A Better Course

Someone [who is rated as highly attractive] above gets nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of our curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten.

Margaret Goodman called over the good mercer, Joanna and William Mose, a yeoman who just happened to be around at the time, and dared Westdeane to repeat what he'd just said. Which he did. "Thou art an arrante whore and came from Greenwiche."

"We never intended to serve mass quantities and have our product available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We wanted to start a business so we could get some control in our lives."

"once a brand has done its best to irritate consumers it is difficult to see where the creative approach goes next… ‘The standard of advert­ising has dropped as marketers increasingly believe they are working hard through excessive brand awareness'"

It is a widely understood maxim within our industry that a large proportion of good design can only do its job properly by going unnoticed; providing important information in the most unfussy, functional way possible.

People who dislike the X-Factor often criticise it for reducing music to a soap opera, but this misses the point: it’s rather like people who slate wrestling for not being a proper sport. The X-Factor is a narrative which happens to involve music.

"The showy buyers of a bull market are long gone… We are now selling to men looking to make an intelligent purchase; looking to be part of an unspoken club of those who know, understand and appreciate the complications of an haute horology timepiece."

"The nastier that London gets, the darker its peculiar charms, so people (not planners, or sensible journalists with a topic to follow) will be seduced by it … Just as we love the romantic melodrama of the street in Dickens, we secretly love the growing horror-show of the city we actually live in.

"How tough are Thinkpad notebooks? Tough enough to be installed in buses and tram shuttles as seats and keep working just fine."

“Review scores don’t matter on DS,” he argued, before forecasting that 5th Cell’s Scribblenauts would not see the kind of sales a critical darling would be supposed to, due to low marketing spend. “There is no compelling reason to focus on quality, you should literally just spend that money and time on marketing.”

So when someone asks me for some insights into an area, they are perfectly entitled to. But they need to be sure that this is what they really want, as it takes a lot of time, a lot of patience and there is no guarantee that the end product is something that fits in snugly with any objectives or strategies.