Posts tagged ‘1975’


Nostalgia is not a business strategy

06.03.2023

Paris Marx makes a very good case about Elon Musk wanting to relive the good ol’ days when he was doing start-ups at the beginning of the millennium. It’s why things at Twitter are as bad as they are: Musk’s nostalgia. It’s well worth a read if you’re interested in what’s going on at OnlyKlans, as Marx probably nails it far better than a lot of other commentators.

There were aspects of the good old days I liked, too. Better CPM rates for online ads. Way more creativity in web design, as well as experimentation. The fact I could balance doing brand consulting, typeface design, and publishing. That helped my creativity flow. But these are rose-coloured glasses; there’s plenty about my current life that is far better than those hairy start-up days.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in half a century on earth is that you can’t re-create the past. And even if you could, it wouldn’t be as good as how you remembered it.

I’m often nostalgic for those early days in Hong Kong and that mega-fantastic day of the Tung Wan Hospital fair in 1975 (or was it ’76?), where I got to go in the bucket of a Simon Snorkel fire engine. Wonderful day. But at the time I couldn’t drive (I was three), so you can’t have it all.

And millennium me running Lucire might have been having fun in terms of breaking new ground, but I’d much rather be where I am now having talked to Rachel Hunter and putting her on the home page (and in two print editions). Our stories are also heaps better than what they were in the late 1990s.
 

 

Just enjoy the moment and make the most of where you are at. I’ve projects I want to return to, too, but if I do, I won’t be assuming the year is 2000 and working in an area I don’t know that much about, while annoying all the people around me.


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Posted in business, design, Hong Kong, internet, New Zealand, publishing, technology, USA, Wellington | No Comments »


January 2023 gallery

01.01.2023

Here are January 2023’s images—aides-mĂ©moires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
 


 

Notes
Rosa ClarĂĄ image, added as I was archiving files from the third quarter of 2021.

The Claudia Schiffer Rolling Stone cover came to mind recently—I believe it was commended in 1991 by the Society of Publication Designers, which I was a member of.

I looked at a few more risquĂ©, but mainstream, covers to see what is appropriate, since the Lucire issue 46 cover was one of our more revealing though most glamorous ones in years. Vanity Fair and Women’s Health were useful US cases.

Lucire 46 cover for our 25th anniversary: hotographed by Lindsay Adler, styled by Cannon, make-up by Joanne Gair, and hair by Linh Nguyen. Gown by the Danes; earrings by Erickson Beamon at Showroom Seven; and modelled by Rachel Hilbert.


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Posted in China, design, gallery, humour, media, publishing, UK, USA | No Comments »


Retro moment: the ïŹrst American Ford Granada

28.11.2010

Ford Granada advertisement
Above: The US Ford Granada in a contemporary advertisement, as posted at americangranada.com.

Not the European car, but the American one of the same name: the Ford Granada was marketed as a US alternative to a Mercedes-Benz. Not as overstyled as, say, the Ford Maverick, this was an extremely heavy car, and Ford’s marketing emphasized how it was as good as the Mercedes-Benz, at a similar size.
   There’s not much by way of the Ford identity in this car’s design: it comes across as a pastiche of the Merc and something that Lee Iacocca would dream up. It was, after all, the 1970s—probably the last decade occidental car companies tried things without regard to how models might look in their range.
   The heaviness may be due to the amount of standard equipment. Iacocca was quite happy to lavish his era of Fords with gear. There’s little mention of his involvement with the Granada, not even in his autobiography, but it seems in line with his approach with the Mustang II.
   While there’s still some “Fordness” to the overall look, e.g. in the waistline, I don’t remember contemporary Fords having this type of grille, and the later Granada (and related Mercury Monarch) facelifts continued to give this line a different style to the others. (On a side note, there was also an ultra-plush Granada called the Lincoln Versailles, which was not that successful; the equivalent in recent times, of a modern Ford sold under all three brands and looking about the same, was the CD338 Ford Fusion, Mercury Milan and Lincoln MKZ [nĂ©e Zephyr].)
   I remember contemporary reports that swallowed Ford’s claims and published diagrams on how similar the two cars were (PR info from Dearborn?), and I even have a Kiwi friend in Whitby who loves his Yank Granada. Fascinating looking back at these cars, 35 years on—and how branding plays a far greater role in automotive design today than it did back then.


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Posted in branding, business, cars, design, interests, marketing, media, publishing, USA | No Comments »