English | Deutsch English | Deutsch“The difference between the optimist and the pessimist is that the pessimist has more facts,” said Jean-Paul Betbèze, Chief Economist and Head of Economic Research Department, Crédit Agricole S.A., in a panel at the Millken Institute’s Global Conference 2008 in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. True as this may be, his statement stood in sharp contrast to the overall vibe of the event: Yes, we can, was the prevailing sentiment, and the overwhelming majority of attendees would probably have outed themselves as fervent optimists.
These seem to be apocalyptic times for designers. If you happen to be a member of this threatened species, you better look for another calling. We had just put Pillippe Starck’s “Design is dead” fatalism to bed, and then I read Peter Merholz’s essay from 2007: “Stop designing products!”
The 1972 New York subway map is back! Massimo Vignelli, the man behind this graphic design classic, was asked by to update his legendary map for the magazine’s May issue, reflecting more than 30 years’ worth of changes.
I came across another example of meta-marketing today — the phenomenon of PR becoming the actual story. The Wall Street Journal reports on the Brew Blog launched by Miller Brewing Co. It’s about beer, yes, but instead of promoting Miller’s products, the corporate blog focuses exclusively on every step of arch rival Anheuser-Busch.
After reading and talking so much recently about the concept of “democratic exclusivity,” I was delighted to finally experience it myself when I was strolling the streets of Paris last week.
BusinessWeek has published its annual The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies list, a survey put together in collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Of course Apple is no.1. Yet there are some surprises.
I had an interesting conversation with a professor this week at the eMarketing conference. We were talking about shrinking attention spans, the rise of snack-size media, and the tyranny of output. “Never are we bored these days,” the professor said, referring to the over-supply of distraction. “That’s a problem,” he maintained, “because boredom is the mother of creativity. There is no creativity without boredom.”
The world is small. Life is short. But brands still want to be big and have a long life. Hence my advice for them: Shrink!
Philippe Starck had an epiphany, after all these years: “Everything I have designed is absolutely unnecessary,” the French star designer admitted in a recent interview with the German weekly DIE ZEIT. I had the dubious pleasure of hanging out in the Starck-designed Volar club in Shanghai last weekend, and my initial reaction to his statement was: right!
In case you didn’t know: China scales. Let’s take QQ.com as an example, the leading Chinese online social network. The site is reported to have over 300 million active accounts. That is eight times the member base of Facebook — and it’s the same size as the US population.
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