George Lois

George Lois
George Loisis an American art director, designer, and author. Lois is perhaps best known for over 92 covers he designed for Esquire magazine from 1962 to 1972. In 2008, The Museum of Modern Art exhibited 32 of Lois' Esquire covers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionArtist
Date of Birth26 June 1931
CountryUnited States of America
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These days, no celebrity on a magazine cover, including Brad Pitt, Oprah Winfrey, Julia Roberts, or Leonardo DiCaprio, could possibly match the visual punch of Alfred E. Neuman, the gap-toothed, grinning boy, goofily peeking out at us on the newsstand.
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When I teach classes at the School of Visual Arts,, I'll ask the students, 'How many of you have been to a museum this year?' Nobody raises their hand and I go into a tirade. If you want to do something sharp and innovative, you have to know what went on before.
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Sometimes all the 'marketing' insight in the world can't move a client, but the creation of a truly great brand name can become a billion-dollar idea!
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Doyle Dane Bernbach was a great, great agency when I got there. There was an arrogance that everyone had, but it was a closed club. I was a guy who worked a little differently. Edgier. More punch-in-the-mouth.
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The 1960s was a heroic age in the history of the art of communication - the audacious movers and shakers of those times bear no resemblance to the cast of characters in 'Mad Men.'
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You don't create a magazine for your readers. You don't take a poll, you know, like the politicians do, and find out what they're thinking and what they want... You're supposed to be telling people what the hell you think is exciting and dynamic and thought-provoking, and do it - and do it your way.
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With the way I worked, a client can give me everything they know about something, and then I go away and come back with advertising that knocks them out of their chair. They finally understand what kind of a company they are.
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Trends can tyrannize; trends are traps. 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.
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Nobody should force you to do a bad piece of work in your whole life - no client, no creative director, nobody. The job isn't to please the client; the job is to produce something for the client that makes them incredibly successful.
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'Mad Men' is nothing more than the fulfillment of every possible stereotype of the early 1960s bundled up nicely to convince consumers that the sort of morally repugnant behavior exhibited by its characters - with one-night-stands and excessive consumption of Cutty Sark and Lucky Strikes - is glamorous and 'vintage.'
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To me, great advertising can make food taste better, can make your car run smoother. It can change your perception of something. Is it wrong to change your perception about something? Of course not. I'm not lying; I'm just saying, 'This one's more fun, this one's more exciting.'
everybody
Everybody is so busy talking about 'Twittering' and talking about the new technologies and talking about this and that, but they don't talk about creativity.
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The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything. And I really believe that. And what I try to teach young people, or anybody in any creative field, is that every idea should seemingly be outrageous.
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When I did 'Esquire,' I did a lot of celebrity covers, but the celebrity cover was Hubert Humphrey as a dummy, sitting on Lyndon Johnson's lap and aping his feelings about the war. I did celebrity covers that made a difference in what was going on in American culture.