Stop thinking about what to wear and start thinking about other, more creative things. That's the message of Minimalist Tees.

The following message is printed inside each shirt: "The greatest enemy of innovation is common sense. Thinking that it can’t be done any other way because that’s the way it’s always been done. Common sense says constraints and limitations hold us back, stifling our ability to create. We feel the opposite is true. Constraints unleash creativity that challenge common sense thinking. Those that truly harness creativity are the ones that purposely apply these boundaries to their lives in order to whittle away anything unrelated to accomplishing their goal. We hope these shirts inspire their wearer to think less, own less, be less and create more."

Purchase your set here.

Threadless, the crowdsourcing t-shirt people, and Scout Books, the make-your-own notebook folks, have joined together to offer (you guessed it), crowdsourced notebooks. Each pack of three pocketsized notebooks ($9) will feature a selection of themed designs voted on by the Threadless community. Available August 11, the notebooks are made from 100 percent recycled paper and printed with vegetable ink in Portland, Oregon.

Via Cool Hunting.

Japanese designer Takeshi Sano used 25,000 wooden sticks to design the ceiling for the Tsujita restaurant in Los Angeles. Inspired by the mystery and beauty of clouds as seen from the IZUMO shrine in Shimane Japan, Sano calculated the focal length between eye line and each drumstick-size wooden stick in order to create a stereoscopic effect. More photos here.

Via Contemporist.

Here's how two young creatives in the Netherlands, Bas van de Poel and Daan van Dam, used Twitter to land a prized agency job for the summer. Nice going.

Artist Ally Burguieres isn't afraid of big, bold colors. Or taking a big, bold step. Which is what she and her four sisters are doing this summer, by opening a gallery in the heart of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Gallery Burguieres will celebrate nature, culture, and emotions through color and form, with an eye towards sustainability (the frames and furniture in the gallery are either vintage pieces or refurbished antiques). The five Burguieres sisters will be hosting a grand opening party on July 16th. If you're in the area, click here for more details.

Love this handmade, British oilskin notebook from Merchant & Mills. Available for purchase here, with shipping to anywhere in the world. While you're over there taking a closer look at the notebook, take a look around the site. Operating out of a 500-year-old cottage in Wales, Merchant & Mills sells fabric, patterns, and dress-making accessories with pitch-perfect branding in today's internet age. Old school meets new school.

Start a blog or open a Facebook account and, after choosing passwords and a sceen name, you'll be faced with having to upload a photo to represent you online. This is what happened to me in the first weekend of March, 2007 when I simultaneously started this blog, as well as my @badbanana Twitter account. I had no real intention of keeping my Twitter account, so I just reached for a photo that I already had on my desktop.

That photo was of legendardy ad man David Ogilvy. Today is the 100th anniverary of his birth.

Like most aspiring young copywriters in college, I treasured Ogilvy's books. But he represented far more than old-school wisdom in my mind. Here was a larger-than-life ad god. An industrial titan. A creative mind who respected the housewife reading a magazine ad just as much as the factory worker whose job depended upon a successful new product launch. Years later, when I started my own agency, many of his principles drove the way we did our work for clients.

So, just as some people might choose a favorite sport team's logo for an avatar, I chose a picture of David Ogilvy.

When it became obvious that I would keep my Twitter account for a while, I tried to move on from that avatar. Each change, however, caused a huge outcry from followers. There was just something about that face that made my strange and sometimes humorous observations just a tad bit more interesting. The oddest thoughts just seemed a little more normal coming out of that mouth. Or even odder.

The point is, I'm stuck with David. And I've grown to enjoy telling people about the real man behind the avatar. Even if it is sometimes strange for people to say they're not anxious to meet me in person because they don't want to know what I really look like. They prefer the illusion.

David would certainly understand that. While on a tour of a shirt factory once, he famously refused to go into the room to see how the shirts were actually made. He preferred to think they were lovingly hand-made by little old ladies. The truth would only serve to disappoint, he said.

I'm sure Ogilvy wouldn't mind me using his face on Twitter. And I'm positive he'd be fascinated with all these new technologies transforming the way marketing is done today. He was a research man at heart. The ability to record and analyze views and clicks and real-time conversations would have fascinated him to no end. Although I'm also quite sure he'd have a stern warning to the modern-day ad men who think in terms of avatars. These are people, he'd say.

Today, I'm in Cannes, reporting from and commenting on the largest advertising festival in the world on behalf of Cannes Centrale. To ad professionals, this is the center of the universe. And, quite frankly, I've spent twenty years working on the outer reaches of this universe. I never imagined I'd be here.

So it's only fitting that I'll be right here, on this day. A day when a red carpet will be rolled out along the Promenade de la Croisette in honor of David Ogilvy's birth 100 years ago.

Thank you, Mr. Ogilvy. I wouldn't be here without you.

Five of the favorites to win gold in Cannes this week. All epic in scope, scale, and/or execution.

The Ikea spot is strategically brilliant and compelling. The Carlton Draught spot is one of the best commercials I've seen in a long time. The Target event, however, is one of the coolest things I've seen, period.

Excellent work from Weiden + Kennedy, Amsterdam (both Heineken and Nike), Mother, New York (Target), Mother, London (Ikea), and Clemenger BBDO, Melbourne (Carlton Draught).

UPDATE 6/27: The Nike film took the Grand Prix in the film division. The Heinkeken and Carlton Draught films both won Gold Lions. All winners can be viewed here.

I'll be in France this week, chasing down interviews, tweeting my experiences, and providing some quirky commentary over at Cannes Centrale. If you're at the Cannes Lions festival, as well, be sure to follow the action on your phone or iPad all week long. (Better yet, hunt me down and buy me a drink.) If you're stuck at work, slaving away on deadlines while the rest of the ad industry works on their tan, check in from time to time to see what you're missing.

And if you have any hot tips or gossip or people you think I should interview in Cannes (and any questions you want me to ask them), leave a comment or shoot me an email.

I’ll be heading to the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity next week on behalf of Cannes Centrale (where you can follow along, whether you're going or not). To get myself ready to walk into the world’s most creative lion’s den, so to speak, I asked a few of my friends if they’d chat with me about the State of Creativity in 2011.

Next up: “Weird Al” Yankovic, three-time Grammy award winning artist whose 13th studio album, “Alpocalypse,” will be released June 21. Al gets serious with me about his creative process.

You had your first hit in 1982 and have no doubt seen it all in this business in the years since. Loaded question, I know, but what's the state of creativity in the music business in 2011?

Wow, starting with the easy ones, huh? Well, it’s tempting to be flip and say that the industry is creatively bankrupt at this point, but of course that’s not really accurate. Pop music has always been kind of ridiculous. It’s nothing new. Pop music is always changing, always morphing, but much of it seems to be variations on the same stale universal themes—albeit, in some cases, today we’re likely to hear much more graphic or provocative iterations of those themes.

I think a lot of the creativity in the music industry these days is coming from the marketing side—the industry as they knew it collapsed a decade ago, and they’ve been struggling to stay afloat. When your back is against the wall like that, you tend to get very creative very quickly.

Any kid can post a parody song or video on YouTube in a matter of minutes. I guess that's both good and bad. How has technology changed the way you approach what you do?

The Internet has been a double-edged sword for people in the music business. In this post-Napster world, a new generation has grown up thinking that all music is free for the taking, which doesn’t exactly help artists’ sales numbers. But at the same time, the Internet is an incredible promotional tool—with a little marketing skill, you can make millions of people aware of your wonderful new album that they’re most likely just going to download for free anyway.

A couple other Internet pet peeves: There are a lot of “funny” songs floating around the web with my name attached to them, even though—surprise—they’re not really by me. Honestly, it does my reputation no favors when people are tricked into thinking that some vulgar or mediocre song is part of my oeuvre. Also, there are tens of thousands of people on YouTube doing song parodies—that’s great for them, I suppose, but that means that I’ll never again be the only (and certainly not the first) person to parody any given hit song. But, I just put my blinders on and proceed boldly ahead, hoping people won’t notice that I’m the 20,000th person on the planet to do a Miley Cyrus parody.

I also try to be active in social media, and I enjoy interacting with my fan base and friends on Twitter and Facebook. I think that’s been a great boost to my record and concert ticket sales, as well as a boon to the obsessive people who have chosen to stalk me.

Is your creative process different now than it was five, ten, or twenty years ago? How has technology impacted your creative process?

It’s always hard for me to describe my creative process, but I don’t really think it’s changed all that significantly in the last two or three decades. I just take a lot longer to do things, because I feel more self-imposed pressure with every album I put out. I suppose the main way that technology has impacted my process is as a research tool. Back in the ‘80s when I was writing “I Want a New Duck” and “Living With a Hernia,” I had to go to the West Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles public library and check out books on ducks and hernias… because even with my stupidest songs, I do research. Nowadays, of course, if I wanted a comprehensive list of every kind of hernia in the known universe, that information is just a few keystrokes away. Also, you’ll be happy to hear, I don’t have to wear out the binding in my old rhyming dictionary anymore.

When you're in writing mode... is there a routine? A habit? Do you listen to music, sit in a favorite chair? Is there something you do to get the creative juices flowing?

I tend to write—or at least do what I think is my best writing—in the middle of the night, when most rational people are asleep. Partly this is because there are very few distractions at that time (I’m very easily distracted). It’s also because coming up with ideas is a very internal process, and it’s very difficult to convince your family members that you’re actually hard at work when you’re just sitting somewhere staring off into space. I like having a generous amount of time to write something, but I also function pretty well with pressure and deadlines—I was able to write my recent Lady Gaga parody within a couple days while right in the middle of a fairly grueling Australian concert tour.

Capturing ideas. Surely you've perfected a system. Do you have any favorite apps or tricks you use that a writer or musician out there might find useful?

I don’t know how to actually make the ideas come—I wish I did. I just try to be ready when they do. For the longest time, I kept all my ideas in old-school 3-ring notebooks—with those little plastic dividers and everything. Nowadays, of course, my notebook is of the laptop variety. But the process is the same: I’m an idea pack rat. I keep lists of concepts, titles, random thoughts—anything that might inspire an actual song at some point. And once I’ve come up with an idea that I think merits being developed into a full composition, I will spend weeks (if I have that luxury) writing down every word, phrase and half-baked gag that I can think of, as long as it is somehow related to my chosen concept. Then when I feel I’ve exhausted the potential of my brain, I’ll go through that list and pick out what I think are the best ideas, and then try to come up with rhyming couplets for those ideas, which in turn causes me to come up with different—and sometimes better—ideas. So basically, what works for me is obsessive organization. That just happens to be how I write, not how I live my life.

One other trick that works for me is the unlikely juxtaposition of style and subject matter. I keep a list of musical genres and iconic artists, and another list of subjects that I think would be fun to write about… and then I’ll match up entries between the two columns in a way that seems amusing to me. That’s how I came to write one of the original songs on my new album. I decided I wanted to write a song in the style of The Doors, and I went down my subject list until I came to the word “Craigslist”— and it just struck me as funny to think of Jim Morrison singing about that. It was just so anachronistic… so wrong on so many levels.

It's easy to write an easy parody, I imagine. But you put so much thought and care into your ideas and word choices, resulting in pure brilliance. You dig beyond the obvious. But how do you know when to stop?

First of all I have to say, the obvious is sometimes okay. I have a knee-jerk reaction to doing obvious jokes, or doing something that everybody in the world is expecting me to do. For that reason I almost didn’t do my Lady Gaga parody because everybody thought I was going to do a Lady Gaga parody. But at the end of the day, it made perfect sense for me to do it, and I’m very happy with the way it turned out—even though it was pretty darn obvious and expected.

As a semi-obsessive artist, it is kind of hard to know when to stop. That’s why I actually kind of welcome deadlines—I enjoy having limits. Otherwise, you never really finish something – you just kind of abandon it. As an artist, you just have to have a sense of when you’re experiencing diminishing returns. At some point, I just can’t justify ignoring my family for another day so I can come up with a better rhyme for “Hasselhoff.”

I’m never afraid of running out of ideas—I always have plenty of them.  The problem is, I have extremely few really good ideas, and those are the only ones that count.