wantan-cards:

[paper craft]サグラダ・ファミリア

2009年1月製作。「キヤノン クリエイティブパーク」の為に設計した紙型です。

こちらでダウンロードできます。

http://cp.c-ij.com/ja/contents/1006/

littlebhima asked: hi can i have a cheeseburger?

fuck no. also bitch!

The other one was nicer.

Some days one must just not wake up.

maybe just die in sleep.

bored.

I LIKE IT. THOUGHT YOU WOULD TOO.

CAPS LOCK off.

thanks.

kp

NOVEMBER 15, 2006

Mohammed Khan comes across as a man with rock-solid convictions. Convictions that stem from a clarity of thought. And an honesty of purpose. Both amply evident in his approach to the business of advertising.

So how did it all start?
‘When advertising was suggested as a career, a big door opened in my life, and I was in love with the idea of becoming an advertising person. I remember an electric sort of feeling ran through my spine, and I thought – Yes! What good idea. I thought it I could do advertising for a couple of years outside the country and then come back…’
And that was how the 20-year old Mohammed, armed with an Honours degree in English, left India for England. For a full eight and a half years. ‘I learnt the ropes there, and that’s the main thing. I worked for years in a developed market, where advertising was a sophisticated business and everybody knew their work. And I think the difference between here and there is that there you are expected to know your job. Here, you have to pay people just to teach them what to do. In no other business are people paid to learn the job in the office. There, the education, the pre-training…everything prepares you.’

The art and advertising schools in India…
‘Here few art schools teach the relevance of art direction vis-à-vis advertising,’ he says. ‘Most of them teach how to paint pears and apples, and it’s got nothing to do with the price of eggs. They don’t teach them typography, they don’t teach them  advertising design.’ This means that freshers often have to be trained from scratch. Rather unfair on the agency. ‘It’s an absurd situation. For when I hire kids from art school, they have already spent five years in college. And the first thing I tell them is – forget everything that you’ve learnt. This destroys them. Five years when you are 20 is a quarter of your life!’

Radically defined perspectives.
Take Mohammed’s views on how an advertising agency should be set up and run. ‘Advertising can never be a one-man show. In London, advertising had stopped being a one-man show a long time ago. Even the agencies which I helped start – Contract, Rediffusion, Enterprise…I never wanted to be the only guy. Two distinct disciplines – one man looking after the money, the other the creative. That was the model I tried to follow in every agency I set up. In an ad agency there are two bottomlines. One is the work that you do; the other is the money you make. It’s not that you have to one or the other. If you don’t create good advertising, then you are in the wrong business.’

What about Rediffusion?
‘Rediff was a new animal. For the first time there were three people who were good at different disciplines. It was a crack team. And we were young and full of fire, and it was started at arguably the worst time the Indian advertising industry had ever seen. Yet, Rediffusion became a model for a new kind of agency – a creative hot-shop.’ Yet, two and a half years was all he could give it. So what gave? ‘I had come after working for many years in London and I was very excited. But this excitement soon turned to complete disillusionment. At that time, the business was unprofessional, nobody needed to advertise, we were in a seller’s market. Advertising was just an indulgence. You had a budget that you had to spend. People were happy to go on just doing what they had been doing for 2000 years and it was terrible. I was forgetting the business, and was fighting constant battles with clients. They may have known what positioning was all about, but that certainly didn’t translate into creating advertising which was distinctive. I was willing to fight my battles, but there was no respite…most of my energy was getting dissipated in getting the work through rather than creating new work. And when it went beyond a point, I said – To hell with this. I didn’t come here to change the world. I just came here to make some great advertising. So, in a moment of pique, I decided to throw in the towel.’

The Contract years…
From the flush on Mohammed’s face it’s clear that those were memorable years. ‘I think of my Contract days with great affection. They were a magical time for me, those five years. I was doing something very exciting, new…done in the shadow of the country’s largest agency. We were housed in one room, and there was this giant who stood for everything that was the opposite of everything that we believed in. two opposite ends of the spectrum. Because in HTA, there was no room for creativity, while Contract was all about creativity. They were a bout billings, were not about billings. Yet, we were in an extremely profitable businesses, so even with it’s tiny size, Contract was making the same amount of money that HTA was, by the second or third year of it’s existence. We launched Charms out of Contract,’ he recalls fondly.

Producing distinctive creative work all important 
What Mohammed cannot fathom is why clients continue to be with agencies which do not produce high quality creative work. ‘Why are they not looking at their track record? I know some agencies which are flourishing today that don’t have very much to show by way of great brand building. What brands have they built, with what kind of budgets? We have taken on the biggest companies and taken their pants off with one-tenth of the budget, and built No.1 market leaders. We have done it for Lakme. It was a tiny company, but look at it today. Levers bought it…because they didn’t want the competition! Winter Care Lotion became bigger than Pond’s. Lakme’s distribution was just a third of each one of these large companies and yet we built a No.1 brand. Their shampoo became the No. 2 brand on a shoe-string budget.

Surely clients eventually fire agencies that don’t produce good creative?
‘That’s not my experience,’ says Mohammed. ‘I look around and I feel extremely distressed, because advertising is not a secret. It’s there for the whole world to see what you are getting. Every morning, when I read the papers or watch television, I wonder – what is this client doing with this agency, for God’s sake! And because we put key numbers in this country, you know where the advertising is coming from. And you don’t need to be a genius to figure out that you are getting rotten advertising from wherever.’

The same yardstick (dumping agencies for bad creative) applies to Enterprise too 
‘I am saying this to my own clients too. If you think that you are getting rotten advertising, for God’s sake,look somewhere else. Why are you with us? This is what frustrates me. I know our campaigns are given to agencies by clients, who then say – This is what chocolate advertising should be. Why don’t they come to us then? I know this as agency guys themselves have told me this. This is not something I have cooked up. If my client comes to me and shows me a campaign from another agency, I’ll say – Go to them, for we cannot do this, and we don’t want to do this. I can produce advertising which is extremely varied, but I am saying that there is a certain way that you approach a problem there is a certain process. If we change that, we become something else.’

Don’t clients have other criteria other than just the creative output to consider?
‘Clients are choosing them by size, and not by what they do. Something that does not happen anywhere else in the world. There certainly are advantages in going to a large agency because of the infrastructure, but the consumer is not buying the infrastructure! He is buying into the advertising. That is what works,’ he says.

Clients are changing …
Fortunately, Mohammed feels that in today’s market, with product parity more the norm than the exception, clients are seeing the difference that advertising can make.‘The days of the USP are over. It is advertising that creates the distinction between one brand and another.’ And for advertising distinctiveness, you need powerhouse output. Possibly why he struck the partnership with Nexus. ‘It was a strategic alliance. Business was getting polarised between the big agencies and the small agencies. We were both successful agencies, but as clients were looking for larger agencies, we thought we could have the advantages of larger agencies in terms of infrastructure, plus hot, creative work. I had only one name on my shopping list, and that was Rajiv Agarwal. We had worked together, we had started Enterprise together. We were complementary to each other, knew each other’s weaknesses…so it was really a risk-free kind of alliance.’

Cultural compatibility is important in business too.
‘I believe that we have to earn our 15 per cent commission. It’s the easiest thing in the world for me to agree with the client. But the last thing I want to do is tell him three months late – I told you so. That, I believe is dishonest. But I have heard agency people say – But it’s the client’s money. That is an attitude that is frightening. Imagine an agency that doesn’t believe in what it is doing, but is quite happy to earn it’s 15 per cent off it. Advertising is about taking responsibility. And these are the magic words that the client wants to hear.’

And the client’s interest is what drives him.
‘Having done it, you know it is the right thing because you own it to your client. Whatever I do, every drink that I have, everyday that my kids attend school, it is coming from my client…they pay the salaries of everyone in the agency. And therefore, my first loyalty is not to those in the agency but to my client. It’s an old-fashioned way of doing business, but I am an old-fashioned guy, despite what you see and hear. There is honesty and integrity. We want to earn that 15 per cent, not steal it. ‘

(Published in the Advertising and Marketing (A&M) Magazine.)

Mudra bangalore - TVC for payback.in

In this 11-minute timelapse video, freelance designer Dei Gaztelumendi illustrates a cover for comic book magazine Xabiroi from start to finish.

what a voice!

Love the lightness of this video, advertising used to be like this, fun and engaging. enjoy

“I don’t do proper gallery shows,” the artist foolishly known as Banksy used to say. “I have a much more direct communication with the public.”

That was then, though. Yesterday, the archly anonymous “quality vandal” opened his summer exhibition at Bristol’s City Museum. Hours before the show was due to begin, a neat crowd of Banksy-ites in shorts and shades, some sitting on picnic chairs as if queueing for Wimbledon, snaked toward the gallery’s Edwardian baroque facade.

The well-schooled Banksy PR operation had been at pains to suggest that the show was another act of anarchy by the artist; many of the museum’s curators had been unaware of the “undercover” operation that brought the artist’s greatest hits on to the site on Thursday, when the galleries were “closed for filming”. But no one was really fooled. The show was clearly a sell-out, in every sense.

It was also a homecoming. Ten years ago, Banksy, generally thought to have been born in Yate just up the road, in 1974, had his first “exhibition” in a friend’s restaurant in the city. By then, certain art aficionados in Bristol had long been aware of the progress of his career: anti-graffiti officers first began to identify the artist’s freehand work in about 1990, when he apparently operated as part of Bristol’s DryBreadZ crew, though he only developed his distinctive stencilling style toward the end of the millennium (he discovered it, he has claimed in true outlaw fashion, while hiding from the police under a train and being struck by the graphic boldness of a stencilled serial number on the locomotive’s undercarriage).

Banksy himself, if what he says is to be believed, traces his roots back a little further. Graffiti, in its current incarnation, was popularised in Britain by the New York hip-hop band the Rock Steady Crew who toured in 1983, and bizarrely played the Royal Variety Show.

The youth of Bristol caught on early. In one of his “guerrilla” interviews with an underground magazine in 2006, Banksy suggested: ‘I came from a relatively small city in southern England. When I was about 10 years old, a kid called 3D was painting the streets hard. I think he’d been to New York and was the first to bring spray painting back to Bristol. I grew up seeing spray paint on the streets way before I ever saw it in a magazine or on a computer. 3D quit painting and formed the band Massive Attack, which may have been good for him but was a big loss for the city. Graffiti was the thing we all loved at school. We did it on the bus on the way home from school. Everyone was doing it.’

Banksy was confidently outed last year by the Mail on Sunday as Robin Gunningham, a public-school boy with a gift for drawing who had gone missing from his comfortable family, though the people who speak for Banksy refused to confirm or deny the story.

The photograph used with the piece certainly bore a resemblance to the artist who had shared a minibus from London to Leeds with the Observer team who had enlisted him to create the cover art, alongside the band Blur, for the launch issue of our monthly music magazine in 2003. (The work, illustrating a TV being thrown out of a window, spray-painted on concrete blocks, was later auctioned at Bonhams for £38,000 after the owners had removed the wall.)

Banksy has been something of a scourge in his home city, but recently, given his international acclaim (and his six-figure prices), he has been welcomed as a prodigal son. The turning point came in June 2006 when he made a mural on the wall of a sexual health clinic at 1 Park Street. The mural depicted a window, from the sill of which a naked man clung by his fingertips while above him a husband scanned the horizon with binoculars, next to his wife in a state of undress. The mural was directly opposite the city council offices and represented a direct challenge to the city leaders: should it stay or go?

In the end, the mayor put the question to a public vote: 93 per cent said it should remain. From that point on, the council realised what they were on to and have done everything they can to associate Banksy with the city, culminating with this exhibition.

I walked around the show yesterday morning, just before the doors were opened and the crowds poured in. The only other private viewers were the city’s mayor and his entourage. Simon Cook, the deputy leader of the council and the executive for culture, explained how the exhibition was a coming of age both for the artist and the city’s culture. “We are led to believe he trained at the city’s art college,” Cook says, “so it is great to have a local artist giving something back.”

The mayoral party wandered among the sculptures - of a Metropolitan Police riot squad officer bucking insanely on a carousel horse, of a marbled Paris Hilton weighed down by shopping bags, of a copy of Michelangelo’s David strapped with a suicide bomb - with quiet pride. They took photos of the mocked-up artist’s studio with its shopping trolley full of spray cans and its used stencils of blinged-up rodents.

“Twenty years ago, we might have looked on him as a vandal,” Cook suggests, “but the more we looked the more we thought that what he was doing was not just mindless but a very creative kind of street art.”

The culture executive and the mayor only learnt of the show, which was cooked up between the artist and the museum, on Friday morning, but they were only too happy to endorse it. “It should give the city a real boost,” suggests Cook, who expects at least 100,000 visitors in the next three months.

For his part, Banksy uses the exhibition’s publicity to try to preserve what is left of his subversive credibility: “Maybe one day graffiti art will hang in lots of museums and be viewed in the same way as other modern art, although personally I hope it never sinks that low,” he suggests, and: “This is the first show I have ever done where taxpayers’ money is being used to hang my pictures up rather than scrape them off.”

Whether this a victory for the establishment or the artist is unclear, but it is undoubtedly the next step in Banksy’s curious march to anonymous fame. He has never lacked for ambition. In recent years, he has taken his work to the wall dividing Jerusalem and pirated it into many of the world’s major galleries (the British Museum responded best to this intervention: it added “Early man goes to market a Banksy” - of a primitive tribe confronted by shopping trolleys - to its permanent collection).

The artist’s skill was always to add an edge of wit to the juvenile frustration that always seemed the motivating force of “taggers”. He was never content just to mark his territory or shout his name, he seemed motivated, in part, by the need to make people smile, at least for a moment.

If the Damien Hirst generation made art out of marketing stunts, Banksy, of whom Hirst is an ardent collector, took that savvy attitude to the streets. He was among the first artists to recognise that he didn’t need a dealer or a gallery (though he now has both) - he just needed a wall and a website to get his messages across. Most of those messages have about the depth and rigour of a T-shirt slogan; in rare interviews, he liked to call his art “cheeky” and that just about did it. He was like the Chapman Brothers’ nicer sibling - puckish, nimble, never remotely in earnest.

Confined to a gallery, this energy looks very flat indeed. There might be some shock value in confronting a classical statue with an upturned pot of pink paint on its head in the street, but not one staged in a museum. Likewise, an old master daubed with the words: “Exit through the gift shop” could hardly make its point with a broader brush. And you search in vain among the exhibits for any proper sense of the artist himself.

A few things about him we already know: that he is outrageously prolific; that he inspires an extraordinary level of devotion among his tight “crew”, not one of whom has ever broken ranks to reveal his secrets; that he has a love of animals, a dislike of war. Beyond that, once you get past the waggish energy the work is mostly as cold as adverts (albeit ads for “good causes”).

Anonymity has repercussions beyond the mystery that it adds to his output (and the noughts it adds to his sale prices). It means that Banksy never has to put very much of himself on the line. Like a blogger with a made-up name, he can say what he wants without any risk. When he was working on the street, the danger and surprise of the act itself was enough to give the work life. A retrospective kills that life.

Brad Pitt, who bought several Banksy pieces in last year’s LA warehouse sale suggested that the artist had what he wanted: fame with none of its discontents. One of the ironies of this exhibition, and one that is no doubt not lost on the artist, though, is that even anonymity has its price.

The Banksy lowdown

Born: The man many believe to be Banksy, Robin Gunningham, was born on 28 July 1973 and grew up in south Gloucestershire. Gunningham attended Bristol Cathedral School.

Best of times: His first American exhibition, in Los Angeles in 2006, culminated in Hollywood royalty Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie spending more than $2m on his work, which signalled a triumphant breakthrough into mainstream (pop) art.

Worst of times: Banksy’s treasured anonymity was broken in July 2008 by the Daily Mail which unmasked him as a former public-school boy from middle-class suburban roots.

What he says: “People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish. But that’s only if it’s done properly.”

“Remember, crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.”

What others say: “Switching from subversive to extremely lucrative is difficult to do while retaining your credibility, but when you come from the street so literally, and the comments your work makes are more irascible than anything seen in official galleries for decades, then I guess you’re allowed.” Holly Kirkwood, Country Life

(Source: Guardian)

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