Posts tagged “glossy”

Know it when you see it

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Rhino art at the Centre Pompidou. Better pictures here and here

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Cattle advertisement in the Bankside area of London.

Take the form of some large animal and paint it Ferrari red. Then cover it with layers of gloss. Is the result art or advertising? The context in which we experience it seems to make all the difference. A museum or outside a restaurant?

Note: a more detailed, and impassioned exploration is in I Know It When I See It. But they start with the big red rhino, too.

We really care about you *STEVE * PORTIGAL *

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In yesterday’s mail comes this silly glossy ad ahem magazine from Farmer’s (our insurance company) entitled you belong, with lots of great stories about how quickly they pay up after storm damage and so on.

And to really deliver the feeling that I do indeed belong, comes this highly personalized note from our local agent.
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I like the transition from [soft TV voice on] “Please don’t hesitate to contact me. That’s why I’m here.” [soft TV voice off] to the ridiculous dot-matrix font that throws in consumer-irrelevant database numbers like

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directly in my face. Yep, I sure feel like I belong. A real personal connection.

This is a technical failure, a design failure, but also failure of “getting it” – some folks at Farmer’s are missing the point in a serious way.

Series

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