Brian Collins

Not Ready Player One

A quick review of the newest Spielberg film.

On this coming Monday, May 8th, we'll be hosting the extraordinary designer - and brand new AIGA Medalist - Lance Wyman for a lunch and conversation at COLLINS in our New York City office in Greenwich Village.

Cookie Cutter

Last night, long after enduring some dingaling cookie cutter ad agency's presentation at a recent conference, I decided to post many of the words that spilled effortlessly out of the presenters' mouths. And I also added a few.

Very Anything

For a very long time, it took a very long time for anything to change. If you found an answer that worked, you could count on it being the answer for years. In advertising agencies, for decades. But those days are over.

How to get shit done

As my partners and I now lead a growing company in two American cities, I can state that at COLLINS we will remain ruthless in embracing diversity and defending each and every one of the men and women in our company from any kind of ignorant discrimination.

AIGA Gala 2017

The world is a mess. Said everybody. Always. And yet, the world is still here. And so are we. And that says to me that besides gravity and the sun and physics, there’s something else that’s been keeping the world spinning like clockwork all these millennia.

Zen & Trump

In 1966, Thich Nhat Hanh was barred from Vietnam by both non-Communist and Communist Governments. In that year he came to the United States as a spokesmen for monks who thought that reconciliation in Vietnam was possible if Washington stopped its war effort.

Pema Chödrön

When we began COLLINS, our first small crew and I spent three days with buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön at a retreat up in the Hudson River Valley. What followed I was not remotely prepared for.

Ka-Pow! Bang! Pow!

When I was a kid Saturday mornings meant animation. Scooby-Doo, The Jetsons, The Impossibles, Frankenstein Jr, Superfriends, Bugs Bunny, Josie & the Pussycats, and later, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, She-Ra, Masters of The Universe and Transformers.

Bears and bears oh my!

One fall morning back in 1999, during my second year at Ogilvy & Mather, I was asked by Rick Boyko, the agency’s co-president & CCO at the time, to come up with an idea for the giant lobby on 49th Street for the holidays.

Mood Boards

I once met a semi-famous advertising creative director who shamelessly ripped off the work of El Lissitzky for a famous fashion brand's print ads. Badly. This creative director did a blunt regurgitation of only two pieces of El Lissitzky's most famous work.

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