What is Lisztomania?

From Wikipedia: “The term “Lisztomania” was coined by the German romantic literary figure Heinrich Heine to describe the massive public response to Liszt’s virtuosic piano performances. At these performances, there were allegedly screaming women, and the audience was sometimes limited to standing room only.”

I must confess I’m not crazy about the video and although the subject matter is peculiar - I love the song. It’s almost worth watching once with your eyes closed (or just not watching the video) and then again after you’ve heard the song a first time.

“Vincent Connare designed the ubiquitous, bubbly Comic Sans typeface, but he sympathizes with the world-wide movement to ban it.

Mr. Connare has looked on, alternately amused and mortified, as Comic Sans has spread from a software project at Microsoft Corp. 15 years ago to grade-school fliers and holiday newsletters, Disney ads and Beanie Baby tags, business emails, street signs, Bibles, porn sites, gravestones and hospital posters about bowel cancer.”

Wall Street Journal Online

“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

Buckminster Fuller

Where do designers go after they leave Apple? This Businessweek article from 2007 tracked the experience of a few notable Apple employees after they left the company. Recent headlines regarding the health of Steve Jobs again bring to mind questions on the success of a Job-less Apple.

“The design team behind Apple’s great products and experiences is basically the same one that created all the merely average designs under John Sculley and Gil Amelio. After the board of Apple fired Steve Jobs in 1985, neither John Sculley nor Jean-Louis Gassee showed the same passion for design. Ultimately, they left it to cultureless middle management. As design is one of the most honest emotional and visual indicators of the state of a company or a brand, the following ‘dire years’ of design at Apple actually were the logical result of bad leadership.”

Considering purchasing a smaller, lighter car for fuel economy? You may want to consider the trade-offs when it comes to safety. The Institute for Highway Safety recently conducted a series of crash tests on how smaller cars like the Honda Fit and the “Smart” car fare against their mid-sized counter parts. The results illustrate the laws of physics at work.

A friend recently asked why it seemed like there weren’t any major brands taking significant steps to boost the economy. I did a little research of my own, and here are a few examples (links below).

“Intel has announced a $7bn investment over two years in new manufacturing facilities in the US, going against the trend of cutbacks in corporate capital spending in the teeth of a recession.”

http://www.ft.com

“Microsoft Corp. said it hired a former Wal-Mart Stores Inc. executive to help the company open its own retail stores, a strategy shift that borrows from the playbook of rival Apple Inc.”

http://online.wsj.com

Jet maker Cessna is fighting to save thousands of US jobs by combating misconceptions through an aggressive advertising campaign.

“The jet makers were unprepared for the backlash from Middle America. The irony, they say, is that many of the blue-collar layoffs at Cessna, Gulfstream and Hawker Beechcraft Corp. have been in places like Wichita, Kan., and Dallas.”

http://adage.com
http://online.wsj.com

Some good advice from Rebeca Méndez, principal of Rebeca Méndez Design and formerly of design studios such as Ogilvy & Mather’s Brand Group and Weiden + Kennedy. Note to self: follow it.

1. Experiment—create work for yourself, independent of clients, responding to your own questions and curiosity.

2. Collaborate—work with or form a collective of your friends and peers, especially those in other disciplines (writers, architects, artists, musicians, dancers).

3. Have integrity—do your professional work without abandoning your personal convictions and values.

Many people, when they see an immense personal library, are tempted to say something like “WOW! …how many of those have you read?!” While a small minority will get the point that a library is not an ego boosting appendage, but a research tool. Your library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means will allow you to put there. As you grow older, the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

We tend to treat knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended. It’s an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So the tendency to offend the “Antilibrary” sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations. People don’t walk around with anti-resumes telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that,) but it would be nice if they did. Just as we need to stand library logic on its head, we will work on standing knowledge itself on its head. We misunderstand the likelihood of surprises, those unread books, because we take what we know a little too seriously.

Let us call an antischolar —someone who focuses on the unread books, and makes an attempt not to treat his knowledge as a treasure, or even a posession, or even a self-esteem enhancement device— a skeptical empiricist.

From “The Black Swan” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb