In professional work - certainly in the arts and graphics - 99% of people have zero courage. They blow with the wind.
George LoisRead
My concern has always been with creating images that catch people's eyes, penetrate their minds, warm their hearts and cause them to act.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the power of visual imagery to evoke emotions and inspire action.
George Lois highlights the importance of creating compelling images that not only attract attention but also resonate deeply with individuals. He believes that effective art can influence emotions and provoke a desire for action, implying that the role of an artist extends beyond mere aesthetics to inspire change and engagement in the audience.
In practice
During a presentation on marketing strategies, I could use this quote to emphasize the need for powerful visual content.
In professional work - certainly in the arts and graphics - 99% of people have zero courage. They blow with the wind.
You can't test great advertising. You can only test the mediocre. Not that I don't care about demographics. You have to understand who you're going after.
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.
In any creative industry, the fact that others are moving in a certain direction is always proof positive, at least to me, that a new direction is the only direction.
I've done truth to power all my life. It's got me into trouble, but who cares?
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.
The great film editor is not a cutter, he's a storyteller, right?
It wasn't stone. It wasn't welded steel. It wasn't traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn't define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.
One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.
I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.
I always did what I thought was interesting. I always just did what caught my fantasy. Looking like a woman, that was never the criteria for me. It was always to do drag. And drag is not gender-specific. Drag is just drag. It's exaggeration.
The ostensible subject of my photographs may be motion, but the subtext is time. A dancer's movements illustrate the passage of time, giving it a substance, materiality, and space. In my photographs, time is stopped, a split second becomes an eternity, and an ephemeral moment is solid as sculpture.
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