A bit of a long explanation, but at Lead Graffiti, we don't much care about that or doing things the hard way. Also, one of those great reasons for waking up at 2:30 in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep, gives you a chance to write this up. No telling who might be able to help you bring this idea to fruition if they can just get to the bottom of this post and know someone who knows someone who knows Stephen Hawking.

This post is about one of those examples of how an idea floats around in Ray's head for years and then suddenly pops out as a thing.

First part of the story

Back in the 1990s when Ray was hot and heavy into teaching students about producing major advertising campaigns, there was a campaign by Bud Light entitled "Why ask Why?" Ray loved the idea and hated the execution. As he remembers, Bud Lights advertising budget was something like $160,000,000. Here is one of those WAW? commercials.

It haunted Ray that given that much money, Bud Lite couldn't explain some vital stuff to society. It could have been used to promote science, math, etc. And in really positive ways and not just stupid ideas.

So, Ray devised an assignment project for his students to do an ad campaign whose focus was to 1. sell the product 2. while bettering society in a significant way. Two students, Ari Garber and Susan Schneider, did a killer campaign for then product "Sony Walkman" based on the fact that students walking around with earphones plugged into their ears which made everyone look anti-social.

Here is Ari and Susan's magazine campaign for Walkman.

Wouldn't it be cool today if we all were walking around, passing people on the sidewalk and in the halls of malls, "texting with your hands?"

Second part of the story

Ray recently produced a book entitled, "How Ink Writes Poetry." Click here to see the book.

So the Bud Lite campaign pops back into Ray's front-of-mind memory.

How about a series of these books, written in 8-10 paragraphs, by fascinating people, illustrated by ink, and curated by Ray Nichols?

Now imagine a series of 5 new books in the series and the last one is written by Stephen Hawking, explaining something unusual that is on his mind.

Text by Stephen Hawking
Illustrated by Ink
Curated by Ray Nichols

Third part of the story

Getting back to sleep is going to be hard.

Maybe we can't get Stephen Hawking, but we should be able to get someone who at least has won the Nobel Prize.

In case it matters, here is a list of everyone who has won a Nobel Prize.