Adam Hrubý — The Journal

BESIP logo redesign fail

A bit of local design news for you. BESIP is an authority for road safety, part of the Department of Transport in Czech republic. The new management (Ondřej Valenta) decided to throw away the “old” logo, which has served for 44 years, and come with something MODERN, DYNAMIC, JUICY etc. to communicate better. 

“We redesign the old look to a new, modern logo of transport authority, corporation, a company with modern managerial management and advanced internal and external communication” says the owner of the “communication” agency.

And now just look at it.

This is the most typical redesign fail. Throw away everything what has been working (because you got it right!), throw a couple of VERY poor designs on the table and let’em choose. Do a horrible typographic job, and choose an emptied color scheme. “Three people were working for four weeks, six variants to choose from” stresses the agency. Boy they must’ve been sweating with effort.

A breathing logo

“We like the kerning for the chosen typeface, and it’s well chosen, in our opinion” says the owner, as he is defending the tragic composition with “our intention was that the logo could breathe and wasn’t so cramped”. (interviewed by idnes.cz) 

The new slogan is somehow more insistant and alarming, thus reflecting modern news-breaking media fear. The old “For the life on the road” was replaced by “…because life’s at stake!”

My manners are at stake! 

Btw, do you remember obama’s logo? 

Resigned losership is the cancer we learned to love

I know it’s not as juicy as a hunger strike or government corruption scandal. But as a designer and an aesthetically responsible person, I cannot be silent. Not anymore. We were mumbling about our little injustice for to long. There is hope. Look at the GAP case, redesign fail. And look at the community, which reacted whose reaction’s were 1) WTF 2) I can do better. It produced results. 

Czech designers, art directors, typographers, this situations is not hopeless. We can change it. Let’s kick some responsible ass. Share, blog, tweet, do your own redesign. Please, don’t be silent. 

I decided NOT to name the agency yet, to prevent the bad-ad-good-ad effect. It’s all in the dot.

NEXT FESTIVAL 2010 Bratislava

Since this was my first time on NEXT festival, forget my being so enthusiastic. But this is really a great feat from where I come from. Althought quite extraordinary gigs are thrown here and there, NEXT is a continuous, three-day flow of “marginal” music. And you really DO get things in context. I mean you can compare various experimental approaches, see how the people do it and touch them if you want.

And as it was also a trip for me, to Bratislava, Slovakia, I need to share some background stories. Here’s my day-to-day report.

First day

Quite exceptional. Genreless whatever-in interprets. From rather gentle music concrète and procedural composition by @C with great visuals by Lia, over kosher analog turntable noisemaker from Montreal - Martin Tetréault to pumpy zornish (and well applauded) jazz trio The Thing. I was thrilled. Paal Nilssen-Love totally got me as Mats was chewing on the reeds. Everything topped by fucking sickening U2 in a hostel lobby :)

Second day

My shoes are wet and my toes frozen.

Amazing analog performance by GER/US/MEX trio Die Schrauber, funny you could tell their nationalities just from appearence. Recognizing their insruments was a bit trickier. I was caught by the energy of FM Einheit and a little asian kid dancing to his banging giant amplified springs. The final session was closed by a minimal dancing sphere Elektro Guzzi, They could be as well playing in the clubs. To make my day complete I got a traditional, marvellous topping by the hostel lobby DJ - slovak bullshit punkrock.

Hostel Blues atmos

I’m sharing a room with four african guys from Senegal selling wooden statues of giraffes, blaming bad sales on the crisis. They wear incredible amounts of clothes, all navy blue. They put their goods in those huge hockey bags, they rub in warming salves and set off to do the business. And they food they cook smells incredible *salivate*.

In the lobby, there’s a mixed group of four, drinking since morning including one fat bleched teethless fairy, one hairy transvestite in a twinkled denim vest, onehobo wearing an XS Ferrari t-shirt, and one gang-leader, probably called “The Professor”. He wears glasses.

They all smell the same, probably a gang ident.

Hostel lobby is providing another wunderbar exp. - Lord of The Rings with the soundtrack by Sinatra: Love&Marriage. 

• (Boromir running slo-mo) ♪ Go together like a horse and carriage 
• (Frodo looking frigtened) ♪ This I tell you brother
• (Boromir slaying an ogre) ♪ You can’t have one without the other

Bratislava is mad with Christmas’ market fast food. Dozens of stalls luring their victims with hot steam, mulled wine and pancakes. They all sell basically the same, but some of them are packed and some get no attention. (My guess people stand in the queue just because there IS one. There MUST be something EXTRA about this stall, otherwise we would be total idiots, wouldn’t we?)

Last day

Definitely the densiest one. Firstly, music by an innovative jam “V4 soundlab”. A couple of guys from various soundscapes, trying to put together something new. A fair starter. But moments later, a contemporary mixed duo Kamama (Audrey Chen and Luca Marini) emanated such a brilliance and imaginativeness, it made me buy their CD. (I did this for a first time in my life.) Those animalous female vocals made my goose bump. Definitely on my watchlist. And yours.

A brutal mood switch by a lebanese Tarek Atoui, who starred his live act with contactless DYI gadgets, building epileptic noise sheiks. His energy could turn a rock fan into a noise head (and probably a fastfood kebap into food). A thankful crowd enveloped him, curious for the secrets of his technical magic. To smooth things up, rather famous Warp’s Mira Calix played a cosy and sophisticated act, with hip overhead-projector visuals. And to rough things again, the masters of bangers&mashup, Fuzzy Osbourne & MSCLV threw a party the institute for arts and culture haven’t heard before.

Thanks to all people involved. It were great three days, the atmos of the festival was homy, calm and spasm-free. No hip posers, no big-headed outbidders or disturbing maniacs. Well, one maniac, but he was kind of harmless and fascinating. 

If you live around and are into this kind of music, you should definitely come NEXT year. 

• VIDEOs from the fest!!
• Official NEXT website
• A4 ZERO SPACE (the venue)

Check my photos on FLICKR.

Procrastination is a populist party in the republic of yourself

This is a piece in the puzzle of a big topic I’m thinking about a lot of … ehm, time. Human perception of time. Is there really anything more interesting? Well, you may never know, since you have no time to worry about such things.

Procrastination is either a buzzword, and a really heavy issue. Boy I really know what I’m talking about. And thanks to the effects of internet addiction, the attention span of most of the procrastinators is too short to actually read the “tl;dr” articles about it. So most of us just know there is a problem, but never actually have time to read it. 

In the New Yorker’s book review “Later”, James Surowiecki sums up all the interesting facts and theories about today’s most blamed and ashamed counter-productivity phenomena. 

It’s a powerful example of what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off. In other words, if you’re simply saying “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” you’re not really procrastinating. Knowingly delaying because you think that’s the most efficient use of your time doesn’t count, either. The essence of procrastination lies in not doing what you think you should be doing, a mental contortion that surely accounts for the great psychic toll the habit takes on people. This is the perplexing thing about procrastination: although it seems to involve avoiding unpleasant tasks, indulging in it generally doesn’t make people happy. In one study, sixty-five per cent of students surveyed before they started working on a term paper said they would like to avoid procrastinating: they knew both that they wouldn’t do the work on time and that the delay would make them unhappy.

There’s been a lot of research done. From various points of view, including philosophical, economical and educational. Let’s have a look at some examples.

The present bias

As behavioral economist Katherine Milkman has pointed out, this is why grocery stores put candy right next to the checkout.

This is sometimes called present bias – being unable to grasp what you want will change over time, and what you want now isn’t the same thing you will want later. Present bias explains why you buy lettuce and bananas only to throw them out later when you forget to eat them. This is why when you are a kid you wonder why adults don’t own more toys.

Present bias is why you’ve made the same resolution for the tenth year in a row, but this time you mean it. You are going to lose weight and forge a six-pack of abs so ripped you could deflect arrows.

You weigh yourself. You buy a workout DVD. You order a set of weights.

One day you have the choice between running around the block or watching a movie, and you choose the movie. Another day you are out with friends and can choose a cheeseburger or a salad. You choose the cheeseburger.

The power of marshmellows

Walter Mischel conducted experiments at Stanford University throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s in which he and his researchers offered a bargain to children.

The kids sat at a table in front of a bell and some treats. They could pick a pretzel, a cookie or a giant marshmallow. They told the little boys and girls they could either eat the treat right away or wait a few minutes. If they waited, they would double their payoff and get two treats. If they couldn’t wait, they had to ring the bell after which the researcher would end the experiment.

Some made no attempt at self-control and just ate right away. Others stared intensely at the object of their desire until they gave in to temptation. Many writhed in agony, twisting their hands and feet while looking away. Some made silly noises.

In the end, a third couldn’t resist.

Mischel has followed the lives of all his subjects through high-school, college and into adulthood where they accumulated children, mortgages and jobs.

The revelation from this research is kids who were able to overcome their desire for short-term reward in favor of a better outcome later weren’t smarter than the other kids, nor were they less gluttonous. They just had a better grasp of how to trick themselves into doing what was best for them.

They watched the wall instead of looking at the food. They tapped their feet instead of smelling the confection. The wait was torture for all, but some knew it was going to be impossible to just sit there and stare at the delicious, gigantic marshmallow without giving in.

Students and deadlines

A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychologist at M.I.T., did a fascinating experiment examining one of the most basic external tools for dealing with procrastination: deadlines. Students in a class were assigned three papers for the semester, and they were given a choice: they could set separate deadlines for when they had to hand in each of the papers or they could hand them all in together at the end of the semester. There was no benefit to handing the papers in early, since they were all going to be graded at semester’s end, and there was a potential cost to setting the deadlines, since if you missed a deadline your grade would be docked. So the rational thing to do was to hand in all the papers at the end of the semester; that way you’d be free to write the papers sooner but not at risk of a penalty if you didn’t get around to it. Yet most of the students chose to set separate deadlines for each paper, precisely because they knew that they were otherwise unlikely to get around to working on the papers early, which meant they ran the risk of not finishing all three by the end of the semester. This is the essence of the extended will: instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.

The same choice was offered to a selection of students in a 2002 study conducted by Klaus Wertenbroch and Dan Ariely.

They set up three classes, and each had three weeks to finish three papers. Class A had to turn in all three papers on the last day of class, Class B had to pick three different deadlines and stick to them, and Class C had to turn in one paper a week.

Which class had the better grades?

Class C, the one with three specific deadlines, did the best. Class B, which had to pick deadlines ahead of time but had complete freedom, did the second best, and the group whose only deadline was the last day, Class A, did the worst.

Students who could pick any three deadlines tended to spread them out at about one week apart on their own. They knew they would procrastinate, so they set up zones in which they would be forced to perform. Still, overly optimistic outliers who either waited until the last minute or chose unrealistic goals pulled down the overall class grade.

Students with no guidelines at all tended to put off their work until the last week for all three papers.

The ones who had no choice and were forced to spread out their procrastination did the best because the outliers were eliminated. Those people who weren’t honest with themselves about their own tendencies to put off their work or who were too confident didn’t have a chance to fool themselves.

You are not so smart.

Most of the popular examples of procrastination are about “important things” you put off. But I think it’s also a problem of attention span. In my case, it’s not a fundamental fight. I turned it into a lifestyle. I live a multicontextual flow of gaining and losing interest. And it all can be judged as procrastination, since there is no actual work done, neither measurable profit, nor tracable focus. And no happiness either. Should I try to beat my weakness? But is it a weakness at all?

Viewed this way, procrastination starts to look less like a question of mere ignorance than like a complex mixture of weakness, ambition, and inner conflict. But some of the philosophers in “The Thief of Time” have a more radical explanation for the gap between what we want to do and what we end up doing: the person who makes plans and the person who fails to carry them out are not really the same person: they’re different parts of what the game theorist Thomas Schelling called “the divided self.” Schelling proposes that we think of ourselves not as unified selves but as different beings, jostling, contending, and bargaining for control. Ian McEwan evokes this state in his recent novel “Solar”: “At moments of important decision-making, the mind could be considered as a parliament, a debating chamber. Different factions contended, short- and long-term interests were entrenched in mutual loathing. Not only were motions tabled and opposed, certain proposals were aired in order to mask others. Sessions could be devious as well as stormy.” Similarly, Otto von Bismarck said, “Faust complained about having two souls in his breast, but I harbor a whole crowd of them and they quarrel. It is like being in a republic.” In that sense, the first step to dealing with procrastination isn’t admitting that you have a problem. It’s admitting that your “you”s have a problem.

LATER by James Surowiecky for The New Yorker.

I’m interested in lots of toppics, and I read a lot. I also have a lot of ideas worth doing something of, but things just don’t happen. I put a little note somewhere and forget it completely. Or I start to get involved, develop that idea further and five thousand clicks later I give up, surrender to the overwhelming entropy of possibilities. I lose the wind in the vision of a future thunderstorm. So I go do something truly pointless. The republic of mes betrays me.

Later, my eye catches something inspiring. I get an idea.  And the whole scene unfolds with a tedious inevitability. And topic of procrastination itself is the very same victim of its own scheme. And the more I’m aware of it, the more I suffer. 

TL;DR, What is the point?

If you skipped or skimmed the light -year-long post just because it is too long and you don’t have time to read all that shit (yea, you’re surfung on teh internets, man, there’s so many vids and interesting stuff to see… wait! you haven’t checked your twitter updates in thirty seconds!), but you still have hopes you get something from the summary in the end, I have to disappoint you. Why do you bother anyway? What is your motivation? Shouldn’t you be doing something useful?

Now go, procrastinate. :)

Further reading

• LATER by James Surowiecky 
• Procrastination by You are not so smart
• Your brain on computers on NY TIMES
• The Thief of Time by Oxford University Press