big photos
Here at MS, there are lots of posters heralding SP2. They have photos of what I assume are the major players for that release, larger than life. It has the whiff of transparency and accountability all in a nice graphic design the size of your car.
In the lunchroom, all the eurest employees are wearing the SP2 t-shirts, which say something about fighting back against hackers. On each table of the lunchroom, there is a trifold cardstock brochure with the major player's faces on them too. Which got me thinking:
- Imagine snatching up these folks in the middle of their busy workday to try to take their picture. How many do you take? And since everyone has to have a different color background, which one do you choose for which person?
- Say you're Todd Wanke (who I know only from e-mails sent to the entire company). One line item in your day is to pick the best photo out of the pile. Which one do you choose, given that people will be staring at it, slurping their chili (like I was).
It's just an odd set of conditions to produce something coherent, is all.
Also during the aforementioned chili slurping, there was a commercial for a guy creating a statue. The shot of him included him working on a huge piece of clay with a chisel, but he was also talking on his cell phone. Completely accidental, but brilliant. Why?
- Art is work, just like any other work. You would never dream of not answering a cell phone call while programming, would you? Art is the same way. It's not the result of tantrumming or extended childbirth-type pain. Sometimes it's just like cut and paste.
- People feel about programming the way we (programmers) sometimes feel about art. It is some kind of miracle coming out of nowhere, with much applied genius and pain. This is obviously false.
So, hooray for cell phone artist man.