Russell Davies

highly abashed gearhead gnarlyness

(This is a stream of nonsense about cars. Because everytime I see one of metacool's splendid Gearhead Gnarlyness posts I want to write something. But I don't know anything about cars, really.)

I'm getting old. I'm finding toy cars more and more evocative and nostalgic. I was in a model shop with Arthur the other day and found this Battle Kings Tank Transporter and this Bertone Barchetta which overwhelmed me with nostalgia (a bit, I'm not Proust or anything). So I bought them.

(I especially remember the bouncy suspension on the mid 70s Corgi Whizzwheels. They don't make them like that anymore)

And I was in a very nice model car museum near Skegness (it was raining) and saw these rather fine Hot Wheels Blings. And they made me start to think about my relationship with cars.

I've worked on car accounts for most of my career in advertising. A few years on Fiat/Lancia, a few on Nissan and a few on Honda. I've always rather enjoyed it but I never really fit in. Because I'm not a  petrolhead. We used to the British Grand Prix all the time and I spent the whole time complaining about the noise. We'd drive a selection of exotic sports vehicles and I'd try and get everyone to slow down. The first time I took a company car home to show my Mum and Dad it was a Nissan 300ZX and I was proudest of the carphone in it. I probably never got it above 80mph. (Apart from the time I spun one, showing off to some creatives, which finally proved to me that I was not built to drive fast.)

But it's not that I don't like driving or cars. I love driving and cars. I just don't like driving fast. And I don't like all the stuff you're supposed to like about cars.

This seems to capture more of the essence of 'car-ness' than some fancy Porsche or Ferrari.

I love the way we use cars to say so much about ourselves. They're such a conscious, careful and expressive brand choice. And I love the way we turn them into our little worlds. (The best ever expression of this is Martin Parr's From A To B and the accompanying TV programme - does anyone have a tape of that? This picture's from there.) And I love the romance of driving. Late nights. Shouting along to the radio. Truck stops. All that.

This is probably my dream vehicle. I'd love one of these. But if not available at large scale I'd settle for this.

But I hate the complacency of the car industry. They promise so much and deliver so little. (Which is why Honda was such a refreshing change). But the thing that constantly gets me is the paucity of the design imagination. Hot Wheels, Matchbox and Funkmaster Flex can come up with stuff that actually excites people. Interesting shapes. New ideas. But the car industry? Nothing.

Which is why I've started collecting vehicle designs that actually seem interesting to me. Like these fantastic looking RNLI rescue vehicles. Look at the shapes and the scale of these things. This is what we were promised in the 70s.

You're not telling me there wouldn't be a consumer market for one of these. It might be slow but it'll out Hummer a Hummer.

(Finally a front three-quarter facing right, I knew we'd get there eventually)

Or look at this. Finally someone has taken their design cues from Gerry Anderson. But why does it have to be a crane? Why can't it be some cool, hybrid, electric truck? That's how we'll persuade people to give up the gas guzzlers. By building stuff that looks like the future was supposed to look, not cute little smart cars.

Anyway. Hmm. I'm getting interested in cars again. It's been a while. More on a car theme later. (And it's become clear to me. Basically, I like big wheels.)

plannr.net

Some things have come together. I registered plannr.net a while ago as a sort of 2.0 joke, not sure what to do with it. And Alex P built Web2.0 logo creator. And lots of the people on the list of 'all the planners' were slightly floored by the number of extra blogs they might 'have' to read. So I added another thing to my ziki, pointed plannr.net at it and added all the feeds for everyone on the list. So, assuming it works, you can go to one place and see the latest stuff that any of those 100 plus planners has written. Or you can subscribe to the whole thing here. Let me know if it seems useful or not. (And if you want to be removed, let me know.)

Add: hmm. The ziki doesn't seem to be working right now. I'll try and work out what's up. And the subscription link about needs to be right-clicked and pasted into a feedreader. You can't just click on it.

i never should have left

Huge congrats to everyone at w+k london. And to the rest of the w+k world which seems to have gone blog crazy recently. Made me quite nostalgic for April 6th 2004, when I stuck this picture of Sean, Boo and Mick up as the first entry on the welcome to optimism blog and everyone said 'what's a blog?'.

This picture still sums up quite a lot of what w+k's about. Apart from anything else, it was a Sunday.

the great british holiday

There's been a lot of talk in the papers recently about the revival of the traditional British holiday. Especially following the hand-baggage farago. We've been doing that for a while, not because of security scares or because of eco-concern about flying but because going abroad is always such a hassle. And there's lots of bits of Britain we've not seen yet. Anyway. Here are some pictures of our holidaying in Mablethorpe and the North Yorkshire Coast. Just incase you were thinking of cancelling that club med trip.

art and commerce

I've always thought the interesting thing about advertising and many of the creative industries is the enforced and everpresent tension between art and commerce. It's the combination of the two that makes life interesting. Jarvis Cocker talks about Art Schools on this radio 4 programme, and the little bit of history in there throws more light on that tension. It also points out one of the reasons why Britain might be unusually good at those industries - the provision of art schools occasioned by the industrial revolution.

while we were camping

We've been off camping in Lincolnshire and staying in a house near Whitby/Robin Hood's Bay. Very nice. Hardly been near a computer. Not checked my email. So sorry if you've been trying to get in touch. One thing I did was pop into a cybercafe a couple of times and contribute to the Fast Company blogjam.  I suspect I got hold of the wrong end of the stick with this. Everyone else wrote long, thoughtful pieces about innovation, social networking and themselves and I wrote short, pointless things about frozen spam, baseball and goths. Ah well.

Also, while I was away, Mark McGuiness posted an interview we did together about business emotional intelligence and stuff. I can't bring myself to listen to it but I hope it's OK. Mark's a really interesting guy, you should read his blog.

Picture above is of Feedback Loop by Kenny Hunter. We called in at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park on the way home, which is always worth a visit. Here's Arthur studying James Turrell's Deer Shelter sky.

out again

               

       

We're off to the seaside again. Won't be back for ten days. Posting will be sporadic. Probably pictures from my phone if anything. Except for occasional trips to wifi locations for work stuff.

            

school of the web - assignment 9 - fighting talk

I was interviewing Paul Colman for something else, and then at the end, I thought I should try and grab him for an Account Planning School of the Web brief. Because he's smart and he's a client, so that's a useful perspective.

So Paul decided that what we should think about is, how do we make MMA a more popular sport?

Here's our conversation - paul_mma.mp3, and it's always worth checking out Paul's conversation with Alexis Demetriades.

So the task is really simple - you need to come up with a 5-year plan that will make MMA a top 5 sport in the US and the UK. Present your solution however you want to, put it on your blog, or send us a file (but the file needs to be less than 3MB). Since I'm assuming a lot of you won't know a lot about MMA (I don't) you probably need to do quite a lot of research and digging around the internet and start thinking yourself into a different mindset. No more rules or clues than that.

Anyway, have a go. I think this'll be really interesting. This one needs to be done by the end of August. Assignment 8 is with The Design Conspiracy folks for judging etc. All will be revealed when I get back from hols.

craft skills

   

           

In some ways the future of agencies is obvious. Departments and professional divisions will have to disappear. Great creative work will be made by teams of people, some of whom are good at powerpoint, some of whom know some photographers. The creative/strategic/account management distinction is already pretty meaningless, I suspect the departmental follies will wither soon too.

But it won't eradicate the need for some of those people to have actual craft skills, to actually know how to do some stuff, because craft skills inform strategic thinking. And being able to explain the mysteries of craft will make you absolutely invaluable. Which brings me to this lovely post at Noisy Decent Graphics. He takes on the challenge of explaining kerning. And he does it well. Craft skill plus a mission to explain; this mystery man has a future.

Renewed respect to spell with flickr.

schulze and webb have done it again

I've always attributed most of the success I've had as a planner to the fact that I learned how to stick images in PowerPoint way before most other people. (Partly because I used to sit through three day product briefings from Microsoft people when I worked on the business).

So basically I've been coasting for the last ten years.

But always conscious of the need for career innovation I've kept looking for the next thing that's going to make me seem interesting again. I've played around with using a tablet a bit, used mindmapping sometimes, but they've not really done it. And it's always puzzled me that more technologists haven't spent time building and developing presentation tools, since there's so much obvious room for improvement. Powerpoint and Keynote seem to have stopped evolving. They're both fine, but they just do what they do.

Well, all hail Schulze and Webb because they're certainly thinking about it. And I love this new interface they've built for 2D presentations, because it changes the way you'd approach a presentation, and that needs doing. And the physicality of it is brilliant, it gets you well away from clicking, which is huge, because clicking instantly makes you feel like you're sitting at your desk not standing on a stage, and clicking normally requires looking at a mouse or something, which puts your attention in the wrong place. Brilliant. Wouldn't you love to play with that? See how it changes the way you present.

Personally I'm desperate for someone to build the next iteration of video in presentation software - I want to be able to use video as effectively as you can use images. So not just embedding a chunk that grinds away with you powerless to stop it, but something that lets you talk for as long as you want while your video loops away behind you and then, when you're ready, smoothly transitions into the next bit of video which then similarly vamps until ready.

I hope someone's working on that.