George Lois Quotes
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If you work with convictions, people have got to listen to you.
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If you think people are dumb, you'll spend a lifetime doing dumb work.
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All the people who run agencies, all the important people in agencies have taken communication courses, marketing courses, advertising courses, and courses basically teach advertising as a science, and advertising is so far from a science it isn't even funny. Advertising is an art.
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Great advertising, in and of itself, becomes a benefit of the product.
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A graphic designer, you know, who understands ideas and understands that ideas are what makes the world go round, could change the world with a magazine. If one talent could do it right now, and everybody would stop saying it's the death of magazines.
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When I teach classes at the School of Visual Arts,, I'll ask the students, 'How many of you have been to a museum this year?' Nobody raises their hand and I go into a tirade. If you want to do something sharp and innovative, you have to know what went on before.
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'Mad Men' is nothing more than the fulfillment of every possible stereotype of the early 1960s bundled up nicely to convince consumers that the sort of morally repugnant behavior exhibited by its characters - with one-night-stands and excessive consumption of Cutty Sark and Lucky Strikes - is glamorous and 'vintage.'
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With the way I worked, a client can give me everything they know about something, and then I go away and come back with advertising that knocks them out of their chair. They finally understand what kind of a company they are.
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The whole area of creativity is constipated and frightened.
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Everybody is so busy talking about 'Twittering' and talking about the new technologies and talking about this and that, but they don't talk about creativity.
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Sometimes all the 'marketing' insight in the world can't move a client, but the creation of a truly great brand name can become a billion-dollar idea!
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Nothing great can come of more than three people in a room. If you had 10 incredibly bright people, nothing would come out of it.
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Because advertising and marketing is an art, the solution to each new problem or challenge should begin with a blank canvas and an open mind, not with the nervous borrowings of other people's mediocrities. That's precisely what 'trends' are - a search for something 'safe' - and why a reliance on them leads to oblivion.
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The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. And I really believe that. And what I try to teach young people, or anybody in any creative field, is that every idea should seemingly be outrageous.
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Ad agencies do all kinds of market research that ask people what they think they want, and instead, you should be creating things that you want. If you do something and you get it, the rest of the world will get it, too. Trust your own instincts, your own intellect, and your own sense of humor.
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In professional work - certainly in the arts and graphics - 99% of people have zero courage. They blow with the wind.
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I had a fistfight with every kid on my block. I got about fifteen broken noses to prove it. Part of it was also because I was always drawing, and I always had an artist portfolio with me. But I was a tough kid. I won their respect.
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Truly great images make all the other millions of images you look at unimportant. You gotta look at an image and understand it in a nanosecond.
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A truly great magazine cover surprises, even shocks, and connects in a nano-second.
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What Apple did for technology is brilliant, but they didn't do nothin' for our economy.
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Museums are custodians of epiphanies, and these epiphanies enter the central nervous system and deep recesses of the mind.
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I don't design. I get what I think is a big idea, and I put the idea down. I'm not a designer. I'm a communicator.
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It's almost as if creativity is dead. The visual power of advertising was everywhere - now it's basically gone.
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I'm sounding like an old fart talking about how bad advertising is today, but it's true. Advertising sucks. Guys like me and Bob Gage and certainly Bill Bernbach and two or three other guys, we exemplified and led the creative revolution.