Embrace serendipity!

“If you don’t care where you are, then you’re never lost!”

1962 on the Italian Riviera—topless girls, big baguettes, family camping… life was good.

(Thanks, UPS…)

(source unknown)

PostSecret is an ongoing (by now international) community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a postcard. I have posted about PostSecret before here and here… the clandestine collective catharsis continues with gusto.

Somewhere in the great beyond, presumably…

George Carlin, who could speak colourful truth to power with rhetorical mastery and hyperbolic mirth like few before him, passed on a year ago this week… thankfully we can still enjoy samplings of his caustic brilliance such as this (language warning) online.

Here’s lookin’ at you (and your social justice legacy) Herb…

Above: a sampling of the remarkable editorial cartoons of Herbert Lawrence Block, commonly known as Herblock (October 13, 1909 – October 7, 2001). Lots more good stuff left us by Herblock here.

Austin, Texas

Yesterday President Obama signed new legislation that will heavily restrict the nicotine content and marketing of cigarettes, including the requirement that colorful ads and displays be replaced with black-and-white-only text. For a piece in its Sunday Perspectives section, the St. Petersburg Times asked DJ Stout (of Pentagram’s Austin office) what cigarette manufacturers like Marlboro might do to follow the new marketing rules… Stout suggests that to comply with the crackdown, tobacco companies should embrace the restrictions and make cigarettes look truly dangerous. This, of course, will still appeal to a core group of smokers.

“Over the years there has been an onslaught of public awareness messaging about the evils of smoking,” says Stout. “Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last 50 years you are very aware that smoking is not only bad for you, it could very likely kill you. All smokers know this for sure but it doesn’t deter them.”

“Our marketing advice to cigarette companies in the new heavily regulated era is to fully accept the new aggressive anti-smoking restrictions and wallow in the government’s apocalyptic health warnings. Don’t make excuses or dance around the stepped-up marketing regulations, just transform the whole cigarette pack into a three dimensional warning label.”

Images above: Some of DJ Stout’s cigarette packages for an exercise in the St. Petersburg Times.

(Thanks Adrian for the link).

Mill Valley, California

Craig Frazier has decided to “post a new drawing every week in desperate need of a caption.” He invites anyone so inclined to write the words you think belong to that drawing, and to submit a line of no more than 30 words in length by Friday at 5:00 pm. The week’s submissions are then judged by “an editorial review board of one” with the winner announced the following week… and then appearing forever in the Drawords book.

Here’s how @Issue (where I came across this project) describes the gig… “For illustrator Craig Frazier, Drawords started as a welcome “relief from a day job where I’m given copy and am supposed to draw to it. Every stroke has to communicate something.”

“This is the reverse,” he says. Instead, as a way to keep his head and his drawing skills sharp, Frazier gave himself the assignment of producing a whimsical sketch a week, which he decided to email to contacts with an invitation to give it their own captions. “It was a way to connect with clients and give them a peek at the way I work and the way I see,” he explains.

The drawings were outside of Frazier’s commercial illustrations, experimental and surreal. He says that he discovered if he put enough “silly elements” in, then people let their imaginations take over from there. “They have come back with things that I would never have seen in the drawing. There is a collaboration going on that is very innocent and satisfying.”

@Issue: Journal of Business & Design

Hartford, Connecticut

That’s a parental dictate that Kevin Van Aelst obviously never took to heart… see more of the man’s quirky (and often edible) oeuvre here. Shown above: Apple Globe (2007); Oreo Yin Yang (2005).

(Thanks for the link, Gerald).