insight in a pizza box

Like so many other things (e.g. democracy, beauty, coolness), an 'insight' is hard to define but easy to recognize. From a recent Time magazine:

'It suddenly dawned on me that most people running from the law don't eat out, they order pizza.'
CYNTHIA BROWN, of the Butler County Child Enforcement Agency in Ohio, on her inspiration for placing wanted posters of child-support scofflaws on local pizza boxes in an effort to turn up the heat on deadbeat dads and mums.

where ideas come from

I took the excerpt below from this excellent article in The Independent, "Why don't we make good ads anymore?".
They interviewed the likes of Sir Martin Sorrell, Trevor Beattie, John Hegarty, and others, who offered their insight about the industry.
But the excerpt I took is from Sir Frank Lowe, a little bit out of context, but it offers a glimpse on how some of the world's greatest ads were created (by somebody who must know).
"...How many hours did it take Terry Lovelock to write "Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach"? He wrote it in the middle of the night in the La Mamounia hotel in Marrakech. He woke up and wrote it by the bedside. "Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet" was written by Tim Warriner when he lit up a cigar on the top deck of a London bus. How many hours was that? I found Stella Artois's "Reassuringly expensive" in the body copy of a print ad written by Geoff Seymour. It wasn't written as a line. "Every little helps" for Tesco was written by Paul Weinberger between going in and out of the loo when we were having a drink at the Paxton's Head pub in Knightsbridge." (via 407 In Vitro)

where ideas come from

I saw this Shell ad on "The Economist" magazine. It reminded me of something I had seen before but I couldn't quite remember where.
Determined to find the name of the artist who inspired this ad, I asked the help of my friend PL. He's a brilliant art director, and with his photographic memory, he quickly pointed me to this, the cover of the New York Times Magazine, Year in Ideas 2004 (subscribers only, sorry)......and to this, the cover of the Communication Arts, Photography Annual, from August 2005.Basically the same pictures.
But I still wanted to know the name of the artist who inspired this all, so I searched for "visual complexity", and from this site, I finally found the original source: British artist Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2004 with his "History of the World" mural. See below. I was amused to see that the jacket and the sweaters are almost the same color.And here the print version in black & white.

burn calories and save energy

How nobody thought of that before!
Hong Kong's branch of California Fitness, a fitness chain with many gyms across Asia (including Singapore) is testing an innovative concept: their cardio machines, such as stationary bikes, steps, and cross-training, have been equipped so that energy burned off by people doing exercise is transformed into electricity.
The brainchild of inventor Lucien Gambarota, the project is appropriately called "Powered by You". The goal is to make California Fitness more energy efficient, with the capability to produce and store energy. See video on YouTube here. (via inhabitat)

ted 2007

The 2007 TED Conference starts in Monterey, California. You can follow some of the action here. And wait for the presentations to be available here, sometime in the future. In the meantime, you can watch Wired Editor-at-Large Kevin Kelly, talking about the evolution of biology and technology (duration: 20:39), on TED 2005, below (or download it here).

where ideas come from

Who would've thought? YouTube creators were inspired by HOTorNOT.com. According to an article in Time magazine (Dec. 16, 2006, the "Person of the Year" issue), "Chad and Steve agree that Karim deserves credit for the early idea that became, in Steve's words, "the original goal that we were working toward in the very beginning": a video version of HOTorNOT.com."