See the end for a little experiment in formatting.
A picture I took:
A guest lecture I gave
(originally created in collab with Christopher Owens for the Miami Ad School Strategic Planning Boot Camp in Oct 2023)
Things to read
Embrace Your Crookedness (fully endorse)
The Death of Slow Dance (another Honest Broker banger)
The Mad Farmer Poem. No idea why I copy/pasted this entire poem into my notes or where I found it in the first place. But it is a good read.
EXECUTIVE COMMUNICATION REFERENCE
Bill Watterson and weird energy
So 28 years after the last Calvin and Hobbes comic, Bill Watterson just dropped a new book.
And its very cool.
But there is also some important reminders in the story of how it came together…
I’m just going to quote the article, because I think it is a fun story, but the point to takeaway is:
After a year’s work, the pair dumped everything they had created and started over, realizing that juxtaposing their clashing styles within one image created interesting results with a “weird energy.” “Things clicked when we gave up,” Kascht says.
He turned to his friend Kascht to help, but the problems didn’t stop there. Watterson had left gaps in the story for the pictures to fill in, but then realized he didn’t even want the illustrations to do that, preferring readers’ imaginations to do the work. “We were trying to make pictures that didn’t show things for a story that didn’t say things — which was probably the aspect of the book I liked the best,” he says. Also, Kascht’s realistic style and methodical, researched process clashed almost irreconcilably with Watterson’s intense need to keep things sketched and improvised. “Our process was appallingly inefficient and wasteful, we were basically drawing the map as we wandered around lost,” Watterson says in the video. “John would emerge from weeks of work with some carefully considered, beautiful object, and my heart would sink. It wasn’t what I wanted at all!”
“It would be hard to overstate the incompatibility of our creative approaches,” Kascht agrees. “Now I understand why bands break up in the recording studio. [...]
Our collaboration wasn’t a matter of compromise so much as collision — my detailed realism smashing into Bill’s stripped-down primitivism. This dumb method created tons of debris, and also flashes of lightning that couldn’t have happened any other way.”
After a year’s work, the pair dumped everything they had created and started over, realizing that juxtaposing their clashing styles within one image created interesting results with a “weird energy.” “Things clicked when we gave up,” Kascht says.
“Working through differences toward a common purpose is practically an act of defiance these days, and I’m as proud of that as of any other aspect of the collaboration,” Watterson says.
Juxtaposition is productive and powerful. Don’t be afraid to start over. Throwing up your hands also throws off the pressure.
Make things with weird energy.
A reminder for the ad industry:
Taxonomy is fun.
Another one to file under “useful but under no circumstances should be used in a presentation.”
Oft forgotten subtext of any pitch
not some secret formula. We just don’t think about clients as “users” or vice versa.
WORKING IN PUBLIC/WORK-WIKI
(blatantly stolen concept and design from Tom Critchlow.)
POLL
I believe there is more knowledge in the old than in the new.
So I am thinking about publishing on my own platform (likely via notion) in order to better set up stratscraps as a collection of interconnected collections of assets and inspo rather than in the chronological style of a publication. it’ll take a while to build the network of backlinks, but you’ll probably get the idea.
For the time being, I’ll do substack + notion. We’ll see how it goes.
Subscriber feedback will be the deciding factor.
I’m personally torn.
Check out the notion version of this volume and let me know what you think in the poll below (vote even if you dont open the notion link.. that is telling in and of itself).