cbueno

Need a first name & last as well as your email.

or write to carlos -t- bueno -d- org if you don't wanna be an exhibitionist.

If you are not a snob Oakland has some great places to live on the bleeding edge of gentrification. I stayed at a friend's place near 17th st, a kind of brownstony place, 800 bucks/month, beautiful kitchen, right on the BART.

Counterfeiting checks and legal tender. On newsprint. In pencil. I figured I'd bootstap into enough cash to buy proper pens and paper.

PR move, just like "unlimited internet". The architecture doesn't support unlimited anything, but like everyone else I have, what, 100MB in there, tops? So declare victory and go home. Doesn't cost them a thing except some config work by the Mail team.

[aristus, lost my passwd :)]

"Eyecatching" means garish, cluttered, etc. This is not always desirable. Usually it's reserved for wide-spectrum ads for cheap items, hence "downmarket". Audience drives design. If your audience is a few thousand rich wives you'll take the elegant route. If your audience is a million working girls your best response comes from more strident stuff. Since there are so many more working girls versus rich wives, it seems as if all DM is "downmarket". I am sure of this because I've seen the difference even a few changes can make, and I've seen years and years of real-world research on how different styles gather response for different things.

Let's say I'm doing an ad for big copiers. Artsy doesn't work here. You need strong, reassuring. Price isn't listed. Instead you want a couple of pictures, big (local!) phone number, local address, and an IBM-ish logo. IKON, formerly Alco, wanted to establish a trust brand that buyers don't have to think too hard about. So: IKON came out of "I Know One Name".

Now you are selling pizza. Number, types of food, price, delivery options, hours of operation. Closeups of bubbling cheese. Sizzle, not steak.

Cut to the iPhone. Popular yet hip. It's a fine line, and very few orgs can manage it. That's why Apple is the darling of the ad world. They are an outlier.

Another great fine-liner was Grey Poupon mustard. They took the visual cues of the rich, the exclusiveness, the clubby feel un-rich people imagine exists ("But of course!") and placed it right in front of the fact they were flogging mustard for 4 bucks a jar. But once that hook was in and the audience was ok with funny crunchy brown stuff, other fancy mustards went right back to the more familiar downmarket themes of "fun for kids" and "kick it up a notch".

...and so on. Non-commercial (and, frankly, inexperienced) artists tend to make the mistake that ads are not thought about too much or are made by folk who lack taste. Sure, 90% of every profession is crap, but the aim of commercial art is different from Art.

I saw Boord last week at a startup panel at Florida Intl Uni. It reminded me of Garcia-Marquez's book "In Evil Hour/La mala hora", in which a town is plagued by anonymous character assasination.

There are two problems that everyone latches onto when they hear about it: posts are anonymous, and you can't opt in or out. The model is coercive. If someone wants to attack you you are given no choice but to register and marshall your friends.

On the other hand, I discount objections that everyone immediately latches onto. Often that means the idea is simply strange or taboo, not unworkable. Remember that the first proposed application of anonymous digital cash was an assasination pool.