Things Unsaid

This is a great motivational video. The part about the "connecting dots" is specially imporant to me.



This helps me when I feel confused.

Not that is a bad thing. I mean, if that was as frequent as my lonely weekends, life would be better.

And, for the first time, I get the meaning of the lyrics to Best Of You.

This was an instant classic from the moment I first saw the video.

Plus, the kid and his relationship with the animals remind of a 80's classic, The NeverEnding Story.

 

 

Actually, he did.

Sade:
Isso só acaba se um de nós realmente quiser - e ninguém quer.
Não esquece - faça tudo que tiver que fazer antes de nos vermos, pois seu rendimento vai cair.
O meu cai.
Subo em cima de você [ou vice versa] e esqueço da vida...

Every now and then he says somethings I want to show the world.

The worst thing about coming to work before your boss is that you get more familiar with the work place than him. So you start doing stuff you shouldn't.

I remmember the day I was given the gift of portable music. It was Christmas ´97, and I got my first discman. The first one to use it was mybrother. He excluded himself from the family reunion to an isolated room where he listened to his Alanis Morisette album, which was his present, in myChristmas present.

Since then, I don´t know what it feels like to be on a moving vehicle and not listen to music. That same discman would go everyday to class with me until early 2005, when I got my first iPod. I remmember when I started taking the city bus to school, I wouldn´t take me iPod with me in the beginning. But then I became a very bitter person. So started taking my iPod with me, even if taking the bus was somewhat dangerous.

Last night, I sync-ed my pictures library to my 80Gb iPod. I never sync my iPod to my libraries, but it was the only way to get my pictures into my iPod. So I did it. I payed much attention to not sync the songs and erase them all. But I guess that didn't work.

This morning, as I say to my dad in the car "I feel like listening to the Foos today", I realised I couldn't find any songs on my iPod. Only pictures! What good will that do?

This is my first big frustation I get from Apple. I'm guessing there are more to come. Oh well. 

Ok, it's September 30th. When will Apple's home page announce a release date for Leopard?

Oh, btw, I'm turning 19 today. (: Hooray for me!

For almost three weeks now, I spend the first four hours of my day monitoring video-editting and advertising classes on 20 Macs.

Just now, after I left my job to work on some stuff on the pc-lab I just tried to close a window on its upper-left hand corner.

This makes me happy. :D I´m leaving the dark side of the force. Now all I need to for Apple to finally release Leopard so I can finally get my Macbook Pro!

Isn't it funny, how the one thing I love the most about the person I love the most is the same thing I hate the most about everybody else?

Isn't that ironic?

I've just discovered a whole new world in the wonder that is Adobeland.

Now all I need is to nerd my way through life for another three years so I can master Adobe Camera Raw like I've mastered Photoshop. Muwah muwah muwah.

My Mac transition has begun. Yesterday was my first day as an intern on the G5 Computer labs. I got learn all stuff about Final Cut. And today promisses to be a good one, it´s Photoshop day!

I´m excited.

It sure is! It first started with me finally getting the job I wanted at school. I got a chance to talk with the guys from the department, which are offering jobs for students in the editing rooms working with Final Cut Pro on a Power Mac G5; and in the classrooms where they have hands-on classes with Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. I wanted to work in the editting rooms, but since I know my way around Photoshop, they put me in the classrooms. Plus, most kids who apply never worked with Macs - I know, it's a shame - and since I did, I got a big "yes! come work with us!" from them. I should start working as soon as I get all the documents ready.

 

Then, after that, I bought my Tim Festival tickets, which included concerts by The Arctic Monkeys and The Killers.

 

In the words of the immortal Chandler Bing, could I be any happier?

This is really worth reading.

What is Art Direction (No. 9)

This outdoor ad, newly posted on a phone kiosk, arrested me as I strolled down Lexington Avenue last night. Its explicit content can be summarized as follows:

A young woman, facing the viewer, holds what appears to be a prosthetic arm—her own prosthetic arm, one infers. The young woman is casually dressed in a sweater and jeans. Her expression borders on neutral. Where her right arm should be, the sweater has been pinned back. The poster also contains words advertising a new HBO documentary, executive-produced by James Gandolfini, concerning the difficulties faced by a new generation of American war veterans returning home from Iraq.

That is a pictorial inventory, but the poster contains more content than I have listed. Most of that content is externally located. For this poster has been framed and shot, and its subject styled and posed, almost exactly like an American Gap ad.

Consciously or unconsciously, an American viewer will almost certainly make an uncomfortable connection between the disfigurement and sacrifice portrayed in this ad, and the upbeat quality of the Gap’s long-running, highly successful clothing slash lifestyle campaign.

That connection is content. And the non-verbal information that triggers that content in the viewer’s mind is art direction.


Wordless and full of meaning

What is the art direction saying? What is it adding to the content that is already there? Surely the sight of an attractive young woman who has lost her arm fighting in Iraq is loaded enough as an image. Surely a non-combatant, far from Iraq, safe at home, already feels plenty of complex emotions when confronted with this one veteran and at least some of the visual evidence of her sacrifice. What additional statement is being made by the art director’s decision to style this poster like a Gap ad?

Here is a possible reading:

While many Americans are well aware that their country is at war, many others are doing their best to blot that thought out of their minds. In this effort at collective amnesia they are abetted by many retail advertisers and TV programmers, including not a few TV news programmers. Ratings-wise, the war is a bummer. Sales-wise, it is a drag. America wants to shop and move on. (Interestingly, the fashion industry is the one segment of America’s consumer culture that is paying attention. The 691 pages of the new September Vogue are filled with skirts, shoes, dresses, and jackets that obviously resemble armor or in other ways clearly invoke awareness of war and warriors.)

In conceiving the way this poster would be shot and styled, the art director was not holding the Gap responsible for the war in Iraq. Nor was he or she blaming the viewer. But by carefully echoing the imagery of an ad that epitomizes our comfortably shallow consumer lifestyle, the art director does indict the complacent among us and challenge us to think about something besides our next new sweater or iPod.

The placement of type ensures that the words are the last thing we see on the poster. We absorb and are discomfited by the rich, non-verbal text for several beats before our eyes take in the explicit, written content announcing a documentary.

That is art direction. It is not art. It is not design. It is something else. It makes us feel. It makes us think. It holds up the mirror to our desires, our regrets, ourselves.

 

By Jeffrey Zeldman @ zeldman.com.

Sorry for the bad neologism.

My pic of the day. Picture made by the English photographer Jonathan Yeo, representing Pres. Bush´s face with pornographic images.

It's my new thing for the week. I know it's late to jump on the bandwagon, but still..

Great video.