Any questions?

(source: Jean Bellus)

Winnipeg, Canada

I’ve had this poster likeness of Picasso (alongside the ones of Einstein and Gandhi) with the grammatically challenged call to action facing me from across the design studio for well over a decade now. I wonder if that has affected my thinking at all… though that’s not really a very different kind of thought, is it?

Rhône-Alpes Ain, France

I honestly have no idea how I chanced upon this website—but needless to say, it was a happy find. I’m a sucker for vintage illustration… and my girlfriend Evelin is nuts about hats, so, a sort of a twofer.

Pretty please?

In the meantime, I guess we’ll have to settle for Here Comes the Sun.

Winnipeg, Canada

Digging through some old files at Circle recently, we came across this 17-year-old clipping from the Winnipeg Free Press, which ran just before we moved from our original studio on Albert Street to the space we’ve occupied at the corner of Princess Street and McDermot Avenue since 1993. Our saying “No” to a cattle-call RFP by a prospective client caught the attention of journalist Martin Cash, who penned a mostly complimentary story about our design practice and ethos…

Mr. Cash described Circle as “having become known for a certain thoroughness and a high level of quality”—traits I would like to think have remained with our little team to this day.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

“Now I’m a trained professional artist, well-paid, looked up to, and with a real future… and look at my model!”

(flashback, in situ)

In case you may have missed this selection of eminently quotable profundities, bon mots, maxims, aphorisms, and engaging witticisms by the sage rhetoricist Marshall McLuhan when first posted here—well, here we go again…

+  +  +  +  +

Whereas convictions depend on speed-ups, justice requires delay.

Money is the poor man’s credit card.

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror.

We march backwards into the future.

Invention is the mother of necessities.

You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?

Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.

The trouble with a cheap, specialized education
is that you never stop paying for it.

People don’t actually read newspapers.

They step into them every morning like a hot bath.

Today each of us lives several hundred years in a decade.

The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.

News, far more than art, is artifact.

When you are on the phone or on the air, you have no body.

Tomorrow is our permanent address.

All advertising advertises advertising.

The answers are always inside the problem, not outside.

Politics offers yesterday’s answers to today’s questions.

The missing link created far more interest
than all the chains and explanations of being.

When a thing is current, it creates currency.

Food for the mind is like food for the body:
the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

The future of the book is the blurb.

The ignorance of how to use new knowledge stockpiles exponentially.

A road is a flattened-out wheel, rolled up in the belly of an airplane.

I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt.

This information is top security.
When you have read it, destroy yourself.

(Image: detail of rear-view McLuhan photograph taken by the late great Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh on 21 January, 1967)

Holyoke, Massachusetts

A cautionary poster of yore (that seemingly fell on deaf ears) by award-winning illustrator Howard Scott (1902-1983), a Pratt Institute graduate…