Since its very beginning, Pixar Animation Studios is all about wonderful storytelling, connecting with people in a way that do not involve anything but pure emotion, so the eye, the mind and the heart are not caught up in the clutter.
Following its tradition, Pixar’s new feature film Up again pushes the envelope of emotional expression in the opposite way than its nearest competitors. You know, there’s something that Pixar does so exceptionally right, while others make you go so “meh”…
While almost every large scale animation movie design looks quite fine today, with mostly great character lighting, overall smooth animation and starring funny voices from leading hollywood celebrities, packing progressively more and more marketing potential into a single production, Pixar goes the other way around, purposefully streamlining all the visuals and building upon symbols.
It’s not that Up’s imagery lacks complexity whatsoever, or that Pixar’s artists do not execute with more craft and care than their rivals, as actually quite the opposite applies. However, Renderman technology, together with a storm of CG techniques at disposal, are just considered as means to express complex real life feelings, so that taking away all the noise, they leave you with just the essence, the heartfelt issues.

So Up, as any other Pixar movie to date, is first and foremost a tale with a unique promise: building upon universal themes to make us think once more about “who we are” and “what we stand for”, thus creating bold meanings, capable of touching us with a variety of feelings.
I strongly encourage you all to get to a theatre near you early and enjoy such a lovely adventure, whose first fifteen minutes or so, I’m sure, will indelebly rest impressed upon your hearts.

Marketing rules. It plays an extensive function in business’ practice and scholars provide pivotal evidence about the phenomenon. Anyway, the academic discourse seeking to define the concept of marketing and its measurable economic relevance is still ongoing: in the wrong direction I might add.
Even though the essential marketing practice is old as human trade is, its widely accepted body of notions is rooted in the last century’s business practice. We all know what actual marketing is today: a practice mostly concerned in creating, communicating and delivering value to customers, whose dominant logic is based on the good old principle of exchange. Exchange of goods, exchange of services, whatever… But while the debate about the scope of marketing goes on, complementary business concepts are developing, shifting attention in always different directions, dipending on the hype of the moment: yesterday was total quality management, today is social responsibility, tomorrow might be progressive consumer resistance to branding strategies…

However, targeting exchanges and customer relationships as the core marketing preoccupations, lead us away from considering that the social environment, as well as cultural objects, corporations and, at last, real people, are actually components of the same balanced system. They all influence and get influenced in the ongoing cultural discourse. In the age of globalization and networking, marketing paradigms quickly appear and vanish, and while many valuable suggestions and observations may see the light every once in a while, a general perspective is still lacking today, hindered by dispersion of many research efforts into distinct islands of knowledge, exceedingly producing self-referential contributions and overall noise.

Instead, The Consumer Zeitgeist tries to open up a new perspective on marketing within a broad sociological context, where the attention is directed on the comprehension of cultural objects and on the sociological tools we all have at disposal and can effectively use to analize, understand and finally influence society at large. This dissertation is an attempt to redirect the ongoing speculation about the reality of marketing towards real people and everyday life, drawing on concepts from sociology of culture to give sense of cultural expressions, including brands, and understanding their impact on society.

This work will be discussed at the University of Trieste on december 2009. Eventually, its contents will be translated in plain english and distributed early next year.

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In all likelyhood, unless you work as a freelance¹, you will spend most of your professional career worrying about a variety of issues, most of which are not strictly related to your core expertise. Dreaming of your career as a super-duper manager, I bet you can figure on all sorts of cool things happening to you here and there but… hey, that’s only half the story!

Get your feet on the ground

Close your eyes and try to imagine your work day without the need to communicate with other people, receive an assignment from your boss, meet the stress of a deadline for task completion, agree, laugh and cry together with collegues near you… ok, you got the idea… Welcome to the Stone Age: now take up bow and arrows and go out hunting for mammuths… ok, a dodo is probably a better choice for Mr. One-man-does-it-all. You know, hunting is a risky business.

Back to modern times, there’s no more place for soloists out there (and there’s probably no much of a point too), as generally each-man-does-his-own is more the case in complex societies. Every human form of life is exceedingly more inter-dependent and inter-connected with one another in any given group. Every single human activity produces social effects, and your working day-to-day is no exception to the rule.
Generally, I find myself busy most of the time getting and providing useful informations to coordinate each other activities, rather than doing the sort of stuff that lives up to my official resume. My personal productivity depends in large part on how well I’m able to organize my activities, apportion my resources, and exercise discipline in pursuing whatever goals I consider important for the business I work for. This leads us to the real point: the need to increase productivity per time unit.

Your road to productivity zen is paved with good intentions

Yes, I know. The general definition of productivity must be something like the relation of output to input in real (physical) terms, well… things like that. Thus, for an industrial company, we might measure the number of products produced per worker to get back an efficacy index. This is the so-called “labor productivity” measure, since the denominator of the ratio includes only the labor input. The speculation over this concept originates back in the fordist era, where it seemed appropriate for the concept of personal productivity to be related to output in a set of given activities over successive periods.
However, since we are human beings, not machines, productivity is to me more of a condition than a situation, as we are subject to a variety of factors whom we cannot take into account in any functional model. I’m aware that scholars developed a whole serie of statistic equations capable of balancing results over longer periods of time, but no one statician took into account the amount of stress generated on people’s minds by adherence to such models, and no one could calculate neither the costs for society at large nor the overall cultural impact on our lifestyle.
However, despite such an evidence, we all know about the Joneses: we try yo keep up with them but, unfortunately, every time we get close, they refinance.

Truth be told, dear manager, there will always be someone more efficient than you. There are those who are actually more productive and those who just appear to be more productive than you. Your colleagues, friends and acquaintances might all seem Stakanov’s pupils. Their new cars, maid service, vacations overseas, tailored suits and hi-tech gadgets all seem to confirm your suspicions. The more they earn, the more they value and the better professionals they are, you might think…
However, you are only seeing part of the entire picture. The missing information might change your mind. For example, the excess time spent in the office, if experienced regularly, comes to detriment to the rest of your life. Moreover, the emotional impact caused by people’s poor ability to make decisions or keeping up with responsibilities, that is task overload, will eventually impair your overall performance on time, a huge cost that is generally invisible to a casual observer. Indeed, this cost is real, and the bill needs to be paid, sooner or later.

Your productivity goals and plans need to be personal

Your aims should be tailored to your specific condition alone and no one else’s. When you stop comparing and contrasting, you effectively pull yourself out of the race to keep up with the Joneses. By the way, we all have a different set of skills, so it’s by far a better choice to improve your own set, rather than trying to mimic an ideal and unreal personality, which only leads to frustration and feelings of inadequacy. The sense of accomplishment that comes from improving your professional performance should be the ultimate prize.

What crazy times these are. We all envisage a situation of economic crisis, so severe that a cut in general demand prevent a multitude of companies from continuing to service their investments. However, crazy times call for crazy organizations, the ones that really understand the fallacy and insanity inherent the Steady Growth Model; the ones with bold ideas which vault business people beyond reengineering, beyond Total Quality Management, beyond empowerment, even beyond change, toward transformation and cultural significance; the ones who thrieve even in these brave modern times.

Here they are, the crazy ones, the passionate people that travelling over 150,000 km, across 19 countries in search for creativity, built a network counting more than 800 schools, 5600 applicants from 61 countries, and has proven itself over the course of its 8 editions… to persuade audiences, to change minds, to move the world.

We always try harder and do stuff the best we can. Hope you enjoyed the Show, as we did getting it real once again. Have a look-see at International Talent Support website for more awesomeness!

It always comes to me as great surprise to discover new interests. I’ve never been a fan of dance, in general, but Corrado caught my attention with Trieste per la Danza 2009. This is the latest edition of an international dance festival, which brings to light the marvelous exhibitions of the most interesting contemporary dance companies out there. Corrado, a dear friend of mine, asked me to design some nice illustrations for this happening, so I had the chance to get informed about this whole new world and, indeed, I can feel my holy curiosity growing for the imminent event, which will take place at the Rossetti theatre, in Trieste, these very next days. I just hope this won’t turn into another new, and ardent, and unquenchable passion of mine: daytime is never long enough.

It’s definetly a good idea to check your mailbox frequently these days —before and after school, during lunch, and at other times during the day if possible. If you ever see a package with your name on it, coming from EVE headquarters in Italy… well, chances are you’ve been selected to be one of ITS#EIGHT finalists. Heartiest congratulations! You deserve it.

Now I warmly encourage you to do your best to control those animal spirits flinging away all over your body and read carefully the documents inside the package: there are things that still need your attention!

Additionally, if you have a lot of time on your hands, I suggest you’d spend a couple of minutes looking at the front cover, which I designed after reviewing a lot of portfolios… yours also, which should capture the overall mood expressed by competitors. That’s just for personal satisfaction, yes… just that! However, apart from the (hopefully) nice graphics, you’ll spot your time schedule for the event, right at the bottom of that page.

Enough for now, looking forward to see this edition’s winners. Remember, once you’re lucky, twice you’re good!

With ITS#EIGHT just around the corner, the air I breathe in is getting hotter and hotter here at work. During the last few weeks the door belled more or less everyday, leading the whole staff to desperation! Express couriers deliver tens of portfolios each day, coming from international designers all around the world, willing to apply to one of this year’s competitions. It’s still raining portfolios at EVE offices, but I guess it will soon stop, as the deadline to apply is over.

Springtime has definetely come to Trieste, with wall-to-wall sunshine and tons of blue all around me: blue sky and blue sea as far as the eye can see. However, despite such a beauty, I can’t refrain from thinking about the next series of deadlines, which are creeping up. So, with total concentration on matching some expectations and goals, it’s time to take the wraps off some new designs for the coming edition of the catalogue, themed after the heyday of the American circus, I’ve been working on for over a month. ITS#EIGHT is coming, and it’s gonna be “The Greatest Show of All“.

There are mainly two good reasons to visit Diesel Cult. First of all, it’s a place where you’ll meet people mostly “preaching” about style, music, places and art. The second reason worth noting is that it hosts a minisite with a narrow subject focus: ITS#EIGHT – The Greatest Show of All. With its clean and unobtrusive interface, combined with bold and vivid images, it perfectly captures the International Talent Support vibe, while it still integrates perfectly into Diesel’s existing interface. It’s been a tricky balance developing a clear and distinctive design for ITS, while trying to remain true to the host brand’s unique, avant-garde outlook.

In the old days, espresso was usually prepared in one single shot by pressing hot water through ground coffee. The Flintstones used to brew it solely with steam pressure, but that’s a different thing. Nowadays, drumroll please, we do have an option: it’s called iperEspresso and is brought to you by those fine folks at illycaffè. Ok, strictly speaking this is no fresh news for anyone, however it looks like a huge step forward in my typical coffee driven creative process, so I just want to make sure everyone knows about it.

Illy has spent nearly 70 years perfecting the espresso coffee process. So, if I were to ask someone about how to brew an excellent coffe, I’m sure I’d ask Illy himself, which incidentally is also much much easier for me, proivided there are alternatives and considering that I live in Trieste, as Illy does… curious, huh? Over time, I continue to be impressed—blown away is more like it—by the focus of illycaffè on excellence. It’s innovative iperEspresso method, in particular, leads to a far smoother and intensely aromatic coffee than regular approaches. Yet because drinking an iperEspresso is so different, the potential for misunderstanding is high. So the question is: “how the hell do they achieve such a terrific taste, why an iperEspresso shot is so different from a standard espresso, and why don’t I just put Andrea Illy through such a third degree, since he lives in Trieste as I do too? Yep, the answer to the last question is nice and short: I work hard all day long for International Talent Support, which is worth the investment of time. Everything after however is me enjoying some family time.

So, if you want to know any more, if you are an espresso addicted and want to try something new and different, I’m not very well able to tell you: follow the white rabbit instead, to claim your highest pleasure…

This is one of the early and not fully developed pictures created as one of the several proposals for the ITS#EIGHT main theme. The study moved its tiny first steps from the eight number… the concept of infinite loop… the infinetely big and the infinitely small. What would it look like to fall into such a convergence zone?

If I had developed it any further, I would have embraced elements of the supernatural, the psychological, the almost-but-not-quite, the unbelievable told in terms that could have been believed.