“ April 19, 1955 Dear Mr. Calt: On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see: 1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home. 2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years. 3. I am helpless without research material—and the more “motivational” the better. 4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client. 5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every concievable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform. 6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines. 7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.) 8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts. 9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy. 10. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush. 11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.) 12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editings, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose. Altogether it is a slow and laborious business. I understand that some copywriters have much greater facility. Yours sincerely, D.O.

“ Good thing the App Store prevents us from seeing women and men in bikinis, because racy stuff like that is never shown in magazine ads, television commercials, billboards and TV shows.

“ Garder une trace, ce n’est pas l’essentiel pour moi. Parce qu’au fond la trace, elle circule, elle laisse une empreinte. Rappelons-nous les situationnistes pour qui la trace, le résultat, n’étaient pas importants. Ce qui compte, c’est l’acte, le processus, et ce que ça provoque chez l’autre. Ça fait son chemin.

“ on pourrait dire que Technikart est aux bobos ce que Télérama est aux intellectuels de gauche

“ Volksgemeinschaft designated the racially pure community of nations. Volkswagen is an example of a term which has outlived the Third Reich.

“ The Outlook interface feels like it wasn’t designed for managing your email as much as it was designed to mirror the interaction paradigms of applications like Word and Excel.

“ The bulk are being created by startups, and the nature of startups is to IPO, sell or go out of business. They are supposed to be risky, and everyone going to work for one should remember that.

“ While this is a fine demonstration of a new API, the experience is a bit off-putting. Imagine taking a dish out of the dishwasher and then having it start flopping around like a fish in your hand. This is a rare case of Apple losing sight of what’s important in real-time interaction design. Stability and responsiveness lead to comfort. A transformative animation (instability) that happens after a short delay (the appearance of unresponsiveness) does not make for good experience. I wonder how many novice users will instinctively release the mouse button and inadvertently terminate the drag operation the first time this animation is triggered.

“ Apple says that its goal with the Lion user interface was to highlight content by de-emphasizing the surrounding user interface elements. You can see this most clearly in sidebar and toolbar icons, which are now monochromatic in most of the important bundled applications. But this has the unfortunate side effect of making interface elements less distinguishable from each other, especially at the small sizes typical in sidebars. I’m not sure the “increased emphasis on content” is enough to balance out the loss, especially in applications like the Finder.

“ Post Scriptum. “Et franchement, je ne suis pas obsédé ou quoi, mais un DVD porno me donne plus de satisfaction qu’un CD, qu’un film, qu’un livre, qu’une revue, qu’un repas, parce que le caca qui est derrière est finalement tellement moindre que le caca énorme qui existe derrière toutes les autres industries.” Il faut quand même être un sacré inculte et un bourrin de première bourre, pour écrire pareille ineptie. Ce n’est même pas de la provoc : c’est un aveu d’impuissance mentale – celle qui ne se soigne pas avec le Viagra.

“ However, we support everyone’s right to identify themselves in their own way, and provide some additional choices in our “country” selector to accommodate members of our community that live in disputed territories.

“ Chère Brigitte, tant de sagesse me laisse sans voix. Bon sang mais c’est bien sûr, pourquoi faudrait il systématiquement adapter la loi à l’évolution des moeurs? Sans cette bête prétention à évoluer, le monde tournerait bien mieux: les putes seraient lapidées comme il se doit, on aurait le plaisir d’assister à des décapitations en place de Grève, le droit de cuissage serait toujours d’actualité, les nègres ramasseraient le coton, l’Algérie serait française, les greluches n’auraient pas le droit de vote, et vous seriez gentiment à la maison avec un rouleau à pâtisserie, en train de fermer votre gueule.