kind of adamantly,

up till the -- pretty much, last few days,

but was denied access to a slide projector.

(Laughter)

I actually find them a lot more emotional --

(Laughter)

-- and personal,

and the neat thing about a slide projector

is you can actually focus the work,

unlike PowerPoint and some other programs.

Now, I agree that

you have to -- yeah, there are certain concessions

and, you know, if you use a slide projector,

you're not able to have the bad type

swing in from the back or the side, or up or down,

but maybe that's an O.K. trade-off,

to trade that off for a focus.

(Laughter)

It's a thought. Just a thought.

And there's something nice about slides getting stuck.

And the thing you really hope for

is occasionally they burn up,

which we won't see tonight. So.

With that, let's get the first slide up here.

This, as many of you have probably guessed,

is a

recently emptied beer can in Portugal.

(Laughter)

This -- I had just arrived in Barcelona for the first time,

and I thought --

you know, fly all night, I looked up,

and I thought, wow, how clean.

You come into this major airport, and they simply have a B.

I mean, how nice is that?

Everything's gotten simpler in design,

and here's this mega airport,

and God, I just -- I took a picture.

I thought, God, that is the coolest thing I've ever seen at an airport.

Till a couple months later,

I went back to the same airport --

same plane, I think -- and looked up,

and it said C.

(Laughter)

It was only then that I realized

it was simply a gate that I was coming into.

(Laughter)

I'm a big believer in the emotion of design,

and the message that's sent

before somebody begins to read,

before they get the rest of the information;

what is the emotional response they get to the product,

to the story, to the painting -- whatever it is.

That area of design interests me the most,

and I think this for me is a real clear,

very simplified version

of what I'm talking about.

These are a couple of garage doors painted identical,

situated next to each other.

So, here's the first door. You know, you get the message.

You know, it's pretty clear.

Take a look at the second door and see

if there's any different message.

O.K., which one would you park in front of?

(Laughter)

Same color, same message, same words.

The only thing that's different

is the expression that the individual door-owner here put into the piece --

and, again,

which is the psycho-killer here?

(Laughter)

Yet it doesn't say that; it doesn't need to say that.

I would probably park in front of the other one.

I'm sure a lot of you are aware

that graphic design has gotten a lot simpler in the last

five years or so.

It's gotten so simple that it's already starting to kind of

come back the other way again and get a little more expressive.

But I was in Milan and saw this street sign,

and was very happy to

see that apparently this idea of minimalism

has even been translated by the graffiti artist.

(Laughter)

And this graffiti artist has come along,

made this sign a little bit better, and then moved on.

(Laughter)

He didn't overpower it like they have a tendency to do.

(Laughter)

This is for a book by "Metropolis."

I took some photos, and this is

a billboard in Florida,

and either they hadn't paid their rent,

or they didn't want to pay their rent again on the sign,

and the billboard people were too cheap to tear the whole sign down,

so they just teared out sections of it.

And I would argue that it's possibly more effective

than the original billboard in terms of getting your attention,

getting you to look over that way.

And hopefully you don't stop and buy those awful pecan things -- Stuckey's.

This is from my second book.

The first book is called, "The End of Print,"

and it was done along with a film,

working with William Burroughs.

And "The End of Print" is now in its fifth printing.

(Laughter)

When I first contacted William Burroughs about being part of it,

he said no; he said he didn't believe it was the end of print.

And I said, well, that's fine;

I just would love to have your input on this film and this book,

and he finally agreed to it.

And at the end of the film, he says in this great voice

that I can't mimic but I'll kind of try, but not really, he says,

"I remember attending an exhibition called,

'Photography: The End of Painting.'"

And then he says, "And, of course, it wasn't at all."

So, apparently when photography was perfected,

there were people going around saying,

that's it: you've just ruined painting.

People are just going to take pictures now.

And of course, that wasn't the case.

So, this is from "2nd Sight,"

a book I did on intuition.

I think it's not the only ingredient in design,

but possibly the most important.

It's something everybody has.

It's not a matter of teaching it;

in fact, most of the schools tend to discount intuition

as an ingredient of your working process

because they can't quantify it:

it's very hard to teach people the four steps to intuitive design,

but we can teach you the four steps to a nice business card

or a newsletter.

So it tends to get discounted.

This is a quote from Albert Einstein, who says,

"The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery.

There comes a leap in consciousness --

call it intuition or what you will --

and the solution just comes to you, and you don't know from where or why."

So, it's kind of like when somebody says, Who did that song?

And the more you try to think about it,

the further the answer gets from you,

and the minute you stop thinking about it,

your intuition gives you that answer, in a sense.

I like this for a couple of reasons.

If you've had any design courses, they would teach you you can't read this.

I think you eventually can and, more importantly, I think it's true.

"Don't mistake legibility for communication."

Just because something's legible doesn't means it communicates.

More importantly, it doesn't mean it communicates the right thing.

So, what is the message sent before

somebody actually gets into the material?

And I think that's sometimes an overlooked area.

This is working with Marshall McLuhan.

I stayed and worked with his wife and son, Eric,

and we came up with close to 600 quotes from Marshall

that are just amazing in terms of being ahead of the times,

predicting so much of what has happened

in the advertising, television, media world.

And so this book is called "Probes." It's another word for quotes.

And it's -- a lot of them are never -- have never been published before,

and basically, I've interpreted the different quotes.

So, this was the contents page originally.

When I got done it was 540 pages,

and then the publisher, Gingko Press,

ended up cutting it down considerably:

it's just under 400 pages now.

But I decided I liked this contents page --

I liked the way it looks -- so I kept it.

(Laughter)

It now has no relevance to the book whatsoever,

but it's a nice spread, I think, in there.

(Laughter)

So, a couple spreads from the book:

here McLuhan says,

"The new media are not bridges between Man and Nature; they are Nature."

"The invention of printing did away with anonymity,

fostering ideas of literary fame

and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property,"

which had never been done before printing.

"When new technologies impose themselves

on societies long habituated to older technologies,

anxieties of all kinds result."

"While people are engaged in creating a totally different world,

they always form vivid images of the preceding world."

I hate this stuff. It's hard to read.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

"People in the electronic age have no possible environment except the globe,

and no possible occupation except information gathering."

That was it. That's all he saw as the options. And not too far off.

So, this is a project for Nine Inch Nails.

And I only show it because it seemed like it got all this relevancy all of a sudden,

and it was done right after 9/11.

And I had recently discovered a bomb shelter

in the backyard of a house I had bought in LA

that the real estate person hadn't pointed out.

(Laughter)

There was some bomb shelter built, apparently in the '60s Cuban missile crisis.

And I asked the real estate guy what it was as we were walking by,

and he goes, "It's something to do with the sewage system."

I was, O.K.; that's fine.

I finally went down there, and it was this old rusted circular thing,

and two beds, and very kind of creepy and weird.

And also, surprisingly, it was done in kind of a cheap metal,

and it had completely rusted through, and water everywhere, and spiders.

And I thought, you know, what were they thinking?

You'd think maybe cement, possibly, or something.

But anyway, I used this for a cover for the Nine Inch Nails DVD,

and I've also now fixed the bomb shelter with duct tape,

and it's ready. I think I'm ready. So.

This is an experiment, really, for a client, Quicksilver,

where we were taking what was a six-shot sequence

and trying to use print as a medium to get people to the Web.

So, this is a six-shot sequence.

I've taken one shot; I cropped it a few different ways.

And then the tiny line of copy says,

If you want to see this entire sequence --

how this whole ride was -- go to the website.

And my guess is that a lot of the surf kids did go to the site

to get this entire picture.

Got no way of tracking it, so I could be totally wrong.

(Laughter)

I don't have the site. It's just the piece itself.

This is a group in New York called the Coalition for a Smoke-free Environment --

asked me to do these posters.

They were wild-posted around New York City.

You can't really -- well, you can't see it at all --

but the second line is really the more kind of payoff, in a sense.

It says, "If the cigarette companies can lie, then so can we." But --

(Laughter)

(Applause)

-- but I did.

These were literally wild-posted all over New York one night,

and there were definitely some heads turning,

you know, people smoking and, "Huh!"

(Laughter)

And it was purposely done to look fairly serious.

It wasn't some, you know, weird grunge type or something;

it looked like they might be real. Anyway.

Poster for Atlantic Center for the Arts, a school in Florida.

This amazes me. This is a product I just found out.

I was in the Caribbean at Christmas,

and I'm just blown away that in this day and age they will still sell --

not that they will sell --

that there is felt a need for people to lighten the color of their skin.

This was either an old product with new packaging,

or a brand-new package, and I just thought,