What a week! I started in Boston at BAI’s annual Retail Delivery Conference and Expo (for which we’ve created the campaign and graphic theme for four years in a row — more on that in separate blog post), and ended up at the Opportunity Green conference at UCLA over the weekend.  To quote from their website, “The world can no longer afford business as usual. Opportunity Green emerged to confront this challenge and bring together the brightest innovators leading the growth of the new green economy.”

A few highlights of the conference — at least for me:

• Hearing Adam Lowry, one of the founders of Method cleaning products (whose concept, design, copy and creativity have made me a huge fan) talk about their beginnings, what the company has learned, and where he sees the industry heading. About how a company is more of an organism than it is an organization. And how, despite all the metrics and business models, sometimes companies “just have to do something awesome.”
• Seeing Chris Jordan’s mind-bending photographs designed to give the viewer an experience of the actual amount of garbage we create. And watching his moving, beautiful slide show documenting the decimation of the albatross population from ingesting the plastic now swirling in the Pacific Ocean — an island of trash twice the size of Texas.
• Being stunned at the positive impact Proctor & Gamble can have on the environment simply by making a cold-water detergent that’s as effective as the usual warm-water kind.
• Running into my old business partner Stuart Karten, a brilliant industrial designer, who brought half a dozen members of his team to get current on the state of the shift to a green economy.
• Hearing Annie Leonard and Jonah Sachs discuss their renowned video The Story of Stuff, and thinking about how their approach to story-telling relates so deeply to all the work we do.
• Experiencing the powerful Hopenhagen campaign that Ogilvy’s team has put together, and learning how this enormous agency knew when even its own resources weren’t enough — and sought partners to augment their message.
• Reveling in the news from a year-long study by MIT’s Michael Hopkins and BCG’s Andrew Townend that, even in this recession, corporations are not cutting back spending on sustainability. Then talking to Andrew over lunch about where things are headed and what it means.
• Watching 13 brand new green startups — all finalists in the OG25 competition — each give a 60-second pitch to the whole conference. Brilliant new ideas, three of which apparently found venture capital funding this weekend at the conference!

There’s much, much more. But this post is getting long. Bottom line, to quote Jim Davis from SAP, “A bullet train has left the station. You’re either on it, or you’re back on the platform. And in 10 years, you’re irrelevant.”

The original line of Karito Kids, now joined by their little buddies, Travel Charmers (see below).

We are incredibly lucky to have so many clients who do amazing things for the world.

Some raise money for women’s cancers. Others provide education, housing and support for developmentally disabled kids and adults. Still others support young athletes, build homes for working families, or create state of the art programs for seniors with dementia.

It’s a hell of a group, and we’re thrilled to be on their teams.

One of our favorites is the amazing Karito Kids.

A couple of years ago, two visionary women formed a company whose mission was to support services for children in some of the poorest parts of the world, while teaching kids about the value of being involved and giving back. (The name Karito [`ka-ree`-toe], meaning charity and love of one’s neighbor, comes from the constructed international language Esperanto.)

To do that, they created a line of multi-cultural dolls and books, and set things up so that a portion of every purchase supports children’s humanitarian projects worldwide.

The creativity of their product line combined with the company’s core commitments to charity and global awareness have attracted industry and media attention, resulting in dozens of prestigious awards, including the #1 Toy of the Year.

Now they’re doing even more.

Look! It's the new Travel Charmers line of soft, cuddly Karito Kids.

They just announced a plan to donate an additional $2 of every Karito Kids® purchase to victims of the recent natural disasters in Southeast Asia.

Through an initiative called “Project Reach Out,” they’ll send extra funds to help families affected by the recent earthquakes and typhoons in Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines. This additional “Project Reach Out” donation will be in effect through October 31.

Laura and Lisa — and their whole team — are simply amazing. As are their products. Do yourself and the world a favor and shop now for the holidays. It’s not too early to get into the real spirit of giving.

My theory of the day: Going green is the next World War II.

It looks to me like global warming will be the huge economic push that will get the whole economy moving at full steam again. (Pardon the pun.) As the oceans rise, as the land becomes parched, as cities flood, as the populace migrates, enormous opportunities will also open up for companies with enough awareness to see them.

As with World War II, we will have no choice but to deal with the problem. The government will spend money, and taxpayers will fund the expenditure. People will simply have to get truly creative to solve the problems a warmer climate will create.

I don’t know that what we now think of as “green” will be the main focus. I imagine it’ll be a part of it because there will certainly be a desire to slow the process down as much as possible. But being green tends to take vision and sacrifice, and lots of people are too self-involved or unconcerned or uneducated to be willing to participate.

In contrast, money is a great motivator. As is water lapping at your upstairs windows. I think lots of other new industries will emerge:

• New forms of mass transportation will have to be built to deal with relocation.
• New forms of housing will be needed — cheap, insulated, self-contained, probably modular housing systems.
• New forms of farming will be developed, with genetically engineered crops (whether we like it or not) that yield more nutrition with less irrigation.
• Massive new engineering challenges like bridges, pontoon-based structures and levees to protect people from the rising sea.

You get the idea.

People who are thinking ahead will be in a position to capitalize on all this while helping their country, and the world, enormously.

And, with luck, we’ll be part of those innovative solutions.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where we’re all heading — as a company, as a country — and what we can do about it to help make things better.

Michael Bungay Stanier is a business coach in Canada devoted to helping companies and individuals do Great Work (as opposed to just Good Work). He sent out a link to this terrific little video. I thought I’d share it with you.

It addresses some of the things I’ve been pondering, and it makes me happy to know there are lots and lots of people out there who are thinking along the same lines.

Maybe you’re one of them. Enjoy.

Patricia and I just got back from a couple of weeks of traveling, mostly in England. We got to spend a day with two good friends: the artist Terry Cripps and writer and consultant Susannah Finzi at their gorgeously restored and remodeled old home in a tiny village in the Gloucestershire countryside. After years of working as a commercial illustrator and photographer, Terry is now doing what he truly loves. He’s painting abstract images.

We picked the fresh vegetables the couple grows in abundance, which Terry and Susannah cooked brilliantly, along with the spectacular aged lamb they had helped raise on a neighbor’s farm. We ate, drank and talked. And, after two years of having promised ourselves we’d do it, we finally bought a couple of Terry’s pieces to bring home.

Our conversations about Terry’s paintings led me to an interesting question about design. Why do so many people think that the things we create have to be instantly recognizable?

Clients worry about legibility, even if they’re talking about a huge, single-word headline that happens to be set in an interesting font, or a light tint. They worry if we turn words sideways, even though nobody has any trouble reading the headlines on street banners while driving by at 40 mph. They worry about whether people will instantly understand the form of a logo and immediately connect it to the object it might represent.

But not every single thing has to be clear right away. Often the most powerful images are the ones that make you scratch your head for a moment, then lead to a delightful “ah-hah!” reaction. Ideas that leave you curious, that get you interested, are so much more memorable than those that demand no involvement.

Often, reducing a design to its essentials — controlled abstraction — is part of our process. We ask, “What can we leave out and still make this work? What’s absolutely necessary to leave in — that thing without which the concept doesn’t make sense or affect the viewer?” People’s instinct is to include everything. And, generally, that desire is fear-driven: “What if they don’t notice me? What if they have a question I didn’t answer?”

I know, I know. I’m becoming a GTD nerd. (At least I’m in good company!)

As as designer, though, I couldn’t stand looking at the many kludgy charts around to guide you through processing the stuff in your “In” box. So I designed my own to use as a desktop background (“wallpaper” in the Windows world). I’ve posted them in the GTD section of this site. If you want to see them, just click the GTD tab at the top of this blog and download them to your heart’s content.

Meanwhile, if you’re not yet acquainted with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”, do yourself a favor and check it out.

I had another post all set for today, when Jim Knipper at Media Associates sent me this video.

This puppy is too good to pass up. It combines some of my favorite things — rage, humor, guitars and viral video — to fight back against the corporate impassivity of United Airlines.

Dave Carroll and The Sons of Maxwell produced a great send-up. I’ll bet UA wishes they’d honored his claim.

The power of viral marketing is just amazing. And it looks like Evian managed to harness it big-time.

It started with a funny little video called “Baby Break Dance” that went up in June and now has about 500,000 hits. Not bad. But the new “Roller Babies” video posted July 2 has already received 3 million hits on YouTube as of this writing.

The question is, where the hell is this supposed to be going?

My very smart friend/client Laura who showed it to me was kind of stunned at how off-strategy it seems. As was I. The Evian brand has long been about health + fashion. Now it’s about — what? Cute, slightly nutty CGI babies?

The phrase “Live young” seems good, smart. A nice extension of the brand’s health equity. And you can’t argue with the attention-getting quality of the Roller spot itself. So I guess we should just be patient and see what develops.

Meanwhile, I’m going to go get a drink of good old L.A. tap — one of the top-rated waters in the world!

What do you call a painfully obsolete cellphone? It's a "Brickberry."

The LA Times’s Dan Neil (one my favorite journalists) did an article this morning on the new Cultural Dictionary, just published by the agency Cramer-Krasselt. In an effort to help their clients stay up to speed in our rapidly shifting cultural tidepool, they eavesdrop on subway passengers’ conversations, scope out text messages and jot down gems from pick-up basketball games.

Then they compile their findings into a guide for the less initiated.

Here are a few beauts:

Pinkwashers (n.): Certain companies that specifically use support for breast cancer research to promote products or services.

Freedomlawn (n.): Residential land permitted or designed to contain a variety of plants other than manicured grass, especially when containing plant life that occurs without cultivation, chemicals or cutting.

Precycling (v.): Purchasing products based on how recyclable they are.

Micro-boredom (n.): What we used to call downtime is now increasingly filled by fiddling with mobiles or BlackBerrys. Those who market these devices, or the services they use, see it as an opportunity to sell us something.

Read the whole article here.

Sunday night I went to a fascinating event: a presentation called “Awesome” about the intersection of science, beauty and magic. It’s part of an ongoing series called Categorically Not! put on by L.A. Times science writer K.C. Cole. The speakers were quite a collection:

• Curator and historian Daniel Lewis whose award winning exhibit “Beautiful Science” showcases scientific ideas that changed the world.
• Art Benjamin, professor at Harvey Mudd College and mathemagician extraordinaire, who blew us away with feats of mental calculation that seemed like sheer magic to us mere mortals. And…
• Adam Frank, astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, who talked about the common ground between science and spirit. He explores the subject in his new book, The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate, which Publishers Weekly praises as “light years beyond the stale standoff between uninspired scientific materialism and unscientific intelligent design.” Frank talked about the experience of spiritual awe that’s embodied in the magnificent photos taken by the Hubble telescope, and in discovering the tiny, elegant structures of the simplest creatures in nature.

Frank is a powerful, passionate speaker who loves his subject and who truly understands how to engage an audience. And like so many presenters, he used PowerPoint in a way that undermined his presentation, distracted his audience and made me want to run screaming from the room.

I cringed as the bullet points built up and overflowed on slide after slide. Gorgeous, dramatic visuals were reduced to afterthoughts in the corner of the frame. Powerful quotes were buried with other dense information that ensured they would be lost in the clutter of the space/time continuum.

I felt so bad for Mr. Frank, who deserved so much better, that I sent him a few links to some great info about strengthening your presentations and knocking your audience’s socks off. I thought I’d post them here, too.

Merlin Mann has a classic, simple overview here on 43Folders.com.

Guy Kawasaki, who as a venture capitalist has sat through more bad PowerPoint presentations than the rest of us will see in a lifetime, shares his 10/20/30 rule here.

Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen blog has some helpful info here and all over the rest of his blog.

Though I’m pretty positive he actually uses Keynote, Steve Jobs is just brilliant at this stuff. Watch any of his presentations if you want to see a master in action.

PowerPoint: Whose speech will it kill next? Hopefully not yours.