Well, it’s certainly been some time since I wrote here. I suppose the fact that I completely lack an audience probably discourages me… not to say that I particularly desire the responsibility of having one. Who cares what I think anyways? Not me, that’s for sure.

Regardless, I know I have at least one reader who is very dear to me (*cough* Google *cough*) so I will exploit the fact that I have this outlet to shamelessly and explicitly promote my newest creation (with a nice density of proper verbage tied in).

So, ladies and robotic server banks, without further ado, I give you the Tie Tee – a T-shirt with an attached necktie and my new company Formalitees. The idea for Tie Tees was born in a blinding blaze of creativity (actually, I was designing a graphic faux-tuxedo T-shirt that looked like President Bush’s suit with a “kick me” sign on the back when the idea to make the tie real struck…) while I was in the Adirondacks that fateful 2008 summer, and it’s been a slip’n'slide ride ever since.

Knowing nothing about the rag trade (or how to operate a sewing needle) I pieced together a prototype with scissors and safety-pins and deemed the idea worthy enough to be spared from the slaughter. Ironically, depending on your world perspective, the shirts I cut up to create the first version of what would become the definitive symbol of modern, holistically-conscious leadership were pink National Guard T-shirts. I mean, it’s said creation requires destruction, but some things were just made to be destroyed…

So there began my crash course in apparel industry – and in the high-end, sustainable part of it at that. I wouldn’t allow my shirts to be made in an irreprehensibly business-as-usual way like most other clothing companies, through the exploitation of economically-enslaved labor and the unsustainable pillaging and polluting of our planet – that would be completely unprofessional and irresponsible. I had to do it 100% right, and I was able to source organic cotton from Texas, get it turned into yarn in Georgia, and dyed and sewn into shirts in Los Angeles. Making the Tie Shirts in the USA out of the highest-quality organic cotton upped the cost, sure, but you get what you pay for – and if you pay less you’re externalizing the real cost through pollution and slavery. That’s not a good deal.

Of course, my desire to do it right made launching Formalitees a bit harder than it would be for those who do it wrong (how do you sleep at night, by the way?) and it took a full two years to go from idea to product. Needless to say, I am still completely unable to operate a needle, but I sure know a lot more than I did and am constantly learning more.

Anyways, back to the idea. Business suits have become tarnished through the actions of evil people – from lying politicians to greedy bankers to the executives of clothing companies that exploit the life out of entire cultures. Tie Tees are an alternative to being in cahoots with this evil, symbolizing the new kind of leadership the world desperately needs – people who care about the planet more than the bottom line. Combining the iconic power of a necktie with the sustainable comfort of an organic T-shirt creates an entirely new level of professionalism – a level of responsibility way more meaningful than business suits can attain tied down to their evil masters.

So, Tie Tees reposition business suits, making them suitable only for evil people or their servants. Is that unfair to all the nice, conscious, Prius-driving, Greenpeace-donating people that just happen to wear suits too? Yes, yes it is. But now they have an alternative. I like to say that the business suit is the flag that unites lying politicians, greedy bankers, and fascist CEOs – and I’m out to burn it, so you better take it off.

Anyways, by commandeering the necktie from the suit and creating a new symbol of professionalism we’re hoping to be a vehicle through which people open their eyes to the problems of business as usual, and of course we hope they’ll wear Tie Tees to show their commitment to a higher level of responsibility for their actions, because business suits suck. But that’s not (only) a marketing strategy; it’s the truth.

So help me fight the evil of business as usual – score a Tie Tee shirt from Formalitees.

Well, Henrik, Tibo & I ended up winning an Andy for our Voiceipt Campaign for the Swedish Tax Agency. Now if only somebody would tell the IRS that the socialists are beating us! The first one to direct democracy wins!

The brainwashing institute where I learned all my tricks has a lovely summary of our success. Big thanks to Le Bureau for the brief!

This was a great experience. The Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst is a contemporary art gallery in Bremen, Germany. They came to my brainwashing institution asking for our help – they’re recognized internationally for the artists they exhibit and the careers they’ve helped launch, but nobody from Bremen supports them!

Working alongside the fantastic strategists Jonathan Chu and Geraldine Szabo, and the brilliant creatives Boris Grunwald, Florian Spielhofer, Penelope Abreu, Jen Maerkert, and Andreas Rasmussen, under creative directors Gerrit Kleinfeld, Nina Rieke, and Nina Jünemann, we discovered our client’s real problem, developed a clear insight, spun it into a big idea, and wound up with a creative campaign that wowed the gallery’s curator and won us a Top Dog award.

My favorite part? Testing our key human insight – if you tell somebody not to do something, they’ll definitely do it. To test it we created two posters, one that says “VISIT THIS WEBSITE”, and one that says “DON’T VISIT THIS WEBSITE.” With ridiculously amazing support for my ridiculously ridiculous tasks that have nothing at all to do with him, Hamburg’s Best PHP Programmer Jonas Franke created a pair of beautifully ridiculous web counters that feature the character GIR of Invader Zim fame doing a fancy dance (as seen below). Adding one dancing GIR per visitor allowed us to count how many people reacted to each poster. And I simply cannot imagine what these people thought when all they saw was 200+ GIRs dancing away on the screen. LOL!

And the results? Well, I told you not to read this presentation! (PDF)

Cool beans; Henrik & Tibo & I scored some more notoriety for shaking up the Swedish sales tax system. Thanks YoungGuns!

Don’t worry world, there is no need to thank Matt Entin and I for harnessing the technological marvels of cardboard to let you finally take that permanent vacation you’ve always dreamed about. Just imagine… they’ll never even know you’re gone!

newcreatives.com awarded newcreation of the month to the project Henrik Düfke & Thibalut Gerard (two dudes for sale) and I created for Le Bureau in Stockholm a couple months ago. Here ’tis:

Hold on to your hats folks; I’ve been lax in my duties around here, so I’m taking advantage of the ability to “correct” the date of a new post, so that I can blast to the past and add a few things that I should’ve over the past half year. White House web 2.0, take note.

So… President Obama had a town hall meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina today. He was welcomed by a local cupcake bakery owner, and he bemoaned the fact that she hadn’t brought him cupcakes… then he recited the logline from a fake news video I made last February at Miami Ad School Minneapolis and sent to the White House; “I think cupcakes are good for your health!” Here’s a video of him saying it in his speech today:

And here’s the video I made and sent to the White House last February, 5 months back:

I’m totally tickled he actually likes cupcakes as much as I made him say he does! The idea seemed to go over well with the crowd at the town hall, and with Twitter… although now there’s a “have your cupcake and eat it too” controversy… but that was foreseen…

Sadly, I don’t think I’m going to get any credit for this one; my video is probably too lame for prime time… but I wonder if I can get a job writing things like this for the president all the time…

Obama: I graduate soon – call me. You probably know my number.

I just got this print campaign off to the The Show, an advertising award show in Minneapolis:

Carving up hundreds of Ramen noodle bricks for these letters was the most frustrating typographical experience of my life, with dry noodle bits flying all over the place like shrapnel, and if you put the knife in at just the wrong place and cut the wrong noodle, the whole brick would crumble and you’d have to start all over. The looks I got when I was buying 5 crates of Ramen (for like, 8 bucks) were pretty good though…

Fingers crossed the judges like my cheap Photoshopping as much as cheap noodles?

It was a great experiment, but it’s finally time to admit that my playful Twitter experiment, Mozart the Lost Sock, has come to an end.

The spontaneous story began on January 9th with his first tweet…

My name is Mozart. I was an average white and grey crew sock, but it seems that’s changing now.

As the eventually 1,000+ followers would learn, those socks we all mysteriously lose are zapped into hollow earth, where evil irons force them to build giant water irrigation systems to feed their oppressive steam regime. Our hero Mozart fell through the vortex with his iPhone, and changed the way irons interact with socks forever.

Mozart tweeted his followers with live accounts of what was happening in his adventure, and often talked about the latest flavor of cupcake he’d eaten (which is, of course, a sock’s preferred form of sustenance). Chamomile cupcakes, cinnamon hazelnut cupcakes, chocolate chip zucchini cupcakes, banana maple syrup cupcakes… phew, he sure did love cupcakes. I was considering opening Mozart’s Cupcake Delivery website and actually whipping up these delicious flavors (lavender cupcakes are a-m-a-z-i-n-g).

In any case, 300 tweets later Mozart tweeted about a video of exploding cupcakes… and was never heard from again…

Some fans hypothesized that with his love for cupcakes, perhaps he had tried to recreate the video and suffered some injury… But I must admit it was just finals week and I was a wee bit overstretched, what with cutting Ramen noodles and other really important things.

In the end it was a great experience. Twitter finally become fun for me, and Mozart got some really dedicated fans. One of them created a lovely compilation of all the tweets – Wanderings, Mozart the Lost Sock. It’s fun to read back through it and remember how exciting it was to try to keep a story going with only 140 characters per post to work with.

Rest in peace Mozart!