 1960’s when photography was thought to have swept the field. After studying at the High School of Music & Art, then Cooper Union in New York, Glaser studied etching in Bologna with the painter Giorgio Morandi. In a speech in 1998, he cited two opposites–Morandi and Picasso as his “artistic models.” Artists who are driven by opposing passions often come to grief. But those who succeed in harnessing them often give off light. More often celebrated for his design, Milton’s drawings have become increasingly personal and spiritual. The integrity he brings to his work has made him a touchstone for many artists, including me.
Brad Holland: You’ve previously mentioned Morandi and Picasso as your two models. I think anyone could understand Picasso’s influence on you. His work is so protean, as your’s is. But the influence of Morandi is less obvious. What does he mean to you?
Milton Glaser: For me, Picasso and Morandi represent the full range of human artistic possibilities. Morandi was parochial and narrow. He went to Paris once, didn’t like it, and never went again. He lived modestly. He was an academic beaurocrat. He taught at the academy three times a week. He never married. He didn't seem to be interested in money, fame, or women. He painted about three portraits of people. The rest are landscapes. They’re not familiar, but they’re the same kind of painting as his still lifes. He would make the slightest change. Move a passage of gray a quarter of an inch. If you wanted to buy a painting from him, he would write your name and address on the back; then, years later, after he had finished the painting, he’d send it to you. He was selling paintings then for $200.
Picasso, on the other hand, was the most egocentric, narcissistic man in human history. For him, there was no world except Picasso. People were just instruments to be used, like subjects of a painting. He wanted all the money, all the fame, all the accomplishment. He sucked all the air out a room. I can’t image two more opposite manifestations of human potential, and I think I am equally affected by both. Morandi’s dedication, his simplicity, his desire for nothing except the work, his modesty. And this raging lunatic who wanted to devour the world.
BH: You studied with Morandi. Do you believe you’d have been as influenced by his work if you hadn’t met him?
MG: I knew his etchings before I went to study with him. He taught hard ground etching, where you have to draw with a needle and make a very precise line. There is no tint or anything else to confuse the issue. Either you draw it right or you go elsewhere. But I became more interested in what he did, as I became more acquainted with his drawings, which are very different than the etching, and then of course the paintings.
BH: Morandi’s work is so ascetic. It lacks all of the things you normally use to make a picture interesting. There something almost monastic about that kind of renunciation.
MG: He had that quality in his personality as well as his work. He was very austere, very reserved, very proper in every way. Very sweet. You couldn’t imagine him getting excited. He was well composed with a profound innocent decency.
When I say that I’m kind of between Picasso and Morandi, the thing that I love about Morandi is his clarity of vision. The fact that everything is so rational and unencumbered by emotionalism, although you have an emotional response to that. The paintings are small, undramatic, with no narrative. There’s no brilliant painting. So you have to ask the fundamental question of what makes a work of art meaningful. All the attributes you might use to dramatize your work are not there. So there’s a sense of modesty. But it becomes monumental and you can’t figure out why.
BH: There seems to be a similar ascetic quality to some of your recent pictures. The Flowers of Evil drawings and the monoprints for Purgatory. A lot of your stylistic flair has been sacrificed to directness.
MG: When you are in the field of illustration, you are always trying to persuade people to respond in a certain way. The work has to be assertive to establish its place. You have to make a strong statement in a short length of time. This is unlike painting, where you can look at a picture over a period of ten years and still find it unfolding. It’s like the difference between journalism and poetry. You require a different time interval to appreciate the difference.
BH: How did the Purgatory pictures come about? Were you commissioned to do a book?
MG: Yes. I have a gallery dealer in Italy, who gave me Purgatory to do. I thought it was a great opportunity to move towards a more complex work. I decided to do prints. I took a monotype course in Woodstock. In monotype, you can’t control the work. It depends on how much moisture there is in the air, how damp the paper is, the viscosity of the ink. So when you do a print, you don’t know what the results are going to be. For me, that was good. When you develop a lot of skill, you end up rendering an idea. That's different from letting the picture push you. So I was forced to accommodate the process of making the prints, and it pushed me elsewhere. I had to be more resourceful and react to what I was producing.
BH: Do you know Isiah Berlin’s essay, The Hedgehog & The Fox?
MG: I do. I quote it often.
BH: His theme is that everybody can be classified as either a fox or a hedgehog. A fox with many ideas. A hedgehog with one big idea. You’ve always seemed like a fox to me, with influences coming from everywhere. How much of a hedgehog are you?
MG: I’m interested in all the things that have happened in the visual world. And probably like yourself, my influences are more outside the profession than inside it. I never use the profession as a guide for what I aspire to. I’ve always believed that you could do everything. Not that this is necessarily desirable. If you're a fox, you don't want to act like a hedgehog and vice versa. There’s no ultimate value in doing many things or doing one thing. These seeming contradictions are really part of the same universe. People want to think of them as opposites, but they’re made of the same cloth.
BH: I’ve always thought that people who draw tend to be rational, and painters emotional. Of course, great artists tend to be both. And since opposites attract, a lot of the best artists seem to come from families where one parent was very rational and the other very emotional. Were your parents opposites?
MG: They were very different. It would be hard to characterize them. My mother was very courageous, a sort of outgoing woman who didn't care about the opinion of the world. My father was a modest, more conformist personality.
BH: We all grow up with parental influences and as we go out into the world, we look for bigger influences who will extend those parental ones. So in my experience, people who are always trying to harmonize opposites in their lives tend to come from homes where their parents were opposites.
MG: My mother was enormously supportive without qualification. She convinced me I could do anything. My father was more resistant. He represented the resistance of the world. My secret realization was that I could use my mother to overthrow my father. But I realized not long ago what I had not been willing to admit in my life, and that was a presence of my father in myself. It’s a complicated issue when your identification with your mother is so complete.
BH: When you started doing this, did you think of being a painter?
MG: When you start, you don’t know about the distinction. All you know is that you like to make things. I had already realized that a painter's life was not my life. I couldn’t imagine painting pictures, selling them in a gallery, and having people put them on a wall in their house. It didn’t make sense. I wanted to do something else. At first, it was comic strips. When I was in Music & Art High School, I realized there were other alternatives. When I got to Cooper Union, I was pretty well on my path to the applied arts. I liked the idea of being public and useful and solving problems. I like storytelling.
BH: How conscious were you of all this when you started Pushpin? Or was it a couple of guys sitting around in a bar saying, “Let’s rent space together?”
MG: I think it was that. We were all in school studying design. We wanted to continue the feeling of being in school. We had no idea what the consequence was. We had never worked professionally. I had worked in a package design studio between high school and college, but outside of that, we didn't know what a studio was or how you ran one. We started after I had come back from Italy in ‘53/’54, so I was very interested in the difference between Modernism and the history of the Renaissance and the Baroque. I realized there was another way of thinking about art and imagery. Also, I never felt part of the history of illustration. I felt no continuity with the Saturday Evening Post and the Westport School. That kind of illustration had lost it’s passion, it's ability to look fresh. We took advantage of a change that was going on with artists like Tom Allen and Robert Weaver.
BH: Yet you brought a unique sensibility to illustration. Your model was more Reubens running a studio than, say, Van Gogh. And that was at a time when Van Gogh and the whole melodrama of his life had become kind of a dysfunctional model for 20th century artists.
MG: Yes, and unfortunately it’s a very egocentric model. It says, Do your work and you will be convincing. They’ll change their opinion of you, love you, pay you a lot of money and make you famous. All you’ve got to do is stick to it. This a total delusion about what really happens in the world. Unfortunately, this idea of self-expression has infected the schools as well, telling students that all you have to do is reveal your talent and the world will kneel at your feet. It’s such a total, miserable lie. It’s perpetuated by frustrated painters who encourage the innocent to think it’s true so they have the strength to go on themselves. In fact, the opposite is true. It produces a generation of bitter people who can’t figure out why they can’t make a living. There is something fundamentally wrong with that expectation of talent in society. At Pushpin, all we were trying to do was make a living. We didn't know exactly what that meant. We started the studio. We looked for work. We got jobs. We inspired each other. Then, at a certain point, we realized we were doing something different.
BH: Ok. We’ve discussed Morandi. But what about Picasso? He was the poster-boy for self-expression. The original gangster with genius. Frankly, I always thought he was less original than Matisse, who in some ways he pursued as if he were Captain Ahab trying to catch Moby Dick.
MG: Well, it’s interesting what you say about Picasso. Picasso was constantly referring back to Matisse. He was considered Matisse’s great adversary, but he had tremendous admiration for Matisse. When Matisse died, he said, “Now I will have to paint for both of us.” What I like about Picasso–and you could say this about Matisse as well–was his willingness to take chances. He abandoned one thing after another: Surrealism, Synthetic Cubism, whatever. He was always willing to give it up. Artistic courage is usually over emphasized. But it’s the ability to leave something behind and try something else when you don’t know where you’re going. I think that’s admirable and I love that quality in Picasso. You never lose the fear that you're going to f__k up and your whole reputation will be ruined, but he was fearless about what he did. There have been very few figures like that in history, willing to abandon their success in favor of possibility.
BH: Did you ever think that you’d get out of commercial art and do something else?
MG: No, I had no other ambitions. But I never thought there was a distinction between being a painter or an applied artist. Admittedly, you often have to deal with criteria that make it hard to create work of emotional or aesthetic significance. But once in a while, you do a book jacket, an album cover, an illustration that isn’t compromised by having to do it for a purpose or for a client. Some people use commercial considerations as an excuse not to do extraordinary work. They say “well, we’re not really free.” But as you know, that’s rarely true. Meaningful work presses through regardless of the constraints. In fact, for many people, constraints make good work possible. I’ve never believed I was being compromised as an applied artist.
BH: Were you influenced by figures like William Morris?
MG: Yes. I was very influenced by him and the Arts & Crafts movement and by other social movements that linked aesthetics and society through the idea that a well-made object produces good effects. I’ve always believed that if you do something well, it will have meaning. In recent years, I’ve been interested in African sculpture. There, the intent is totally unrelated to what we call art. It’s the desire to produce an effect, to change people. Who cares about whether its art or not. Even though the intent of a vase is to hold water, somebody says, “look at that again; it’s art.” Ultimately, it’s the work you do. Do it at the highest level and let other people worry about whether its art or not.
BH: I had mentioned earlier that I tend to think of people who draw as logical and rational. Your work is basically drawing.
MG: Yes. I’m a graphic artist in that sense. In recent years, I’ve moved from pen and ink and water color to crayons and softer materials. I think that’s moved me away from the linear a little, but I still think in terms of form and edges rather than in tonality. I guess that’s the difference: Painters see tonality. My strength has always been in shapes: Forms, edges and line.
BH: Those Wizard drawings you’ve done of Clarence Barron for Barron’s magazine seem to embody the essence of your style. They’re similar to the linear style I first saw of yours in the ‘60’s, but the style is cleaner now. It describes more with less.
MG: I must say, I like those drawings. My early drawings in that style were not as good. They were more decorative. More about pattern than drawing. I was learning on the job. These are much better. I’m more sure of the form.
BH: They distill all the elements of your past work.
MG: I think the work has become clearer as I’ve become older. It wasn’t so much the intent to distill things as it was to make things clearer. Stuff drops away.
BH: They’re like your pictures for the Flowers of Evil, where you seem to have renounced style. Yet, in the Purgatory prints, it seems as if you had renounced everything but style. There are no descriptive elements, but they encompass a whole range of emotion.
MG: It is interesting that you say that. There were two things that were happening. One was that they weren’t drawn. They were cut out. So, whatever facility I have at drawing had to be transformed into physically cutting something out, and I cut as well as an average person. Then there’s the fact that the work itself was not predictable or controllable. I had to respond to whatever was occurring and get out of the way. I guess, to some degree, it’s a way of avoiding premeditated style because the work comes from yielding to the circumstances. That is a very different idea than imposing your will on your work. The best drawings come when you look at something with reverence and yield to its uniquenes.
BH: It’s this renunciation of control by someone who has spent his entire career in control that’s interested me. That’s why I began by asking you about Morandi. We live in a terribly prosaic age, and most poetry has become self-conscious and cliché and melodramatized. But there’s poetry in your work and that’s necessarily what you’d expect to find in a business-minded designer.
MG: It’s certainly an aspiration. Work is not simply functional. Whatever it is that makes art worth looking at doesn’t come out of your intention, but from what you are.
Copyright Milton Glaser and Brad Holland.
Various quotes 3
To draw you must close your eyes and sing." Pablo Picasso "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Albert Einstein "Let us not mince words; the most marvelous is always beautiful, anything marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful." Andre Brenton, 1924 "The creative 'act' is a process, not a moment." Unknown "Foundation design is a search, not for the right answers, but for the significant questions." Unknown "I feel in my very soul that I was born to be great ... born to do things in which other men have failed. Those men here (Chicago Institute of Art) who call me 'promising' know not the magnitude of the 'promise' which the gods have given in the later hours of the night, when the hum of the city is hushed in the stillness and the winds are dead, and thought and I communicate alone. They know not the greatness that has come upon be at these times, when the mind has leapt beyond the real and soars unrestrained in the mysteries of the infinite." Thomas Hart Benton "Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision." Salvador Dali, Declaration 1929 "It is not the purpose of the ad or commercial to make the reader or listener say, 'My what a clever ad.' It is the purpose of advertising to make the reader say, 'I believe I'll buy one when I'm shopping tomorrow' ..." Morris Hite "The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history." Harold Rosenberg "The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes." Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe "The talent for discovering the unique and marketable characteristics of a product and service is a designer's most valuable asset." Primo Angeli "It can't be stressed enough that in order to produce great graphics, you have to have a good product and a good client capable of making decisions." Primo Angeli "Every artist clips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures." Henry Ward Beecher "Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before." Edith Warton "A critic is a legless man who teaches running." Unknown "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." Pablo Picasso "Painting is just another way of keeping a diary." Pablo Picasso "It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them." Mark Twain "My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water." Mark Twain "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." Paul Valery "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." F. Scott Fitzgerald "There is saying among prospectors: 'Go out looking for one thing, and that's all you'll ever find.' " Robert Flaherty "Genius ain't nothing more than elegant common sense." Josh Billings "When I die, it will be a shipwreck, and as when a huge ship sinks, many people all around will be sucked down with it." Pablo Picasso "Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea." Lou Dorfsman "Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies." Erich Fromm "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." Naguib Mahfouz "...I recognize the truth that all interesting, real, and quality things become more piquant and beautiful with vintage. There is not a person alive, if his head isn't up his ass, who doesn't prefer and value the fullness of years. With rare exception, everybody has experienced youth. Big deal. The most special thing about that is surviving it. But give me someone who practices the wisdom of her learning, who has fought for and protected her loves, who has and will share her own and the experiences of others. Now THAT is someone worth knowing well." Doug Tennant, About forum member "Let the designer lean upon the staff of the line—line determinative, line emphatic, line delicate, line expressive, line controlling and uniting." Walter Crane "Applied good taste is a mark of good citizenship. Ugliness is a from of anarchy…ugly cities, ugly advertising, ugly lives produce bad citizens." Lester Beall "You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand." Woodrow Wilson (1856 - 1924) "I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious." Albert Einstein "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Albert Einstein "There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules, but there¹s one little rub. They forget that advertising is persuasion, and persuasion is not a science, but an art. Advertising is the art of persuasion." William Bernbach, quoted in Stephen Fox, The Mirror Makers, 1984, New York: Vintage Books, p. 257 "If it doesn¹t sell, it¹s isn¹t creative." David Oglivy "There is no such thing as a Mass Mind. The Mass Audience is made up of individuals, and good advertising is written always from one person to another. When it is aimed at millions it rarely moves anyone." Fairfax Cone, of Foot Cone & Belding, quoted in John O¹Toole, The Trouble with AdvertisingŠ, 1981, New York: Chelsea House, p. 48 "Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can¹t." Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite¹s Methods for Winning the Ad Game, 1988, Dallas, TX: E-Heart Press, p. 203 "Just because your ad looks good is no insurance that it will get looked at. How many people do you know who are impeccably groomedŠbut dull?" William Bernbach, 1989, DDB Needham Worldwide "Advertising doesn¹t create a product advantage. It can only convey it." William Bernbach, 1989, DDB Needham Worldwide "On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar." David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine Books, p. 92 "When you reach for the stars you may not quite get one, buy you won¹t com up with a handful of mud either." Leo Burnett (Originated by John W. Craford), quoted by Joan Kufrin, Leo Burnett: Star Reacher, 1995, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, Inc., p. 52 I can see beauty where others see ugliness. That either makes me an artist, or a person of very poor taste. Anon What is success? To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived; that is to have succeeded. Ralph Waldo Emerson |
various quotes 2
If you have ideas and imagery, technique will follow."
Unknown
Picasso was in a park when a woman approached him and asked him to draw a portrait of her. Picasso agreed and quickly sketches her. After handing the sketch to her, she is pleased with the likeness and asks how much she owed to him. Picasso replies: "$5,000."
The woman screamed, "but it took you only five minutes."
"No, madam, it took me all my life," replied Picasso.
Unknown Source for Story
"One must seek solutions that are engaging and demanding visually."
Unknown
"Creation implies self-creation; the making of an aesthetic object implies the generation of the artist."
Unknown
"Harmony is the grandest artistic aim."
Unknown
"Modern French painting is all right; it has produced many beautiful and interesting things, fully worthy of admiration, but it has also set up response habits among our artistic authorities which have worked against a free approach to other artistic forms. These habits, objectified in numerous critical and appreciative essays, have crystallized into standards which, while they may be effective momentarily for the French painting responsible for them, have little or no validity when applied to other kinds."
Thomas Hart Benton
"Art gives voice to that which has not been spoken."
Unknown
"The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships."
Leo Burnett
"An image ... is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product or service."
Daniel Boorstin
"There is an urgent need to examine old opinions and look at things from a new viewpoint. There must be an increase in the joy one takes in an object, and the photographer should become fully conscious of the splendid fidelity of reproduction made possible by his technique. 'Nature, after all, is not so poor that she requires constant improvement.'"
Albert Renger-Patzsch, "Joy before the Object" 1928
"A great trademark is appropriate, dynamic, distinctive, memorable and unique."
Primo Angeli
"Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one."
Stella Adler
"Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better."
André Gide
"I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time."
Orson Welles
"What garlic is to food, insanity is to art."
Unknown
"Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together."
Vincent Van Gogh
"There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke."
Vincent Van Gogh
"The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things — but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all."
John Cassavetes
"Most people are more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions."
Anonymous
"Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by what you bring to life."
John Homer Miller
"Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. "
Chief Seattle
"If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities."
Maya Angelou
"Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors."
George Santayana
"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
Pablo Picasso
"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."
Oscar Wilde
"The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious."
Lester Bangs
"Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning."
Jacques Barzun
"Providing, meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures - it is the designer's job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting."
Paul Rand
"Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated."
Paul Rand
"Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations."
Paul Rand
"People who love ideas must have a love of words, and that means, given a chance; they take a vivid interest in the clothes which words wear."
Beatrice Wade
"It takes a long time to become young."
Pablo Picasso
"It's unwise to pay too much, but is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little - that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done! If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better."
John Ruskin (1819-1900)
"Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world."
Thomas Moore
"Life is 1% what happens to you and 99% how you respond to it."
Chuck Swindoll
"You speak an infinite amount of nothing."
Shakespeare
"For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
Apostle Paul speaking about Jesus in 1 Col. 1:16,17
"You can't depend on your eyes, when your imagination is out of focus."
Mark Twain
"You can't polish a turd."
David Reddig
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Edmund Burke
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
Michelangelo
"All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties."
Charles W. Eliot
"In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words; people, product and profits. Unless you¹ve got a good team, you can¹t do much with the other two."
Lee Iacocca
"We want consumers to say, 'That¹s a hell of a product' instead of, 'That¹s a hell of an ad.' "
Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 :LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 14
Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.
Italian proverb
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
John Gardner
If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.
Mary Pickford
Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. -
Leonardo da Vinci
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Edison
if you sit in the middle of the road, eventually you will get run over.
Anon
Unknown
Picasso was in a park when a woman approached him and asked him to draw a portrait of her. Picasso agreed and quickly sketches her. After handing the sketch to her, she is pleased with the likeness and asks how much she owed to him. Picasso replies: "$5,000."
The woman screamed, "but it took you only five minutes."
"No, madam, it took me all my life," replied Picasso.
Unknown Source for Story
"One must seek solutions that are engaging and demanding visually."
Unknown
"Creation implies self-creation; the making of an aesthetic object implies the generation of the artist."
Unknown
"Harmony is the grandest artistic aim."
Unknown
"Modern French painting is all right; it has produced many beautiful and interesting things, fully worthy of admiration, but it has also set up response habits among our artistic authorities which have worked against a free approach to other artistic forms. These habits, objectified in numerous critical and appreciative essays, have crystallized into standards which, while they may be effective momentarily for the French painting responsible for them, have little or no validity when applied to other kinds."
Thomas Hart Benton
"Art gives voice to that which has not been spoken."
Unknown
"The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships."
Leo Burnett
"An image ... is not simply a trademark, a design, a slogan or an easily remembered picture. It is a studiously crafted personality profile of an individual, institution, corporation, product or service."
Daniel Boorstin
"There is an urgent need to examine old opinions and look at things from a new viewpoint. There must be an increase in the joy one takes in an object, and the photographer should become fully conscious of the splendid fidelity of reproduction made possible by his technique. 'Nature, after all, is not so poor that she requires constant improvement.'"
Albert Renger-Patzsch, "Joy before the Object" 1928
"A great trademark is appropriate, dynamic, distinctive, memorable and unique."
Primo Angeli
"Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one."
Stella Adler
"Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better."
André Gide
"I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time."
Orson Welles
"What garlic is to food, insanity is to art."
Unknown
"Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together."
Vincent Van Gogh
"There may be a great fire in our hearts, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke."
Vincent Van Gogh
"The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things — but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all."
John Cassavetes
"Most people are more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions."
Anonymous
"Your living is determined not so much by what life brings to you as by what you bring to life."
John Homer Miller
"Man does not weave this web of life. He is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. "
Chief Seattle
"If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities."
Maya Angelou
"Graphic design is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, abnormality, hobbies and humors."
George Santayana
"All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up."
Pablo Picasso
"Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known."
Oscar Wilde
"The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious."
Lester Bangs
"Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning."
Jacques Barzun
"Providing, meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures - it is the designer's job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting."
Paul Rand
"Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated."
Paul Rand
"Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations."
Paul Rand
"People who love ideas must have a love of words, and that means, given a chance; they take a vivid interest in the clothes which words wear."
Beatrice Wade
"It takes a long time to become young."
Pablo Picasso
"It's unwise to pay too much, but is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little - that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done! If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for something better."
John Ruskin (1819-1900)
"Finding the right work is like discovering your own soul in the world."
Thomas Moore
"Life is 1% what happens to you and 99% how you respond to it."
Chuck Swindoll
"You speak an infinite amount of nothing."
Shakespeare
"For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
Apostle Paul speaking about Jesus in 1 Col. 1:16,17
"You can't depend on your eyes, when your imagination is out of focus."
Mark Twain
"You can't polish a turd."
David Reddig
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Edmund Burke
"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
Michelangelo
"All business proceeds on beliefs, or judgments of probabilities, and not on certainties."
Charles W. Eliot
"In the end, all business operations can be reduced to three words; people, product and profits. Unless you¹ve got a good team, you can¹t do much with the other two."
Lee Iacocca
"We want consumers to say, 'That¹s a hell of a product' instead of, 'That¹s a hell of an ad.' "
Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 :LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 14
Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.
Italian proverb
Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
John Gardner
If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down.
Mary Pickford
Simplicity is the ultimate form of sophistication. -
Leonardo da Vinci
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
Thomas Edison
if you sit in the middle of the road, eventually you will get run over.
Anon
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