“ 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.

posted : Tuesday, January 31st, 2012

“ 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.

posted : Saturday, January 28th, 2012

  • A special limited-edition The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword bundle containing the game and a gold* Wii Remote™ Plus controller (*note: the gold controller will simply be gold in color and will not contain any actual precious metals)
  • Every copy in the initial production of the game will come packaged with a special music CD featuring orchestral arrangements of select songs that will be performed at The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary Symphony Concert (available while stock last)
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword boasts the most realistic sword combat of any game to date, turning every encounter into a challenge of both brains and brawn. Wii MotionPlus technology accurately translates the angle of every sword slice, effectively putting Link's blade in the player's hand. Analyzing enemy attack and defense tendencies and counteracting with precise swings of the sword provide a satisfying experience that blends puzzle-solving with a new and distinctly unique combat system
  • Explore a massive, multilayered world that seamlessly blends soaring exploration in a sea of clouds with intense ground-based adventuring that blurs the line between the main world and traditional Zelda dungeons. Link™ soars through the skies on the back of a noble bird and dives beneath the clouds to the continent below in an epic quest that lays the foundation for the events in the critically acclaimed The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
  • Prepare for intense puzzle-solving as only The Legend of Zelda games can deliver. Exploration of the forests, volcanoes and deserts requires players to think on their feet as they solve puzzles, overcome obstacles and escape deadly traps. Once they find their way to each dungeon, they are confronted by even more puzzles guarded by fiendish enemies
  • The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword redefines the traditional Zelda framework and introduces an arsenal of items, upgrades and rewards unlike any game in the franchise to date. The adventure guides players into, out of and back to dungeons and areas they've already completed. Along the way, Link gathers a massive inventory of peculiar items and resources that can be used to upgrade many of his weapons and equipment

posted : Friday, November 25th, 2011

“ 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.

posted : Sunday, November 6th, 2011

posted : Sunday, November 6th, 2011

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

posted : Sunday, November 6th, 2011

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

posted : Sunday, November 6th, 2011

“ 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.

posted : Monday, September 12th, 2011

“ 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.

posted : Monday, August 22nd, 2011

“ 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.

posted : Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

“ 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.

posted : Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

posted : Sunday, August 7th, 2011

“ 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.

posted : Monday, June 20th, 2011

“ 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.

posted : Thursday, June 16th, 2011

“ 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.

posted : Wednesday, June 15th, 2011