I’m writing an article for a Novell magazine, and keeping a constantly friendly but not over-casual tone. And I’ve got several conflicting tones in the random stanzas knocking around in my head:
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.”
“LEND ME SOME SUGAR! I AM YOUR NEIGHBOR!”
I’ve also been thinking of slogans. “We Make IT Boring” sounds awesome, because it’s not immediately intuitive, but if you think about it for five seconds it makes sense: IT is exciting only when things go wrong, or if things only occasionally go right. If it just works, you don’t notice it any more than you notice the incredibly complex workings of household appliances. When IT just works, it becomes boring, and you can actually something done instead of futzing around with your IT infrastructure.
The conflict of a slogan proclaiming the boringness of a product is what makes the slogan catchy, and rare– it’s a risk to have a conflict there, especially to have a disparaging comment in your motto. There’s a reason that the app that declared “It Sucks Less” never caught on (Was it Oleo?). But “boring” isn’t the same as “not sucking” — it means predictability, which is not at all bad for things that are, in essence, tools approaching the status of utilities or appliances.
That’s my deep thought of the week, by the way, so savor it deeply.
Secretly Ironic 