Friend and songwriter, Matt Wilson (a Minneapolis treasure) once wrote “the sun is coming to cold places.”

I love that phrase. It holds hope in a time of cold and desperation. It reassures. Perfectly suited to a kind man from the cold confines of the northern tier. But they can get you through a cold mid-western winter too.

In trying to bring musical and visual reference to Matt’s words I wrote “tenzing”.

In addition to the joy, hope and giving, there’s a lot of despair around the holidays. It’s the beginning of the winter solstice – an unsettling time for many. It’s also a time of great, and often self-induced, stress about the holidays. This one seems all the more desperate given all our current socio-political tumult. Oh, and let’s not forget the war; no, not the one in Iraq, but the one that’s supposedly being waged against Christmas (do we REALLY need people to invent another war around this time of year?).

The point of tenzing is not just to build a song around a guitar riff, but to bring Matt’s sense of hope to what is starting out to be a very cold and solemn winter; especially considering it’s still fall.

Anyway, without giving it all away. Just enjoy the music and images. It’s a gift, and remember the sun is coming to cold places.

We’ve just finished work on our latest Silent Short. We call it The Five Dollar Coffee Maker.

Here are a couple of links to the video:

For High-quality Quicktime Video (36meg) click here.
For a slightly lesser quality, FLASH video (18meg) click here.

To the inevitable questions:

What’s it all about?
Often in this business of creative work, people will overlook quality for expense. And by that I don’t mean they’ll take lower quality for less money. Quite the contrary; people will often settle for lower quality as long as it costs more. I used to say, “yeah, they don’t really do good work, but they have a really expensive coffee maker in the lobby.”

Well, the coffee maker doesn’t shoot in HD, it doesn’t score your film, it doesn’t design your brochure, and while a San Marco in the hands of a competent barista may spit out wonderful crema, it sure isn’t going to spit out great ideas.

We’ve always had this little coffee maker around the studio. You see them a lot in vietnamese restaurants. They make really good coffee and they only cost about five bucks. But they only work if you are patient and if you expect something different than you get with the million-dollar coffee maker.

Who did that amazing drawing?
The drawing was done by the lead actress, juj. Our chief designer and associate configuration coordinator.

Do you really use coffee for paint?
All the time. And barbecue sauce, and berries, and mushrooms, and actual paints too.

Who did the music?
I (John) wrote and performed the score. It was recorded here in the studio.

Why is it in 6/8? (IS it in 6/8?)
The music is composed and played for 6/8 because the coffee drops fall into the glass in 6/8. Some have said the song is in 3/4 or a classic waltz. It’s actually a slow 6/8. It’s not just about the beat and tempo as some might think. The time signature is also about the bar phrasing of the melody. And isn’t the point that there are no rules?

The August Hour Music Page

We’ve finally started uploading some of our music production from the past few years. Many would say it’s about time.

So far there are only a few MP3 samples, but we’ll keep uploading songs as we dig them out and get them formatted into MP3.

So far the page features music from The Silver Shore, The Daybirds and myself. It’s mostly there to give you an idea of our music production chops and to introduce you to some music you might not have heard before.

It’s always nice to revisit your first love — and music is definitely mine. Being a recording engineer/producer is a lot like being something between a midwife and a high-school guidance counselor. Midwifery is the term commonly used to describe the art of helping a woman give birth. And a high-school guidance counselor is there to help kids turn into adults. As a parent you do the best job you can at strengthening and perfecting your kids and then you release them into the world where you know others will project themselves onto them. For any real songwriter or composer songs are children and music production and engineering is all about helping the songwriter parent their babies. Because sometimes people can be unfair in their projections — or downright rude — you hope you’ve done the best job possible of preparing the songs for this state of vitality and exposure.

So yeah, it’s fulfilling work. And it can be rewarding. Sometimes I hear songs I’ve worked on and think “you know, there’s some real genius in there” and I am just thankful to have had the chance to help with them.

It all sounds good anyway.

enjoy.

http://www.changethemargins.com

One day last summer I was invited to one a advertising luncheon. It was for small businesses who use postcard decks and direct mail advertising. There was an advertising expert there, we’ll call him Bob. Bob asked the audience to critique a piece of a participants print advertising, no one really offered anything. So, he called on me. I told Bob that I thought the design was a little confusing and there were a lot of competing ideas. The headline wasn’t really clear and it might be more clear if there was a little less going on visually. Bob, wearing his blue gabardine blazer with gold buttons, tossled loafers, and pleated khaki pants said, “You’re one of those ‘white space guys’ aren’t you?” I said, “I guess it depends. I definitely like clean design. When it works our clients do well by white space.” He said, “Well, I’ll get to why you’re wrong in a minute.”

Bob explained that white space isn’t interesting to people. That if businesses want to succeed and generate lots of leads from direct mail they need designs with pictures and lots of visual stimulation to stand out. “Okay,” I thought. “That or maybe they just need this six-pound sack of crap stuffed into his three-pound blazer telling them how things are supposed to look.”

Today, I wonder, if maybe Bob wasn’t on to something.

Tamara Krinsky has perhaps the most elegant idea to help reduce your consumption of natural resources: set your word document’s margin settings as narrow as possible before you send it to the printer. The goal here is to save the planet we all live on.

According to Tamara’s site, the mission of Change the Margins is pretty simple: encourage adoption of wider printing margins on a grand scale. To accomplish this, the campaign currently has three goals:

1. Convince Microsoft to change the default margin settings in Microsoft Word to .75 on all sides. The more convenient it is for people to change their habits, the better chance there is that they will actually do so.

2. Persuade five corporations to officially sanction wider margins for all company documents. In this way, people will get used to seeing documents with this formatting as the standard, as opposed to the exception. Never underestimate the power of peer pressure.

3. Challenge five universities to adopt wider margin settings as the standard for their students and faculty, and include this information in their course guidelines.

At Penn State University’s Park campus the “Mueller Policy Paper #1: Reduce Standard Margin Settings” showed how PSU could save 72 acres of forest and over $120,000/year by reducing the default margin settings campus wide.

On a national scale, that’s estimated to be about $400,000,000 per year.

You’re probably looking at this page and wondering, “what the hell are these guys doing advocating for less white space and narrower margins?”

First, you’re not reading a printed document, these virtual margins don’t waste paper. Second, we’re huge fans of saving our clients money, and we’re even bigger fans of elegance. A designer should be able to create an effective design in the pursuit of creating he most economical and efficient outcome possible.

There are some clients who convey a sense of affluence through abundant use of whitespace. How else can you as a designer convey that idea without being wasteful? Elegance is defined as nothing missing and nothing extraneous. Can’t too much whitespace be just as extraneous as too much type?

Also, isn’t this idea that prestige is found in massive amounts of whitespace becoming trite? Can’t we as designers find inventive ways to communicate our clients’ ideology? Can’t we do it and use less paper?

Maybe I’m not such a “white space guy” where the planet is concerned. Either way, it’s time to narrow the margins . . . and definitely avoid advertising experts.

The Echo Maker

I’m reading The Echo Maker by Richard Powers. Powers is arguably the greatest writer living in America today. The Echo Maker is gorgeous. Not just the plot or the characters or the arcs, etc.. But, what really sets Powers apart, as always, is his ability to convey just the right thought with just the right words.

But, this post isn’t meant to be a book review. The point is that Powers knows exactly how to make his words click. This idea of the click is expressed perfectly in the book Spunk and Bite by Arthur Plotnik.

The point of the click is that the language perfectly reflects the thought the writer’s trying to convey. It’s not so much that there have to be few words as possible. However, the words exactly reflect the thought and the thought clicks.

There are all kinds of examples of this, from Shakespeare:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
– MacBeth

to Shandra:

When Radha returned from the grocery store where three white youths calling themselves Dot Busters, ridiculed her kumkum, Dev said, “We must simply tolerate such misunderstandings.”
from Sari of the Gods

With one sentence, or a simple turn of phrase, we know exactly what the author is thinking – and we’re thinking exactly what the author wants us to be thinking.

This click exists in music, lyrics, films, design. Any place there’s a vocabulary there exists the possibility of a click. It ties back to Thackara’s idea of lightness of design. It’s in Rand’s idea of elegance – nothing missing, nothing extraneous.

The Echo Maker is about a man who has a car accident and forgets who his sister is. He forgets how he feels about his sister. Meanwhile, his sister tends to him while he recuperates. The entire time he thinks she is an impostor playing his sister. His injury makes him unable to remember love. The book follows their progression through trying to overcome his injuries.

Throughout Powers is at the same time powerful and efficient, expressive and elegant. He inhabits the areas he writes about – the geography, the science, the culture. He shows the signs of being an anthropologist as much as a writer. Every page contains a phrase you’ll write down to remember. And you’ll learn something new about yourself and the world you’ve (hopefully) never seen.

Go get it. This is a book to own.

If you google “DHL Sucks” this is what you get.

If you google “FedEx Sucks” this is what you get.

If you google “UPS Sucks” this is what you get.

Each of the comments and horror stories deals with different aspects of the companies suckage. In my experience, and in reading the comments, the breadth of ineptitude by DHL is astounding. Meanwhile, the FedEx site doesn’t paint the best picture of their employees. I mean come on, you come on a forum and (assumably) flog people who have a dim view of your company? Seriously?

The UPS Sucks page details one particular case and how vehement UPS was about not helping the customer, until they had to file a lawsuit.

It’s utterly mind-blowing how little it takes for a company to generate good will with their customers. Even more mind-blowing is how often they fail to do it.

Where the shipping companies are concerned, it’s clear from my own experiences that DHL and Fed-Ex really have no interest in helping their customers. And it stands to reason they wouldn’t; in a sea of millions of customers a day, how do you begin to decide to whom you throw a life preserver? I can’t answer that, and I don’t expect them to. Which is why I only use UPS. Both have demonstrated to me that they do whatever they can to satisfy their customer. I can go on and on about experiences with UPS where they went further than any other shipping company has, but you know they drill. “They walked through a rain storm, chartered an Airbus and cleared a landing strip in my hateful neighbors front yard to make sure my daughter got her wedding dress on time” blah blah blah.

But what about taking care of the customer? Where is the balance. As anyone knows, I’ve had to break the news to clients in the past that I just can’t do that for them. And honestly, while it stresses me every time, and I lose sleep over it, I have to do it. Why? Because of the other clients.

I have developed a philosophy; I call it my Two Angels philosophy.

When a client presents me with a service issue, I imagine there are two angels on my shoulders. One angel, is my highest-billing client the other, is my least. When I make my decision, I imagine they are both asking me to justify that decision in terms of how I’ve treated them in the past. I have to explain to them how the decision I’ve made is justifiable in terms of their business. For the smaller client, I say “Well, Small Client, this client represents three times the amount of business you bring us, so for that amount of work they earn a special dispensation in this case. If you’d like to bring that amount of work, we can treat you likewise. To large client I say, “See, Large Client, while we may not have given you that discount you wanted you can see that we do other things for you in recognition of the amount of business you bring us which indicate that we appreciate your business.”

It’s a delicate balancing act for sure. And I think that’s the key. We try to balance all the clients along with the needs of our business and ourselves.

The good news? I can categorically say that we do a MUCH better job than these multi-billion dollar companies with thousands of employees.

Oh, and please don’t ship us anything via DHL or Fed-Ex. Because, well . . . you know, they suck.

This site is blowing my mind right now:

It’s a skeetch blog by Jason Das. The drawing above is of Danny Gregory doing a reading from his book Every Day Matters

Danny is a very inspiring guy and an amazing talent. You might have seen some of his work (he was the CD on the Chase Credit Card ad).

Jason Das’s sketches are simple but inspiring glimpses into the real world. I like them a lot.

Check them out, then go out and draw something.

Alejandro Escovedo.com » Rolling Stone: Alejandro Escovedo Plays Zankel Hall

Our friend and inspiration, Alejandro, recently played Carnegie Hall in New York. It’s about time.

Also, we just confirmed tonight that we’ll be working on a video for Alejandro’s song “Dearhead on the Wall” in the coming months.

Al co-wrote this song with his wife, Kim. So it’s an honor to collaborate on a video for such a beautiful song.

Check out the music at the link.

American Copywriter: When you get wrapped up in your own industry jargon

This is a pretty interesting blog posted on American Copywriter’s blog. I think the most important point to bear in mind from Jennifer’s post is that you have to remember the customer. It’s not about you, it’s not about your client, it’s not about their product. It’s about the customers.

Think of it like this:

“If you’re going to take up space in my living room without being invited in – even for just thirty seconds – you better be talking to me about me.”

If the heat doesn’t kill you the humidity will.