Left to right, back and forth. Post-meeting hoppery in Philadelphia. Thanks to Audrey T for playing iPhone photographer.
Simplicity.
From Jonathan Ive’s one-button iPhone, to Haiku poetry, I’m inspired by the beauty of, and intellect behind, simplicity.
In my mind simple is what you get when you boil down a product or an idea to its essential elements. It means stripping an interface (in the case of the iPhone), or a language (in the case of the Haiku) to its most basic form. It means relying on my audience to draw on its life experience to understand what it is that I’m trying to communicate. This is really, really hard, and somewhat risky. Hard: it requires a deep understanding of my audience. Risky: strip my idea / product down too far and nobody will know how to use my gadget / understand my advertisement. (Good example? Perfectly round hockey-puck mouse that came with the original iMac — I never knew which was way up!).
The reward for striking the right balance, however, is a concept that resonates deeply with those who engage it. Below is an example of a pretty complicated advertisement that saves itself with a really simple tagline (at 1’16”): She arrived as Ms K Mathieson, Executive VP of Sales. She departed as Kate.
Having worked in the corporate sector for a few years, I totally get it. Simple, powerful stuff and, was the rest of the advertisement even necessary?
Watch the ad:
On Indian Jet Lag
There’s something different about Indian jet lag. It steps beyond a movement of time and creeps into a movement of being. It’s not Starbucks in Rome to Starbucks in New York, it’s a 65 year old woman squatting in front of my apartment gutting fish to Starbucks in New York. It’s not sleepiness, it’s the feeling of power leaving my body. It’s soaking in the juices of one culture and being thrown back into my own. Alone. To dry. It’s sex. It’s watching a small dog’s strained eyebrows as he relieves himself in the middle of the Bombay tarmac, to breathing in sterile air out a quadrifiltered bicarbonate composite alloy air duct howling in the belly of a glass airport. An air duct large and strong enough to suck up the dog, his eyebrows, and recent creation in one fell swoop.
On Exiting a Train at Churchgate Station
Last Friday, on the way to the Mumbai-Kolkata Indian Premier League cricket match, Beth and I had the good fortune of riding the train to Churchgate Station during rush hour. Watch Bombay commuters of every size, shape, and generation leap onto the train, before it stops, to secure a seat for the long ride home:
HLL Fairness Meter: Because Life’s Not Fair
Controversial psychologist Phillipe Rushton developed the head test: ethnicities with smaller heads, he stated, are less intelligent. Apartheid South Africa developed the pencil test: if a pencil placed in a person’s hair stays put, it was thought, the person is racially inferior. Not to be outdone, Hindustan Lever, India’s largest consumer products company, recently developed a “Fairness Meter.”
In a society where a darker complexion indicates lower caste, the Fairness Meter brings a new level of accuracy to the time-honored tradition of judging people by the color of their skin. Part of the Fair & Lovely line of cosmetics, the Fairness Meter helps Indian men and women to accurately track the bleaching effect of Fair & Lovely’s skin-whitening cream. The lower the number – the logic goes – their fairer the person and thus the more beautiful. Says the mother of Apoorva Satish, an early adopter of the Fairness Meter: “My daughter Apoorva Satish studying in 10th Standard was some dark chap. After seeing the advertise of Fair & Lovely I encouraged her to use this multivitamin cream. The result is 15 number to 10 number according to fairness meter. We are all very happy…”
Read more testimonials on Fair & Lovely’s website.