Survey THIS!

McDonald's is kid friendly: a) Ronald McDonald b) "Play Place" c) "Happy Meal". They are now focusing on health and fitness via their healthy replacements i.e. a bottle of water and salad instead of fries and a coke. Jack in the Box is more on the "we're going to stuff your stomach" while at the same time promoting freshness i.e. "We don't make it until you order it." They differ by marketing strategies in that Jack focuses on humor i.e. Mr. Jack and his crowd of adolescent to older men. McDonald's focuses on family togetherness and community aspects of a fast food chain.

Target is perceived as fun, colorful, and welcoming with great discounts on not only the Target brand, but big-time vendors. Wal-Mart is perceived as an All-American store with ridiculous discounted merchandise within a wide array of product, however, with my personal experience I believe Wal-Mart focuses on the older crowd i.e. retired All-American citizens, per se, whereas Target is easily more culturally diverse and is geared towards the younger crowd. I would rather buy my clothing from Target rather than Wal-Mart. In the end, Wal-Mart takes the cake as far as prices, but to me it seems it is a ghetto-type of a Target.

Verizon is all about service management and customer satisfaction. After all, they are "the most reliable network". Cingular also has a pretty solidified line service, but their services are not guaranteed and their fees are somewhat ridiculous, given my personal experience. Cingular and Verizon always do battle with their phones and service plans i.e. the iPhone, compared to Verizon's enV. Now that phones are pretty much ruling everyone's life, plans are now geared to suit one's usage of minutes i.e. the great marketing strategies that suggest "Hey, you NEED a phone!"

What matters to me? I'll tell you what matters to me: honest, integrity, and intelligence. My friends would describe me as humorous, meticulous, and "super" laid back. My family thinks I am lazy, quiet, self-centered. People with first impressions believe I am charasmatic, humble, and funny.

I would definitely have to say that I am patient, mellow, and loyal.

Official Language

In chapter five of David Crow's Visible Signs I turned to page 93 and noticed a noteworthy thing: "Any value or 'capital' awarded to individuals always arises from a deviation from the most common usage. Commonplace usage is seen as trivial or vulgar."--basically one must strive for better usage of words that are for more scholarly and less general in society. We play this word game because we need to separate the powers, thus we can seek a hierarchy of social groups within our nation(s), or so the story goes. My favorite example of screwing with the system is on page 99. On that page you will find an extraordinary piece from Katy Dawkins. The piece is a plaque and it says "Liverpool City Council/Fuck You/By Order". I thought it was sheer genius because she took the foul language and fit it in accordance with the "official language" rules/laws. Another interesting set were the works of Joe Magee. On page 102 his "Renationalise" piece was supposed to be a column about winter coats, but instead he placed the winter coat ad along with a braille coding that read "renationalise" and when the editor finally figured it out, his contract was cut, hahaha, nice. Another one of Joe Magee's work had to do with an ad about hair conditioner. So he placed the image and once again used braille coding. This time it read "Thatcher Fucked Us". I really enjoy artists who push the envelope and bother editors/critics--good times.

Posters

In chapter four of David Crow's Visible Signs, I received punctual information on page 74. Crow talks about Frank Jefkins and his three basic principles of effective advertisement writing. The first is that the advertisement should be of interest and value to the reader. The second asset it should have is that it should be precise and as quick to the point as possible. The third is that it not only has to be precise, but it also has to be concise, meaning that one should only say what needs to be said in the fewest necessary words. Less is more. Also, the whole anchorage versus relay series helped me understand posters that use text to draw away from the image and posters that use images and very little text to draw one in and help them to further examine the poster in awe. I specifically liked the 77th Black Dawn Disaster by Alan Murphy because of the many series of faces and text--it kept one guessing as to what the heck was going on in that very "scene" of action.

Modern Myths

Okay, so I'm reading chapter 3 in David Crow's "Visible Signs" book and came across something that caught my eye. On page 62 and 62 Crow discusses myth and how there are too many misconceptions in society and how the public has falsely associated themselves with the images of certain things around our communities. He talks of the media and how they manipulate our senses by controlling language and media, thus signs are misleading or hidden subliminally to further draw the average Jane or John Doe. He states, "In today's society the modern myths are built around things like notions of masculinity and femininity, the signs of success and failure, what signifies good health and what does not." I thought that was very true of our weary-eyed culture in the United States, but it is what it is.

David Crow

So, Visible Signs by David Crow is kind of an interesting read, but I think one has to be in the mood to read through some of his stuff. Not everything he says catches me off guard, so it's like reading a hit or miss tutorial. Anyway, what I did like was the whole firstness, secondness, and thirdness aspect, on page 38, and how one goes about brainstorming and completing a production. Firstness deals with an overall sense of what you want to do, secondness is based on factual criteria, and thirdness is the relationship and association of it all--basically 1 + 2 should equal three. I also enjoyed one of his portfolio pieces on 48 and 49 titled "Stylorouge". That piece just goes to show that things aren't what they appear if you step back 4 frames from reality and observe the whole makeup and atmosphere of what's really taking place--kitsch motive at its finest.

Visible Signs

So I was reading Visible Signs and noticed that each chapter has a portfolio section in which the paper is nice and clean, like a finished product. Is anyone else wondering why he chose to do this? The first part of chapter one is on some draft-paper-like material with the transparent and faded guidelines for the writing. I thought it was a pretty cool idea and some of the stuff David Crow states is interesting and straight to the point. Also, free stickers? What's that about? It's odd and appealing at the same time.