Photoshop Experts Using Photoshop 1.0

In honor of the 25th anniversary of Adobe Photoshop, CreativeLive asked 8 Photoshop experts to try their hand at Photoshop 1.0.

What is a good brand?

The School of Life's The Book of Life looks at the most substantial things in life: your relationships, your income, your career, your anxieties. Under the theme of capitalism they explore what is a good brand: 

Essentially a brand is a constellation of qualities, it is a personality in the material realm. It presents a vision of life in a hugely condensed manner via physical objects and services. The bad associations around brand spring from the way that often this vision of life is a little fake, exaggerated or plain daft.
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But a brand doesn’t only symbolise a set of ideas. It makes these ideas reproducible and universal. Brands allow particular qualities to multiply across the world.
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Brands invite the recognition that great things are not usually (actually, practically never) done by individuals acting in heroic isolation. At some point every good idea, every important insight should go through the process of becoming a brand. Because this just means that it should widen its power in the world. And it means other people can join in. The world is in great need of better brands.

This reminds me of a recent post on advertising & the great and wicked troubles of our day. 

Behind The Next Step

From AdWeek:

One of the great ads of the past decade was the 2009 Johnnie Walker spot, filmed in a single take, with the brilliant Robert Carlyle telling the brand's history while strolling in the Scottish Highlands. Now, the whiskey brand and BBH have crafted another captivating single-take spot—a year-end meditation that looks forward, rather than backward, by showing a man walking through his dreamlike vision of 2015.

They did some 50 takes in three days.

Advertising & The Great And Wicked Issues Of Our Day

Ernie Schenck in Communication Arts about Dr. Deborah Morrison:

Deborah Morrison is the chambers distinguished professor of advertising at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. Recently, she wrote a piece for Co.Create in which she calls on advertising people to transcend the consumption cycle and train the full might of their creative firepower on what she calls the great and wicked issues of our day. You know the ones: Global warming. Hunger. Energy. Gun violence. Mass extinctions. Overpopulation. 

As I write this, Dr. Morrison and nine advertising students are in Alaska studying climate change. They’re learning how to find the stories in the science—stories that most of us would never see, and not because they aren’t compelling. On the contrary, they’re beyond compelling, the stuff of nightmares without end. The stories are there all right, but they’re mute and colorless and shapeless, entombed beneath a mountain range of data. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Data can do many things. It can prove theorems, send rockets to the stars and cure diseases of every stripe. What it can’t do is light a fire under the collective ass of society. Data can’t do that, but stories and ideas can.

When It Comes to Making Choices, Ignorance Really Can Be Bliss

Diana Kwon for The Science of Us: 

Decisions are a big part of life in the 21st century. Never before have we had to make so many of them. Online shopping means you can purchase an item from anywhere and have it delivered conveniently to your doorstep. Dating sites like OkCupid and eHarmony give access to potential romantic partners from all around the world, while Amazon brings the world’s largest product warehouse onto your computer screen. The seemingly endless options may appear to be a blessing, but under certain circumstances, you can have too much of a good thing.

Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper conducted one of the first studies demonstrating the effects of “choice overload.” Using jam, essay topics, and chocolates, they found that people were more likely to make a choice — and be happy with that choice — when presented with fewer options. Paradoxically, despite the negative effects, people found the larger choice sets more appealing and enjoyable to choose from. Some have called this phenomenon the “tyranny of choice.”