We’ve known for years that the opportunities to buy mass attention are shrinking by the day, just as the opportunities to earn and measure attention become ever more enticingly available. If we can just wake up to this fact, this is a show-stoppingly great moment in time for our industry. A great read for those who has been looking for the change.

It’s kind of strange how we all have our kept secrets from the past to present. Like how time pass but doesn’t really pass at all. We still linger on to it at times. Would she look the same? Did I look the same? How much does someone change in 5 years? Even if she did look the same, I would be looking at her with different eyes—she wouldn’t be the same.

At times these thoughts should be buried, but let’s face it. We humans are connected creatures. The need for the connecting with someone keeps us alive and let us know that we are not alone in this world. I bet that sometimes when you are out there in a bar having a drink two, your eyes would be scanning the room to find a familiar face that you once had a connection. But the truth is, it hardly happens. Those that we once were connected to have moved on, no one will stay constant in the same place.

I guess i was looking for an awareness of the years and the lifetimes I was accumulating. But i guess at the end, it was a reconnection which should be best kept as a secret.

Well have just finish the final round of judging for Crowbar Awards 2011 and i must say students these days are well informed on advertising trends, too well informed whereby they form an invisible “standard” checklist on what mediums should they use when it comes to the work they create. As part of the jury for the interactive category, the key thing for me is to see work of substance and originality rather than just some similar lofty concept that is presented through mediocre motion graphic videos. But well, students being students, the only source of of knowledge comes from the design education they have.

Sometimes i really wonder what creative education in Singapore has evolved to. Art schools back in my time play an inspirational role when it comes to creativity. However , schools these days are overly concern with software trainings rather than conceptualization and creative thinking process. And students who come out from these programmes merely become design operators for agencies or design firms which indirectly affects the creative output domestically.

So the question is, are the schools fueling the society based on demand or are these school concern with nurturing creative thinkers that potential can shape the future? This discussion could go on for ages but hopefully, one day people will realize that the world could be ideal, if we put the right vision and the right people in it. Or maybe the industry doesn’t need any creatives thinkers, as agencies these day have the magic help from the wheel of concept.

This made me look.

A must read for all designers out there. “The Photoshop Etiquette Manifesto for Web Designers is a list of helpful and *subtle* suggestions to organize Photoshop Documents, making the transfer of them less painful.”

5 Keys to the Art of Listening, from David Weedmark.

HTML 5 is here but it got most of us (especially client) in a state of confusion. This diagram will be a good intro for all those out there that need a better understanding of how it works in a visual way.