I can't remember a more anticipated magazine launch than this one: monocle magazine, called a cross between Vice and The Economist (with pictures, and four different paper stocks) Wallpaper doesn't count though, as it was a surprise.

The content, as hinted on by many, aims to satisfy readers looking for serious content. (whatever happened to the joy of reading peer-reviewed journals?) If the first issue's lengthy articles on Chinese Imperialism in Africa and a few more all totalling 50,000 words (about the average novel) are any indication of what's in store, then Tyler Brule (and the H&M twins) have really got something going. The magazine will be flanked by a strong web presence (the former head of Interactive Design and Technology at BBC is making this happen) and is staffed with formers from the Independent and The New York Times Travel Magazine.

My luck of being in Manila, the Brits will get their hands on it first. I'm retreating to back issues of the New Yorker.

Q&A with Chuvaness, known outside the blogsphere as Cecile Zamora, had an answer that almost made me drop and roll on the floor (it's about Kris Aquino, of course). What with Manolo Quezon, Abe Olandres, Bang and Blame and Jessica Zafra all game to fire out email answers for Bulletproofvest, could it be that there's nothing more entertaining than reading other people's words on my blog? Like eating off someone else's dinner plate. I like!

1. I saw you on TV with your bag collection. Do you have anything fake? How'd they get in?

At the risk of sounding mayabang, I have no fakes, except my FAKE bag by Bea Correa, a Dutch artist. She gave it to me after I interviewed her for the Star.

Here it is.

Also, I’ve always believed there is nothing worse than a fake LV, except for a genuine Secosana.

My note: And I really love those Susana bags you can get for P430 a pop at 168.

2. Bryanboy: good or bad for fashion? Why?

Good if he is your customer. Bryan was a customer of mine in Defect and recently at Store for all Seasons. I actually met him in Defect around 1998, he was the kid with credit card and the Jeremy Scott logomania bucket hat. He was 16 or 17 at that time.

3. Could you win Project Runway? Can you out chuva Michael Kors?

You know what I have never seen a full episode because the people remind me of annoying folks at Parsons (where I studied in the ‘90s). Some of those BFA students are so mayabang and feeling God.
Besides, only normal (commercial) designers win those and the Parsons Golden Thimble Award (with apologies to Marc Jacobs, my crush). So to answer your question, no.

My note: You'd have to cry on every episode to win that thing.

4. I usually wear a pair of jeans, a boy scout belt, a tee and a pair of trainers. I rotate three pairs of leather shoes, four sneakers, and I trim my nose hair. Queer Eye me.

Haha. Let me see your picture so I can see your hair, height and waistline and we’ll take it from there.
For starters, don’t wear leather shoes with jeans. I really hate that look.

My note: (Okay, I won't.)

5. I have to defer to you on this: does Arnold Clavio blip your gaydar? Take a minute.

LOL. You really crack me up.
Arnold Clavio can’t be gay because I don’t see any effort to look cute.
How do I put this delicately? He is not easy to look at.
But I do have a certain fondness for him because my first baby used to love that Arn-Arn muppet.

My note: He trips mine. I think it's how he always wears a jacket in this tropical country. Underneath the windbreaker and the glasses is a buffed superhero. And the Tancho pomade gigolo look just ices the cake.

6. Six parties anywhere, done or upcoming, that you want to or should have crashed.

I would’ve wanted to crash the Nicolas Ghesquiére dinner, but thank God I was invited last minute.
I really, really enjoyed that Motorola party where they “raffled off” 100 phones, Macau-style. (I was also invited and I won last minute.)

Honestly I don’t crash parties because I’ve always had this “hiya” thing where I don’t go if I’m not invited.

Besides, I really love staying home.

7. Five things you want to get rid of but can't. Why?

This is a trick question. Did you mean why I want to get rid of them, or why can’t I get rid of them?

Anyway the five things are:

Manila traffic
security guards
ugly bathrooms
my zits
my fear of flying

8. Pick a man and a woman, dead or alive, that you'd give your left eye and three fingers to dress. How and for what would you like to dress them for? (And, which three fingers would you give away?)

Forget the eye and fingers! Kainez.
I would love to make over TJ Trinidad because I crush him.
Kris has to stop wearing gowns in broad daylight. It is a misrepresentation to the masses, that rich people wear gowns all the time. Like that Lotlot de Leon movie where she lived in a mansion and had spaghetti bolognese and red hotdogs for breakfast. It is so wrong, ano ba. I am tired of seeing Kris Aquino’s halter tops and her number 7 eyebrows. But it’s hard to make her change her look. Remember when she wore Custo Barcelona every single day?

My note: Kris is over the top. I really think she's certifiably nuts.

9. The next big things in the Philippine fashion industry: one male model, one female and one designer.

Nobody! I do love Jon Mullally’s looks (even though I cannot converse with him).
Female models and designers are all slim pickins here, so I’ll pass.

10. What's in your refrigerator? Including the stuff you don't know about. Better yet, take a picture and annotate.

Mostly my Dutch husband’s since he loves food. Mine are the Japanese stuff, his are the healthy stuff.

The pictures are in here and here.

My note: Where are the film caps?

Bonus Question: Were you ever envious of Mich Dulce's PBB stint? I mean, she has a wikipedia entry and you don't.

No way! HAHAHAHA. As Ate Vi would say, “Been there, been that.”

I convinced Mich to join PBB so she can get her KSP fix. That’s what I actually told her and it was one of the times she took my advice. And now she hates it that she can’t cross the street without someone saying, “Meech, Meech, picture naman o.”

I can’t be in Big Brother because I can’t eat strange food and I’m scared of communal bathrooms. I have a problem with authority so I can’t do those stupid tasks. I really, really hate the voice of Big Brother.
And I don’t want to win Promac appliances.

As for the other thing, I don’t want to be in Wiki cause all your haters come out of the woodwork. Besides I could start my own Wiki if I wanted to no? I’m not that KSP.

Thanks to Chuvaness.

Tags: Chuvaness, Philippines, Kris+Aquino, Manila, Mich+Dulce, Cecile+Zamora

The Magazine Publishers of America have announced the winners for Best Cover, along with Best News, Celebrity, Concept, Fashion, Service and Best Cover Line. Nice hi-res photos await, including The Economist's "Rocketman."

Tags: magazine, the+new+yorker, rolling+stone, the+economist, mpa

Seth Godin has a really nice piece on how to "live happily" with a great designer. A good read for anyone who wants to understand what makes the creative process work, and for the designer, some language to surround what it is exactly that's bugging you.

This of course assumes that the designer is "great." My favorite:

You can't tell me you'll know it when you see it. First, you won't. Second, it wastes too much time. Instead, you'll need to have the patience to invest twenty minutes in accurately describing the strategy. That means you need to be abstract (what is this work trying to accomplish) resistant to pleasing everyone (it needs to do this, this and that) and willing, if the work meets your strategic goal, to embrace it even if it's not to your taste.

I've run into this problem so many times. Clarity of concept is something clients are often too lazy to do, and they end up muddling the process, which produces results that are nowhere near what they should be. And, the designer is not a mindreader, nor does he have a crystal ball either.

Tags: graphic+design, designers, creative+process

I've had this entry in mind for a while, delayed, possibly, by the simultaneously eye-numbing and hypnotic sensation caused by the daily visual assault of advertising.

Here's some observations I believe are good enough proof advertising's gone from a respectable industry to a bunch chest-thumping gorillas:

1. We've all seen the innumerable amount of billboards in the city, some of which seriously lack taste, never mind decent art direction. Many are calling for an end to the "carpet bombing." Seriously, our streets are getting uglier with all those beveled type.

2. Both GMA and ABS-CBN have renounced their membership with the broadcasting body KBP, allowing them to control how much advertising to air and when to air it. That's really long-hand for: P&G and Unilever can take their war to the people untramelled. So, now, you never know which show starts when. It just starts sometime after the show before it.

3. The INQ7.net website, that, according to Alexa.com is the most popular site based in the Philippines, has a homepage that's a whopping 851 KB!! Even worse, the ABS-CBN news site checks in at a monstrous 1104 KB. Compare that to this blog at 264 KB, 292 KB for CNN.com or 416 KB for NYTimes.com. How can you read that if you're on dial-up like most Filipinos are? Maybe Filipinos abroad can deal with the weight, and it seems like the advertisers are targeting them anyway.

(Even if there are some elements cached in your browser, those local news sites still take upwards of 700 KB to load.)

And the reason why these sites are overweight? It's not the fries and milkshakes. (Actually, in a way, it is.)

So, with advertising getting in the way of access to information, entertainment and a decent drive (actually, it's more like the government allowing this to happen by refusing to regulate the industry), the best thing to do is stay home, hide the car keys and read a book.

P.S. No need to remind me of my Masters degree.

Tags: advertising, philippines, media, media+issues, media+literacy, outdoor+advertising, Alexa, Philippine+Daily+Inquirer, ABS-CBN, KBP

An article in the NYTimes, from a book called Juicing the Orange lays out (excerpts) some steps for institutionalizing creativity in the workplace. Among them: not merely stating the oft-used but callously ambiguous phrase "think outside the box".

• Always start from scratch.

• "Demand a ruthlessly simple definition of the business problem."

• Find a "proprietary emotion" you can appeal to. "Marketers who favor reason over emotion," they write, "will find themselves quite literally forgotten."

• Think big. Don't be limited by the budget or the initial challenge.

• Take calculated risks.

• Collaborate with others both inside and outside your company to solve the problem.

• "Listen hard to your customers. (Then listen some more.)"

I agree with the first one whole-heartedly. That's what I ask my clients to do. And I've often found that it's the smaller companies that are willing to take the bigger risks (naturally, the bigger ones feel they have more to lose). That said, the smaller companies who bet their companies still have everything to lose anyway.

Demanding an elevator version of the business problem is crucial to getting your head wrapped around it in the first place. How well you solve the problem often comes down to how well you beat it down to simple terms.

And somewhere in there: pay attention to the details. I'd like to add another: trust your designer.

Tags: creativity, business, design

Here's the GP Winner at Cannes (print category).

Visual is stunning, and works perfectly with the "imagine" strapline below. And it presents the product on another level; many are used to seeing fantastic things built with Lego. Here, you have to see it with your imagination. (Source)

Technorati Tags: advertising, Cannes, design, Lego

It's too bad that if you have an IP address from outside the U.S., you can't watch the streaming episodes from ABC shows like Desperate Housewives and Lost. But the exercise of giving away the shows has proven very promising.

Prime-time ABC television shows were viewed more than 11 million times on the Web in the first month of a test by the Walt Disney Co. of whether consumers will watch ads online if the shows are free.

An online exit survey posted the first week of the two-month trial showed that 87 percent of respondents could recall the advertisers that sponsored the episodes they watched

That's an 87% recall -- wow. From a computer monitor! And we thought Tivo would kill the TV commercial.

Some fantastic night photography of roadside abandon from Troy Paiva. I really love the saturation and the values -- the photographer seemingly switching on these ghost town scenes back to life, instead emphasizing their emptiness. And, wow, the highways and backways this guy's seen!

Let's describe the whole earth!

I've placed in our new digs. Where's yours?

Plot in any url and watch it grow. Very pretty (and a big time suck!).

I'm 33 and thinking of starting a family. Ever see something that made you change your mind completely?

The United States of Iraq.

A beautiful, surreal rendition of one of my favorite cities.

To prove to my clients that no one surfs at 800 x 600 anymore (except maybe my Dad), here's the new look Yahoo homepage, at 1064 wide.

AJAX-ed too! (Check out the buttons on the right.)

Granted that my current consultation project (as with my current preoccupation) has a bunch to do with online work -- and myspace-like strategies -- I've been lurking around some new websites, mostly to do with Web 2.0. A few ones that I've found very useful:

Lifehacker is the most user-friendly, if you're new to the business of trying to take your life back from all this technology. Lots of neat stuff, including sections on Office 2.0 (meaning, all the stuff you do on your desktop that you can now do online).

Techcrunch keeps a nice eye on all the Web 2.0 startups -- and has all the buzzwords too. Lots of strategy ideas.

There's the new Slashdot: Digg. And, 43folders, which is just full of useful stuff.

Finally, Pete Cashmore's blog is a daily stop.

I'm actually at this stage, somewhat, but I'm not freelancing in the purest sense. I, for example, don't create my own contracts (in a few cases I do) and I don't set the scope of work either. As a consultant, I just make sure the hours are staightened out, and the work looks mintyfresh! Still, I'm looking forward to doing most of my work at home, which means turning off the TV and not refreshing the RSS feeds more than once -- a day. Fortunately, I'm good with that. Except when Kobe's being beat.

Here, however, is sage advice from Cameron Moll, on freelancing. (I taught a subset of this in class, called: "Top 12 Mistakes You're Going To Make as a Fresh Grad Graphic Designer" -- I wonder if any of my students have made some of them.) I agree with most of them, except that I would have put including a Kill Fee in the contracts in my top 10.

I've long wanted to explore the maximalist style (or, in Helfand's words "thornament") which overdesigns pages with vector art curly-q's, rococo flourishes and themed repeating patterns in an effort to drown all whitespace. I did try it once in for a mural/installation, and I liked the horror vacuii exercise.

Helfand here regards the full spectrum of maximalist currency and application -- from whimsy evocations to a propenent's confessions of "barfing on the page" to the almost sad and inevitable evolution of digital design and its new practioners (read: students) abusing the freedoms that computers in the classrooms can afford them, blaming the culture of "easy-access."

Barfing on the page, indeed. And where does it come from, this inability to stop, to hold back, to self-edit? I blame the culture of easy-access: Flickr, Photoshop plug-ins, skateboard culture, IM’ing, DJ mash-ups, and the failure of the slow food movement to gain any traction in the design press. Funny, yes, but I’m actually serious: many a cultural historian has tried, and will try to excavate the provenance of design work that is pictorially layered and comunicationally dense, and they should, because it’s everywhere. It’s on T-shirts at Old Navy and in classrooms at every design school I’ve visited in the last two years. It’s on packaging and in posters and pushing its way through publications and the somberist of annual reports. Some of it is breathtakingly beautiful, compelling, even entertaining. But most of it is excessive, indulgent and impossible to parse.

Truth has always held it's form: in design, less is more. The Holy Grail is still "expressive clarity."

As we herald the Participation Age (don't ask, at least not yet), we are overcome by Web 2.0 champions with names like Morfik (ooh, browser-side logic!), Meebo, Writely, Blummy and Sxip. Check them out, some of them might be useful (developers and non-developers alike) or as a peek into what's exciting about the web these days.

But with names like Google and Yahoo as the granddaddies, we should have known better.

Two meetings I would love to attend:

Planning in the "Age of Disaster" with Eliot Spitzer, nonetheless. And, Stefan Sagmeister, DK Holland and Paula Scher try to reign in their egos by talking about them.

Ran into these clever creatives from BBDO-Guerrero Ortega from quite a few advertising blogs. These Flash cards for Childhope I think were really meant to be print ads: better to get it in one second than through the long animated build-up.

Michael Wolf photographs the massive cityscape of Hong Kong like they were towering termite castles -- repeating singular textures of concrete and steel, void of any sign of the life within.

View here.