If you need to foster actual creativity, if you have a desire to build things that touch people's lives and that people will talk about and be inspired from then perhaps less so.
The caveat that real artists ship is still in effect of course.
If there's a lesson here for the HN community I think it's that there's more than one way to do things. You bristle at the idea of punching a clock and accounting for your time in 15 minute increments. So you shouldn't work there.
At the same time there are surely creative people out there who bristle at the idea of working through the night or on weekends. To those people a workplace that closes at 6pm and enforces a no-work policy after that would be appealing.
The beauty of this article is it tells us both ways work. So people who want to close down at 6pm can start a company and draw other like minded people to them. While people with no interest in that lifestyle can stay away
Just compare any ad with, for instance, Shindler's List. or Blade Runner. One has a single, cute, memorable tagline. The other is a monumental effort of style, atmosphere, meaning.
If you don't trivialize art to mean "anything pretty", then of course advertisements aren't art.
Don't fall into the Is Not For Me = Trash line of thinking. It's intellectually lazy.
However, what about Apple's 1984 ad? Or the BMW mini-movie advertisements they ran about 6 years ago?
There are some incredibly cool concept ads out there. They usually are not the ones broadcast, but if you watch the end of the year awards for the industry, there are some very creative minds working there. (And creating some impressive work).
Art is supposed to be emotionally engaging. What does a comic book do better?
An ad has "Buy this car! Buy this car! Buy this car!"
I deny ads work better when artistic. True, you remember them better. But often I totally miss what the product was, which makes them score Zero on the ad-o-meter. Do you remember the product for those 'artistic' Apple ads? Not good enough to say "some Apple thingy".
Advertisements are perhaps the shortest lived, least substantive, and least impactful creative works.
That is, it's better to produce 100 things and throw away 99 than it is to sit around a perfect 1. In the end the quality will be higher.
http://russelldavies.typepad.com/planning/2007/02/quantity_e...
Over the course of of a session, when you're jamming with your synthesizers and instruments, a project can transform from A to B to C to D to E where E ends up sounding nothing like A. You have your hard- and software synths, fantastic effect plugins and hardware, drum machines, more outboard gear. You tweak and compress, change melodies and harmonies. You press 'save as a new version' every minute.
Your wandering mind be damned, if you want a great track you need to stop, sit down, and focus. All good tracks I come up with come from a focus on quality, not quantity. By the way, in my opinion, iterative refinements do not belong into the category of "quantity", I don't know how anyone could make such a statement.
Of course you sometimes need the sessions to come up with some idea that resonates with you, but after that you (read: I, I'm talking about my own experience) have to force yourself to focus.
My best work is actually a culmination of these "snippets" that I build up over a few months/weeks. It's like with each mediocre/average project I produce, I'm discovering the parts of the great one not too far off.
It's the same thing with code, design and all my other creative projects. I have to wade through a lot of weaker ideas and designs in order to discover the best parts. And once I figure those out, it's mostly a rewrite of all my past ideas into the one good idea.
How are Jobs' keynotes so well delivered? Repetition, iteration, practice, just like martial arts, makes perfect.
Shockingly there's more to art than a trite truism. If you want to acquire skill, go for quantity. But after that, if you want to become a master, if you want to impact people's lives in a way they appreciate and care about you'll need more than skill, you'll need inspiration.
I was expecting them to talk more about getting people structure to get them shipping more and challenging themselves - a la Jobs'. Instead, it really did feel like that place was a soul-grinder. The guy they interviewed didn't even work there anymore - telling...