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jon steel interview
Went to see Jon Steel yesterday to interview him about Perfect Pitch and other things. What a decent, self-effacing, funny, insightful, interesting man. He's my model of what a planner should be. We ended up chatting for just over an hour, and I thought I'd put it all up and not bother editing (because a) I'm lazy and b) I think he's that interesting). The book is well worth reading, as Gareth has noted. Thank you Jon.
freakin awesome
Emily recently spoke at a conference in Singapore. And she asked the rest of us to contribute some video that she could use in her presentation. Jeffre made the best one. It's about brands and interestingness. So here it is (with a little intro from me for the YouTube folks). It'll give you some insight into the quietly twisted genius that is Jeffre Jackson.
interestingness.mov (it's about 27MB. Sorry. I've tried repeatedly to upload it to YouTube but I end up with no sound, and when I adjust it to another format the audio disappears halfway through. Frankly, I'm flummoxed.)
love want to help you start an agency
The thing I love about LOVE is their enthusiasm. A couple of months ago they had no blog, today they're offering to help you start a digital agency, using their blog.
a bunch of stuff
I have this huge bloglines clippings folder, full of things that I fully intended to build a whole post around. But it's not going to happen and I want to share, so here's a bunch of stuff:
I updated the Creative Spaces Squidoo to incorporate this post of Leland's about the perfect office space, inspired by this post from Diablogue, inspired by this one from Creative Review.
I love this post from Citizen Agency about Obvious Corp, challenging the conventional wisdom about how a tech business is supposed to behave - i.e. they're planning for sustainability rather than aiming for selling and running at some point. Maybe that's one difference about OIA versus the standard creative agency model.
The only disappointing thing about this AmbientClock is that it's not a real product - but that's also what's interesting about it, it's an online beta of a potential real-world product.
Ben wrote a great thing about what Alex Ferguson and Michael Beirut have in common, if you've not read it, you should.
Beeker's had a smart idea about 'virtual interns' which I fully intend to engage with at some point but my head seems to be rejecting ideas like it might reject a transplanted pig's brain.
Jon Leach has great advice about building a compelling presentation.
All these doodles and design drawings from The Smithsonian are magnificent (via notebookism).
Todd's written some smart stuff about Ogilvy Transient, which is an interesting idea if likely to be doomed.
This is old stuff from the Fallon planning blog but still worth reading - all about George Lucas and the long tail. (Which reminds me that Arthur and I have a genius suggestion about what George Lucas should do next - he should just remake all the Stars Wars films. Shoot them all again. Same scripts. Different actors. Better effects. It'd be brilliant. And then he could hand the business on to the next generation and someone could just keep making the Star Wars movies using the latest technology, every twenty years or so, until the end of time, kind of like happens with King Kong.)
Paul gives sensible and sensitive advice on evaluating and feeding back on creative work. Very thoughtful stuff and a skill that's not talked about often enough.
John Kricfalusi writes with genius and passion about soft toys and the death of form.
This is what people should use to monitor brand tracking data.
Diego's written a post on to-do lists, especially public to-do lists, that's stuck with me for a long time. I guess I think of this very blog you're reading as a public to-do list, and this one as a public have-done list.
And let's end with two great YouTube moments - The Communist Manifesto illustrated by Disney and Amateur (via Music Thing)
october's post of the month - voting time
Well, it doesn't look like there are more nominations coming but there's a bunch of great candidates:
Jason - transmedia planning
Footnotes to the tyranny of the big idea
The basics
Web design is 95% typography
All well worth reading, but there has to be a winner, so here's the magic voting box and away you go. Poll closes on Sunday.
eno and cholera
Bless you Matt Jones, his blog alerted me to this. I've got my tickets, I suggest everyone get theirs quickly.
coffee news
First; reporting back. Coffee morning on Saturday in New York was great, if overwhelming. I tried to take pictures but they're rubbish (Piers has some good ones here). It reminded me that I'm absolutely the worst person to be doing this since I'm so socially inept and hate the process of introducing myself and all that. So I didn't really get chance to say hi to most of the people there. Sorry. But in some ways I think that's the point, these posts just provide a catalyst to get people together. It was excellent to see Johanna, Piers and Malcolm R again though. And to meet Lauren, Noah and Michael. And everyone else.
Second, plans for this week. Asi has been bugging me to do an early morning coffee morning for all the people with proper jobs, which seems fair enough. So how about 7am at Bar Italia, Soho, on the 17th? All are welcome.
What else happened last week? I know Sydney tried to get a wave going. Well, Emily did. And Portland and Kansas City looked fun. Did anyone else get together?
a couple more for patty
Looking back we had a real summer of swimming. This was an outdoor pool somewhere in Wales. Bit cold.
This was Brockwell Lido (I think). Equally cold but a sunny day.
cheap hotel in manchester?
I'm off to Love again next week. Can anyone recommend a cheap but decent hotel in Manchester? When someone else was paying I always liked staying at Malmaison but now it's my own money I'm not so sure.