Differenting.

In the nearly seven years since I opened GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, I've been in fewer meetings than I'd have been in at an agency in a week. 

OK. I'm exaggerating. But you get the point.

Because I try not to have meetings, I have actual time to think, work, read, learn, observe and get out of the prevailing Madison Avenue Echo Chamber.  What's more, I can break away from the mind-controllingness of the algorithm that feeds you the same concatenation of crap that it feeds everyone else.

No wonder everything looks alike, feels alike, tastes alike, ends with the same joke, has the same VO, the same music, etc. We're all being fed the same stimulus. And time-pressed as we are, and as bogged down by time-sheets and meetings as we are, many of us seldom get to cast our gaze anywhere but where someone else has already cast theirs.

About two weeks ago, reading something or other, I tripped over a mention of this book. "The Dictionary of Visual Language" by Philip Thompson and Peter Davenport. It looked interesting and odd. And it looked like something everyone else isn't reading. I quickly found it on abebooks.com (an aggregator of used books) found it decently priced and ordered it.

Not having been taken out since October, 2005, the book had been removed from University of Brighton libraries and offered for sale. It arrived on my seaside stoop just two hours ago.

It makes sense, if you trade in ideas as I do, to find sources of ideas. It makes even more sense to find sources that other people aren't aware of or don't use. Ostensibly, that's why agencies used to hire people from different backgrounds, used to have libraries and used to allow people the downtime to fill up their brains with something other than 209-page powerpoint decks containing little but marketing blabber.

There were about one-thousand air-mail-stamp-sized reproductions in the book. I took crappy iPhone photos of some things I liked for no other reason that I like sharing things I like. That's part, I think, of being a human and living in the world.

The nature of the book--it's emphasis on 'visual language' had me looking at simple graphic "stories," that made me laugh, gasp or wow. 

Here are about a dozen things I liked.

A big assignment just wrapped and another one isn't slated to begin until next week. Rather than drive myself crazy worrying about getting more business, I bought this book, took these snapshots and wrote this post.