Knowledge is the food of the soul. So said Plato, who was, while not in advertising, still a fairly learned fellow. As all of our lives should be, this issue of Boards is dedicated to learning.

At various places in this issue, industry people talk about the importance of learning and the different ways they acquire knowledge to apply to their jobs.

In a feature on education in advertising, Pinkhaus designer Joel Fuller talks about using everything around us, including things like furniture design, to teach new designers/ad people, rather than just the obvious material directly related to the craft. His idea is to stimulate thinking by teaching outside the box of the expected.

Similarly, one of the directors profiled in "Directors Chair" talks about applying life lessons to his craft. His own words, translated from Italian are: "I feed myself with movies, arts, architecture, travels and the manual skills to make things." How Plato-like.

The ultimate lesson is advertising is about everything, or as someone else once said: "Specialization is for insects."

Elsewhere in advertising education, Patrick Collister, London-based executive creative director and vice-chair of Ogilvy & Mather, is leaving that company to start his own learning enterprise called Creative Matters. The mandate of the undertaking is to provide training on the creative process to creatives, account people and clients alike. Collister will work with three or four junior creative teams on live projects and will guide them in creative learning ("loosening up") exercises, as well as provide instruction in basics, like how to write scripts and read and respond to briefs. "I can teach people to have ideas," says Collister. "People often freeze when they get creative briefs; they wait for inspiration to strike. I can teach people that they are imaginative and have fantastic brains and to access those parts of their imaginations that they probably don't at the moment." To clients, Collister will teach "creative judgment," which applies to more than just advertising scripts, he says, and starts early in the advertising process. It's about what Collister calls "integrated creativity," which relates to inventive solutions to client imperatives that don't necessarily begin and end with ads as we know them. "Ad agencies should be about providing business solutions, not just advertising solutions," he sums up.

Appropriately, it's in this issue we launch the inaugural segment of what will be a regular feature called "The Learning Curve." The intention of this column, which will be written by members of the industry, is to provide some insight on one aspect of commercial production, to be shared among those directly or indirectly concerned with that corner of the business. Please e-mail me if you have something you'd like to share with the class.

Teressa Iezzi
Associate Editor