e-Books

When a subject seems important enough, sometimes I write an e-book about it. Here are some.

Click the blue underlined titles in italics to download.

9 Lessons from Black+White

In reality, I learned more than nine lessons when I conceived, co-founded and worked as European Contributing Editor for Australia’s famous but now sadly defunct Black+White magazine. Nine is just the tip of the iceberg.

But, it is a good number when it comes to snappy and succinct summations of the most significant of them all, so nine it is. I suggest that you download this e-book and read it as a companion to How I Came Out of the Western Desert & Helped Kill Off The Cultural Cringe. Now that is a mouthful of a title!

[e-book] Achievements & Innovation in Advertising, Publishing & The Web

After I came back to Australia after working in the UK during the height of the brand image advertising boom of the 1990s, where I was also closely involved in what some people are calling the Digital Revolution, where the Web as we know it was born, friends and relatives, puzzled, asked me to “Please explain?”

So I did, and here it is. In retrospect, though, I can see there is so much more than what I have written in this e-book, but it will have to do for now. I’d much rather create a whole new exciting future than dwell in the past for one moment.

How I Came Out of the Western Desert & Helped Kill Off The Cultural Cringe

When a friend asked me to tell her about how Black+White – the magazine that helped kill off the Great Australian Cultural Cringe in the arts and creative culture – came about, the story seemed just a little too large, and interesting, to leave it at a handful of paragraphs in Achievements & Innovation in Advertising, Publishing & The Web. The story of Black+White was not much more than a footnote in that particular e-book.

So it made sense to extend the story forwards and backwards in time, and place, by tracing Black+White’s beginnings in my time growing up on the edge of the deserts in Western Australia. Why? Because if we had a regular old, plain vanilla Cultural Cringe in the eastern states then we had a fully-blown, monster-sized Cringe living and thriving in the uttermost west of this continent. That one made the eastern one seem small by comparison.

There were a few other stories worth telling too, so here they are. Enjoy!

[e-book] Live Local, Think Global

I wrote this e-book when I was pondering some of the lessons I’d learned from working with several of the great brand image advertising art directors and copywriters. Some of them had got their start in regionally-based but worldclass agencies. I’d worked with a couple remotely even, with them based at home in another country while flying in as needed, or meeting up in a third location.

Much of my work has always been remote – me based wherever I was in the world at the time, working on projects with collaborators all over, for clients in a country none of us were in or perhaps had ever been to.

Working remotely, and being regionally-based but working for local clients, but creating to global standards, is more possible nowadays than it ever has been before. Yet, I was coming across a variation on my old enemy the Cultural Cringe – a belief that it was impossible to be regional and create to high standards, because… well, just because.

So, I wrote this to disprove that belief. This e-book inspired at least one independent advertising agency to start up and do well.