No, chocolates.

The following is a collection of somewhat related thoughts I found on my Blackberry:

Empathy requires active involvement and constant flow of information. So as to help us stay in character. Trying to stay in someone else’s shoes without this stream of input (the active and present engagement with someone) is hard!

Second-guessing is working from a position of minimal info. It is making assumptions about what someone …

“Why change the world when all you need to change people’s perception?” — Claudia Bing, a PR magnate character in Absolutely Fabulous.

The older I get, the less concerned I am about trying to “manage” other people’s perception. These days I am more concerned with telling it as I see it, saying what is true to me.

The reality is people will take things …

This is the hoarding of a soon-to-come Wendy’s.

I can’t help but wonder, how many people walking past this will:
(a) notice the tagline, and
(b) read the tagline with minimal or zero cynicism?

Great ad / image selling imagination. Pity the actual toy being sold was rather more prescriptive than I would have liked to see.

Stumbled upon on Thingamababy.

I just got pissed off with Facebook trying to make me do something I don’t want to do.

I log on and get this message.

“We have improved the Profile … so it links to Pages instead.” Yeah yeah so what, let me get to what I am here to do.

“Remember, your Pages are Public” Ok fine thanks for the warning I don’t have …

Mass media (TV, radio) was set up primarily to enable the mass marketing of mass produced, mass branded good to the public. The entertainment content came second.

Consequently, we have been trained to expect the content for free, as long as we put up with the advertising. Paying purely for content (and hopefully without the ads) in the form of subscription TV is a fairly recent innovation.

Contrast this with …

This is a large printed ad attached to a refrigerator with odour control features. It can be seen in all good whitegoods shops all over Singapore.

Is this a sign of some failure in awareness? Of an inability to even peek slightly outside the box?

Or is it a deliberate act of social mischief on the part of the designer? If so, what …

There are specific conventions used in the design of packaging for the different things we can buy at the supermarket. We learn to read these conventions and become part of our automated parsing of our environment.

I think this is why the packaging visuals of the Bio-X range of insecticides caught me completely by surprise. My immediate reaction was “Ooo this one is for getting rid …