Ad free and wierdly beautiful

BoingBoing posts about an outdoor ad ban in Sao Paulo. There's a flickr set too.
The frames for the posters, and their urban setting is more redolent of the US than the Cromwell Road but I find the effect curiously interesting - blue sky or buildings behind are framed by the ironwork.
I confess to usually going on summer vacation to a place where there is a town planning ban on advertising hoardings and it does make for a more pleasant visual landscape.

Kurt Vonnegut

My favourite writer just passed away. He had some rules for writing short stories that might be useful for writing presentations, or copy, perhaps.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

Art department redux

I vaguely recall Creative Departments were called Art Departments once. In these days where ideas can come from anywhere, even planning, and given we're all creative really, perhaps there really isn't any specialness being called the Creative Dept. Some time ago I wrote about renaissance agencies - truly integrated, visionary, energetic and scalar. Crispin Porter talk about advertising rebranding to the Media Arts. So, surely an Art Dept would be more respectful and descriptive of that department's role in the creative process?

Other Planning Types?

A question really. I've noticed on Planning Eye that we have 75 planners but 2 or 3 folks are urban planners. I think that's quite interesting as their role is probably fairly similar to an ad planner - understanding or predicting a person's behaviour or perceptions when presented with an 'environment'. Maybe closer to digital planning.
I wonder what other industries have planners? Architects? Artists? And what their scope of work looks like? What tools do they use? If you're one, get in touch?
Perhaps it would be cool to have a planners-of-the-world unite wiki or something. Maybe a meta-coffee-morning?