About four years ago I made some Nofont t-shirts. Sold some, kept some.

A few days ago I stumbled on this video by Soulbreach.

Great song and the bass player is wearing the “Imagination is a terrible thing to waste” t-shirt:

Check out Soulbreach at www.soulbreach.com. Get their album, it´s clean, hard and vital.

In the larger corporations I have worked with people tend to be less involved in terms of passion and happiness compared to people in smaller businesses.

What makes this happen? Is it the sheer size of the group of people that kills off the dynamics? Is it that larger corporations always attract “safe mode” type employees? Is it that the employees have been working in the same position for far too long ?

Well… in my opinion it’s as simple as the distance from themselves to the end user or client.

When a company or department reaches a certain
size it starts to focus on its internal goals and development, and loses sight of the bigger purpose.

They simply start the day by entering safe mode because they, intentionally or unintentionally, are protecting the position they are holding. They start approving and denying stuff on a will-this-make-me-look-good-in-front-of-my-peers basis instead of from a will-this-benefit-our-clients-and-business-goals persective.

Thats when the machinery becomes greater than the business, when regulation is greater than improvisation.

If that happens, how far away from losing clients is a company at that stage?

I’m scared shitless to stumble on to one of those people when I work with large organizations. They can, very effectively, whithin a couple of days kill a project. And in a couple of years kill the whole business.

It was some years since I saw a campaign typographed like this … not sure if it does the job, do you?

Being an art director is, to me, 10% art and 90% direction, and still a majority of the art directors I meet is the “I’m not in a inspirational mood so therefore I can’t work” type of art directors.

A lot of them fail misreably on the business side of the trade. The difference between the art-guy and the director-guy is that the art-guy are brilliant craftsmen but fail on the level of delivery that is needed, mostly cos they are losing focus on the purpose and result of the project and often starts to focus on the details or design issues instead of the business issues. The director-guy is often not as brilliant in craftmenship but generally strong in pushing the clinets business forward.

So who is worth your money?

Well, my advise would be to hire both guys but give the director-type 90% of the budget and 10% to the arty guy. Why? The clients is not buying your art skills in Illustrator, Photoshop och InDesign, that can be found in any street-corner 24 hours a day. The client is buing you skills in business development and your understanding of their revenue … and that is rarely found.

If you or your business only get the director guy you are going to get flexible and effective communication and the investment will end up in your black figures, but your business will be considered stale, traditional and boring. If you only get the arty guy you will have the coolest brand ever but your everyday grassroot level of communication will be unadapable to different situations and hard to understand.

So, you as a buyer of design and communication must be able to see the need of both types and then you can have a strong foundation to base your business on and in campaigns and your brand will top of mind.

Once on a train outside Stockholm I saw and junkyard with tons of old signs and letters. After a year or so I remembered the place and tried to find it again but it was all totaly gone. During two years I sometimes took the car and drove around that area to search for it. One day I drove in to a gated industrial area and there the place was! Man did I feel like a child on christmas … I have managed to get some 30-40 charachters from them during the years and a few weeks ago I made an inventory. Here are some of them.