PHP MVC Web Frameworks

Feeds : CR Blog

Getty Images Short & Sweet Film Challenge (CR Blog)

5 h, 16 min and 35 secs ago

Getty Images recently joined forces with London’s popular weekly short film evening Short & Sweet to launch a competition for filmmakers to create a short inspired by, and using visual content from, its enormous archive, housed at the Hulton Archive. Laurie Hill scooped the top prize for his film Photograph of Jesus, shown above.

The brief for the filmmakers was that at least 50% of the content must be taken from the Hulton Archive and that the short must highlight the breadth and depth of the archive as a resource. Hill tackles this directly in his film, by combining footage of the archive with an interview with archivist Matthew Butson on some of the most unusual requests he has received in his time there. Hill then charmingly brings these stories to life as part of the film.

Hill won £5,000 as grand prize winner, with runner-up Big Red Button awarded £3,000 for their film Perrington Stud (shown above). Ian Mackinnon & Dominic Parker and Jasmin Jodry were given honourable mentions and £1,000 each for their films, which are shown below. All four films can also be seen at tonight’s Short & Sweet event, which takes place at Cafe 1001 on 91 Brick Lane from 7pm.

[Film Illustration Photography ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Charity Ads: A More Mature Approach? (CR Blog)

8 h, 0 min and 23 secs ago

Kids Company by AMV.BBDO. Art direction/ design: Paul Cohen. Copywriter: Mark Fairbanks. Photography: Thom Atkinson

The unscrupulous among the advertising community have often tended to look upon charity accounts less as an opportunity to help those in need and more as a chance to help themselves. Is a more mature approach emerging?

Charity campaigns have often been taken on with the express intention of winning awards and, in order to do so, many have resorted to crude tactics. In the mid-90s when outrage over ‘shock advertising’ was at its peak, some of the worst offenders were for small charities many of which, miraculously, were never heard from before or since.

But perhaps there is something of a more mature approach emerging. Take, for example, recent print campaigns by This Is Real Art for Reprieve and AMV.BBDO’s new campaign for Camilla Batmanghelidjh’s Kids Company plus, from slightly further back, CHI’s Prince’s Trust work and BBH’s Barnardo’s campaign from last year.

Reprieve by This is Real Art. Art director/copywriter:
Paul Belford

BBH for Barnardo’s from 2007. Creatives: Nick Gill and Mark Reddy. Photographer: Kiran Master

The first thing that occurs with these campaigns is the amount of copy used. It’s not so long ago that we were all bemoaning the death of long copy in advertising. And yet all four campaigns use lengthy, discursive texts to make their case: in Kidsco, the copy runs to nearly 400 words. The style is conversational.

Copy from KidsCo ad above

All four campaigns go for a factual, documentary style of layout, aping editorial or, in the case of Reprieve, the visual language of bureaucracy. The use of typewriter fonts in Kidsco (Letter Gothic Medium) and Reprieve reinforces the documentary feel.

Reprieve ad copy

Headlines have a similarly editorial look, even working with standfirsts in the typical language of a magazine spread, while the photography studiously avoids sensationalism, particularly Kiran Master’s shots for Barnardo’s. The Reprieve campaign even obscures its shocking imagery, letting our imaginations do the work.

The art directors for KidsCo (Paul Cohen) and for Reprieve and Prince’s Trust (Paul Belford) are noted for a more considered approach - one that seeks to reject the tired formulae of typical advertising art direction (big picture, punning headline etc).

These campaigns attempt to engage with the mind more than the heartstrings, patiently arguing a reasoned case instead of lurching into a stop-them-in-their tracks visual assault. It’s a welcome change.

Prince’s Trust by Clemmow Hornby Inge, 2007. Art director: Paul Belford. Copywriter: Nigel Roberts. Photography: Adam Hinton.

[Advertising ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Very Elle, Very Cool (CR Blog)

3 d, 7 h and 55 min ago

With so many photographers and stylists working for both editorial and advertisers, fashion magazines are finding it impossible to create a distinct tone of voice through their imagery. Instead, it is typography that is increasingly being used to separate ‘ed’ from ‘ad’. Joining the likes of David James’ Another and M/M’s Arena Homme Plus is new-look French bi-annual Very Elle, designed by Non-Format’s Jon Forss and Kjell Ekhorn.

Part of the studio’s brief was to use its renowned typographic skills (displayed, for example, in the design of Varoom magazine) to give the magazine a singular voice that would set editorial pages apart from the advertising. “This led us directly to the idea of creating typefaces especially for the magazine,” they say. Forss and Ekhorn created Heroine, an adaptable family of display faces used for headlines and standfirsts. “The magazine aims to celebrate women from very diverse fields so it was important for us to develop a family of typefaces that would not only signal high fashion but one that could span the whole spectrum,” they say. “To begin with we created an ultra-thin version which would be used for the main feature openers in the fashion sections of the magazine. Then we began work on a bolder, much brasher version and then, regular and thin versions.”

They also decided to employ blocks of type with very tight spacing. “To avoid the inevitable problems with clashing ascenders and descenders, we produced alternative versions of each typeface with extended characters,” they explain. “These can be altered to get an offending ascender or descender well out of the way and, as a bonus, they also provide an appealing visual texture within the body of the text.”

The result is a really beautifully crafted magazine that absolutely succeeds in creating a distinct voice - this is, after all, a mass-market publication, not a niche arts title. There have been other periods when type has come to the fore in magazines - think the three B’s of Brodovitch, Brody and Baron. And no doubt advertisers will soon catch up with editorial’s use of elaborately expressive type – it’s often the same people doing both anyway. But for now, editorial pages like these offer a rare chance for typography to shine.

UPDATE: Further to ‘Action Man’s comment below, I’ve found an image of the cover (below). To me, it doesn’t work anywhere near as well as the inside pages, which can largely be attributed to the fact that the masthead had already been designed before Non-Format started working on the title: “We were brought on-board after the launch issue was published. We were invited to suggest alternative mastheads for the cover of the magazine, but in the end the publishers decided it might be confusing to change it after only one issue.”

Non-Format will be working on the spring issue so perhaps this issue will be resolved better with that one.

[Graphic Design Magazines/Papers Type ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Ooh, Zoetropes (CR Blog)

3 d, 9 h and 2 min ago

Sheesh, Zoetropes eh, you wait for ages to see one then two come along at once. While Fallon is reportedly basing its next Sony Bravia spot around a real-life zoetrope built in an Italian square, Poke has created this virtual version for Topshop…

The Topshop work ties in with the store’s Christmas campaign which is based around a fairy tale written by Lulu magazine’s Charlotte Sanders. Poke has extended it online by creating a rather charming zoetrope-based game: the user spins the zoetrope around as fast as they can in order to win prizes.

So, zoeteropes. Big new trend for ‘09. You heard it here first…

[Advertising Websites ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

This used to be all fields… (CR Blog)

4 d and 3 h ago

In an apparent nod to the once verdant edges of old London town, fashion accessories boutique Hermès has planted several silver birch trees around its flagship store on New Bond Street. Silver Forest #36 is a Christmas installation by architects DSDHA and Hermès’ Rebecca Cocks that references an early eighteenth century boundary that once marked the city from the surrounding forests, where the shop now stands.

18 silver trees have been erected on the pavements surrounding the Hermès store while a further 18 stand in the windows and in the ground floor of the shop.

And as if this wasn’t Christmassy enough – the sounds of birds and galloping horses can be discerned if passersby stop to peruse the work (Hermès originally started out in 1837 as a master harness and saddle maker, apparently).

Silver Forest #36 is at Hermès, 155 New Bond Street, London W1. See hermes.com for more window displays from around the world.

All photography by Andrew Meredith.

[Advertising Art ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

GB’s Grand Prix at Epica (CR Blog)

4 d and 6 h ago

Three out of the four Grand Prix awarded at this year’s Epica went to advertising work from the UK. The Epica D’Or winning projects included DDB London’s Dog spot for the VW Polo in film, Lowe London’s Shadows campaign for John Lewis in outdoor, and DDB London’s LoveHate campaign for Marmite Snacks in the press category. Absolut Machines from Great Works in Sweden won the top prize in the interactive section.

Al Murphy’s bold illustrations for the Marmite Snacks campaign won the jury over in the press category. Many of the judges praised the inventiveness of employing two ideas in one in a relatively static format and noted the success in transferring the concept of “loving” or “hating” a classic product to a printed medium.

Agency: DDB London.
Creative Director: Jeremy Craigen. Copywriters: Graeme Hall and Noah Regan. Art Directors: Noah Regan and Graeme Hall. Illustrator: Al Murphy.

Nadav Kander’s photographic talents were put to good use in Lowe London’s Shadows campaign for John Lewis, resulting in a series of elegant wide-format posters. While the influence of the work of artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster is undeniable (as reported on the CR blog, here) the art direction and construction involved in the posters were deemed a great success by the Epica jury.

Agency: Lowe London.
Creative Director: Ed Morris. Copywriter: George Prest. Art director: Johnny Leathers. Photographer: Nadav Kander. Typography: Dave Towers.

Director Noam Murro’s Dog spot for the VW Polo won the Grand Prix in the film category. Praised for its ability to stand up to repeated viewings (though not by the UK jury contingent who had clearly seen it one time too many), the film narrowly won over Nexus Productions’ epic (and in CR’s opinion, more inventive) Damn Boots commercial for Nomis football boots, directed by CR One to Watcher, Woof Wan-Bau.

Agency: DDB London.
Creative Director: Jeremy Craigen. Copywriter: Sam Oliver. Art director: Shishir Patel. Production company: Independent (London). Director: Noam Murro. Producers: Richard Packer (UK) and Jay Veal (USA). Agency producer: Lucy Westmore. Editor: Tim Thornton Allan (Marshall Street Editors).

In the interactive category, Sweden’s Great Work lived up to their name with a fantastic campaign for Absolut Vodka. The drinks company invited Dan Paluska and Jeff Lieberman of MIT, and Swedish design and engineering team Teenage Engineering to each design a machine capable of producing creative work.

Visitors to the Absolut Machines site were then invited to interact with the machines, physically situated in gallery spaces in Stockholm and New York, live from their browsers. Check out the archive section of absolut.com/absolutmachines for highlights of the project.

Agency: Great Works.
Creative directors: Ted Persson, Mathias Päres, Pontus Frankenstein, and Sebastien Vacherot. Copywriter: Mathias Päres. Art directors: Mathias Päres and Pontus Frankenstein. Photographers: Erik Hagman and Sesse Lind. Designers: Fredrik Karlsson and Mathias Päres.

After all the successful campaigns at this year’s Epica were totted up, DDB London had the most winning work, plus two Grand Prix, but it was DDB Germany that came out as the most successful agency in terms of total awards.

Germany in fact topped Epica’s country ranking for the fourth year in a row with 12 winners, 49 silver awards and 36 bronze.

More at epica-awards.com.

[Advertising Graphic Design Illustration TV Websites ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

CS Shanghai: Final Thoughts (CR Blog)

5 d and 8 h ago

Shanghai after 4 hours sleep in 3 days and the hottest Szechuan meal known to man

Three days isn’t long enough to do more than scratch lightly at the surface of a place but my time at the Creative Social in Shanghai did bring home the scale of the changes that China has undergone. There are no more Period Police for a start…

We heard about the dreaded Period Police from writer and journalist Lijia Zhang. Her memoir, Socialism Is Great (cover below), record her life as a young worker in a missile factory in Nanjing. She had wanted to be a writer but, aged 16, her mother took her out of school in order for Lijia to take over her job at the factory. She thought she was doing her daughter a great favour as a job at the factory meant security for life: “The factory was a mini state of its own,” Lijia said, “it fed us, there were hospitals, a library, a kindergarten school, we had indoctrination at its meeting halls. Our whole life was contained there.” But it was a life that was totally controlled by the state: “We weren’t allowed lipstick, or high heels. The width of our trousers was controlled.” And every month the women among the factory’s 10,000 workers had to line up before the dreaded Period Police to prove that they were not pregnant and thereby obtain their ration of sanitary towels.

By teaching herself English from radio broadcasts Lijia eventually managed to break free of her “mind-numbing” existence and, finally, record her experiences in a book which in itself is symbolic of the new China. Though not officially banned, the book is nonetheless the subject of state disapproval: it’s available, but not officially sanctioned. Lijia herself says that “I don’t think the authorities like me but I don’t fear for my personal safety.” Hearing that the book had been reviewed in the New York Times, she went along to a newsstand in Beijing, where she lives, only to find that the offending page had been torn out. Similarly, a review in magazine Beijing This Month was, she said, censored because she’s a “disreputable character with ant-government tendencies.” And yet we were all given a copy at the event and she felt free to discuss it there.

The situation regarding censorship is “very higgledy piggledy” Lijia told us. There are certain no-go areas, such as the protests of 1989 and someone writing in English is less likely to attract the authorities’ attention than if writing in a local language, but if you show some awareness of the system and sensitivity to the sensitivities, you can work with a degree of freedom, she told us.

Another aspect of Chinese life which has certainly changed is the role of women. After China initiated its reforms “women suddenly got breasts” one western reporter said. Lijia talked about how contemporary Chinese literature has embraced women’s personal expression for the first time – no longer are they mere sexless servants of the party.

For the first time, China is embracing individualism, made manifest through some of the people we met at the Social. Lijia was joined on stage by three female students who each gave us their take on women’s role in China today and their hopes for the future. Later we heard from director Heiward Mak who, at 23, has just directed her first feature film (trailer below). The previous day we had a performance from a DJ with three classically trained female musicians accompanying him.

All the young designers and creative types that we met were hugely precocious, in the best sense of the word. One was teaching herself French, another was studying sociology by day and performing on stage at night. This seemed to be a hugely ambitious generation of only children who have been given opportunities their parents could only have dreamed of.

There will be some major issues for them to address. The recession is already hitting China hard - we heard a lot about lay-offs at factories. In advertising particularly Western agencies hold sway, the majority of senior jobs being held by ex-pats, and you can’t help wondering how agencies who arrived no-doubt with dollar signs in their eyes will react to economic downturn. Will a generation of local talent come through or will it be held back by the ex-pats?

Design, as in India, seemed to be suffering from a lack of client awareness and to be undervalued. Although, also as in India, there were an impressive number of women involved in the profession compared to the West. We also heard that its best people were routinely cherry-picked by ad agencies who would use them as art directors on far higher wages than nascent design studios could manage. Though Shanghai is home to myriad ‘cool’ streetwear brands, the majority of work seemed pretty dull in both advertising and design.

But all this will no doubt change as fast as everything else in China. There are hundreds of design schools up and down the country, churning out thousands of designers (while we were there, the One Show was staging a week of workshops at Shanghai’s Fudan University). Local companies are beginning to understand the value of creating their own brands and not just manufacturing for the West. There are huge public projects to get involved in. And yet, underneath, the Party still exists and still controls. Strolling past H&M or the adidas store in Shanghai, it is easy to forget that this is still a totalitarian country, it still locks up dissidents, and worse, and it still executes hundreds every year, but at least the students we met won’t have to worry about the Period Police.

More on Creative Social Shanghai here, here and here

[Advertising Books Graphic Design Websites ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Great New Videos (CR Blog)

5 d and 8 h ago

Here’s a selection of some of the most interesting new videos that have passed through CR Towers of late. First up, Roel Wouters courts controversy in his latest video for zZz, for new track Running With The Beast. (Warning: some viewers may find this film upsetting.)

In a normal cock fight, the birds are equipped with sharpened barbs and spurs so that they cut each other: Wouters insists that that nothing similar was used in this case. “We are aware of the fact that some people will not like this work of art because of the way the cocks are used,” he says in a statement. “We know that using animals for entertainment is heavily under discussion. Nevertheless we chose to make this video. With this video we do not want to stimulate or promote organized cockfights in any way. We did not hire, or consult anybody involved in organizing cockfights. We did not hire, or consult anybody who is a subcontractor for organized cockfights. No animals were injured, no blood was shed. The ink that is used is Ecoline, a waterbased ink, often used in pre-schools. Two professional animal handlers were on set all day. No artificial means to engage the cocks into fighting were used. No spurs or knives were used on the birds. After the shoot the cocks were cleaned and professionally checked for any injury.None were injured in any way.”

Nevertheless, as commentators on YouTube have pointed out, it’s still a morally questionable thing to do for a music video. This making of film provides some more background:

Next is this unofficial video/short film by Eric Lerner set to Sigur Ros track, Gong.

Beck gets the Kris Moyes treatment in this video for Youthless.

Laurie Thinot has directed this charming animated vid for Stay the Same by Autokratz.

Krozm’s new video for Architecture in Helsinki has a touch of New Order’s True Faith about it, but we like it anyway.

Here is Tobias Stretch’s finished video for Radiohead’s Weird Fishes, which was one of the winners of the aniBoom Radiohead video competition early this year.

Finally, here’s Kim Gehrig’s credit crunch-inspired new video for Mark Ronson’s new track Cash In My Pocket (featuring Wiley).

[Film Music Videos ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Stamps of Approval (CR Blog)

[1 views] 5 d and 10 h ago

A set of first class stamps are to be issued in January next year commemorating ten icons of British design. The Royal Mail’s new series offers up a discernably nostaligic look at some British Design Classics, largely culled from the 1930s and 1960s.

RJ Mitchell’s Spitfire, George Carwardine’s angelpoise lamp, Harry Beck’s map of the London Underground network and Edward Young’s designs for Penguin (below) all originate from the 1930s.

The series of ten also includes Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s telephone box (his K2 design is from 1926) and Robin Day’s polypropylene chair for Hille Seating from 1963.

While the design of the Mini (originally launched in 1959) has moved with the times and the 1965 mini skirt is still a classic of contemporary fashion, classic designs like the Routemaster bus (manufactured between 1954 and 1968) and Concorde (1969-2003) have been retired relatively recently.

The stamps will be issues on 13 January 2009. A “prestige stamp book”, issued alongside the stamps, will provide a more extensive background and history of the designs.

To mark the Mini’s 50th and Concorde’s 40th birthdays, Royal Mail is also issuing a “generic sheet” of 20 stamps (Mini series designed by Magpie; Concorde by Neon) and “medal covers” for each which have been designed by the Royal Mint Engraving Team. All stamps and sets will be available from royalmail.com/stamps.

[Graphic Design ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Adidas House Party (CR Blog)

6 d and 5 h ago

Nima Nourizadeh has directed this latest commercial for adidas, a minute-long film shot at a house party where everyone’s dressed in adidas. In amongst the regular (if very cool) joes are a plentiful supply of celebrities, some of which are easier to spot than others…

David Beckham makes a rather jarring entrance (surely neither VB or his security detail would allow him to rock up at a party like this?), alongside the likes of Missy Elliot, Katy Perry, Mark Gonzales, The Ting Tings, Estelle, Method Man and even Ilie Nastase.

The ad is the latest in the Celebrate Originality campaign for adidas Originals (call us pedantic but is a party where everyone is wearing the same brand really celebrating originality?) and was created by agency Sid Lee in Montreal, who, interestingly enough, was also behind the self-initiated project Fleeting Seating, that Gavin posted on the blog last week.

[Advertising Commercials ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

The Anti-Advertising Conference (CR Blog)

6 d and 7 h ago

Big Spaceship’s Michael Lebowitz makes a point at CR’s Click event. (Pic: Jon Cockley)

“Advertising has never given anyone anything except a headache. It’s something you do to get in people’s faces in a world where there is already far too much noise. I want to live in a post-advertising world.” Discuss…

Our Click conference threw up some pretty strong opinions on the current state of adland. Click is CR’s conference on digital advertising. Our first speaker was Big Spaceship’s Michael Lebowitz, whose words are above. “We define our work as telling stories or starting conversations, advertising just talks at you,” he said. “We don’t do advertising.”

In the digital world, Lebowitz said, “you have to give to get”. In other words, you have to make it worthwhile for people to come and spend time with whatever it is you’re doing. That might be by providing a service or a tool that they find useful, or just by making them laugh or by similarly entertaining people, but, Lebowitz stressed, it has to do something other than just yell “buy this stuff”.

The self-flagellation continued with Tony Högqvist (above) of Perfect Fools in Stockholm. “We need to be more humble” - ad agencies? Humble? Err… OK…

“We’re trying to occupy people’s private spaces, so we need to treat them with respect,” he continued. Humble, respect – these are not words normally associated with the profession.

So how will this attitude manifest itself? Dare’s Flo Heiss (above) suggested that agencies need to shift away from making advertising towards making things that can be advertised ie some useful or entertaining piece of content which people can be pointed towards.

All were agreed that it’s a very fluid, very messy time in what used to be a pretty straightforward business.

Graham Fink (far right) introduces (left to right) David Eriksson of Sweden’s North Kingdom, Jon Sharpe of Play and Richard Burdett of 4Creative

“I like this mess though,” said Click’s chair for the day, Graham Fink of M&C Saatchi. “I really don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I just make it up as I go along and trust my instincts.” Richard Burdett, MD of 4Creative, admitted that “being a client at the moment is a living hell.” Trying to organise all these different agencies - digital, traditional, branding, design studio – is “like herding cats. There are so many fractured and fractious relationships”. And the nature of what constitutes a “campaign’ has also changed: “It used to be that when we had a programme to promote we’d stick up a poster and that was the end of it. With digital, when you stick something up, that’s when your problems start…”

Driven by digital agencies, who have to operate in a completely different, two-way environment, there is a definite desire for reinvention among the ad community. In the magazine, we have written extensively about the new arenas that agencies are pushing into – events, exhibitions, products and so on. At Click, we heard a lot of discussion about the opportunities this messy world throws up. Not just to change the way advertising works but also to change perceptions of it.

But will it really happen? Can advertising make a decisive break away from manipulation toward a more honest, open and useful relationship with consumers? Can it stop “overfeeding our appetites” as Tim Mellors recently said?

We have a world in which economic growth is entirely dependent on us buying more and more things. Governments are telling us that we have to spend our way out of the recession. In order to tackle the economic crisis, yesterday UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling announced a cut in VAT in order to try to get people back to the high street. Never mind the state of the planet, just buy, buy buy. In such an atmosphere, can we really expect advertising to do anything other than rattle that old stick in Orwell’s swill bucket? And, given that the future of our economies seemingly depends on it, should we?

[Advertising Technology Websites ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Barrels of Art (CR Blog)

6 d and 9 h ago

In an unusual commission, the Glenfiddich distillery in Scotland approached design studio johnson banks to create a series of artworks illustrating the length of time it takes for their single malt whiskies to mature in the barrel. Following on from a similar initiative last year (where five different designers were each given a barrel to work with), johnson banks looked to the function of each part of the barrel to make a series of sculptures based on the five differently aged Glenfiddich whiskies. The results are on show this week in Glasgow.

The above piece recreates a cross-section of a tree with a dozen rings, suggesting the way the whisky’s flavour matures over time. The sculpture is made from six separate barrels and weighs a quarter of a ton.

For the 15 year-old whisky, johnson banks used the insides of the 32 wooden staves that, when carefully crafted, shaped and bound together, form a whisky barrel. The type was sand-blasted out of the charred wood.

This “impossible barrel” is made from a series of the metal hoops that bind and enclose the staves of the barrels together.

The volume of liquid in each barrel decreases over the years of the whisky’s maturation (nearly half of the contents evaporates). This missing whisky is often referred to as the “angel’s share”. Here, the phrase “For 21 years we take a share” is chopped out of the top of the barrel (shown above and below).

For the piece based on the oldest Glenfiddich, the 30 year old, johnson banks created an image of day and night on the inside of a lid.

The Glenfiddich Barrel Art Exhibition is on until November 27 at the Studio Warehouse, 100 Eastvale Place, Glasgow G3 8QG (12 – 5pm daily; 7pm on the 27th). Admission is free. See swg3.tv for more details.

Creative director: Michael Johnson
Design and art direction: Michael Johnson, Pali Palavathanan, Owen Evans
Customised typography: The Foundry
Modelmaking: Wesley West
Photography: Kevin Summers

[Art Type ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Build Your Own Coffin And Other Ideas (CR Blog)

7 d and 2 h ago

At our Click conference recently, we invited three young designers to present one project each. The ideas ranged from the brilliant to the, quite frankly, bizarre…

Ilona Gaynor talked us through As Long As I Live, a piece of furniture that would, literally, see the owner through from cradle to grave. “I have designed a singular piece of furniture that transforms and lasts as long as you do,” she says. So, the piece starts out as a cot, can then be re-made into a single bed, then a double bed and, finally, a coffin…

Next up, Digital Club showed wwwoorrrlllddd.com. The site’s not quite functioning yet, but the idea is to create an alternative world by overlaying Google Earth with new and far more interesting buildings and environments. So, for example, a giant hole could be placed in the middle of London, or a spectacular fairground built in the middle of the Sahara desert. “The user would create a Photoshop or Flash file, then submit it to us with co-ordinates for placement and we’d overlay it on the Google Map,” explain Digital Club. “If it takes off, over time we’d have a World 2.0. The Glue Society has done something similar, although as isolated pieces with a specific theme (they are genius).”

And finally James Bridle showed bkkeepr. “It’s a personal project I conceived, built and designed a few months ago,” he says. “The idea is to track people’s reading over time, much as Last.fm does with books. The goal was(/is) to make this traditionally private activity public, addressable, indexable, portable and so on - and give people a simple way to remember what they’ve been reading. I got it sponsored before launch, so it’s already turned a profit, and over 500 people now use it regularly - a number I intend to increase when I get round to putting some more time in and expanding the feature list, and opening up an API so people can do more cool stuff with their data.”

Bridle also has another publishing project on the go – an imprint specialising in “classic works of transgressive literature” with the glorious name Bookkake. So far, there are just five titles available - out-of-print classics of the genre such as Fanny Hill and Venus In Furs.

For the covers, Bridle explains, “I worked with photographers on Flickr and licensed the images under Creative Commons, so they receive full credit for the work. Flickr photographer Lejaille with his ‘Curve’ series was the main inspiration. I then designed the layout and typography of the books myself, based on inspirations ranging from museum signage to classic Penguins from the 1950s (my favourite being Abram Games’ Great Escape cover, which I copied to make my own notebook). The books are set in Dolly, a really beautiful book font from the independent Dutch foundry Underware who also do some stuff with blackletter, yet another inspiration, although I ended up creating my own sans-serif blackletter for the Bookkake logotype - a process with its own murky history that I intend to write up at some point.”

[Advertising Books Graphic Design Technology Websites ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

CR December Issue (CR Blog)

7 d and 4 h ago

Our December issue has hit the newsstands…

The WORK section features work by The Glue Society, Non-Format and Tom Hingston Studio’s work for Grace Jones’ new album, Hurricane

Killer Apps: Gavin Lucas takes a look at iPhone apps and wonders about the creative and profit-making potential that Apple’s über-cool piece of gadgetry offers to creative programmers willing to play by their rules…

Patrick Burgoyne meets up with New York designer, Sam Potts

In the second of her series of three articles on design’s role in promoting sustainability, Anna Gerber looks at the importance of production

It’s been a great first decade for advertising agency Fallon: What will the next ten years hold. Eliza Williams spends some time with Fallon to find out what makes them tick…

This month marks the start of a new approach to our Crit section which is extended to bring our readers more in the way of analysis, reviews, discussion, criticism, perspective, trends, viewpoints, reflection and comment. In this issue, we review the Shanghai eArts festival, Flash on the Beach and Brighton Photo Biennial, plus: is it time for Mac to lay off PC? ; a new mood in charity ads; how to eat yourself creative; graphic responses to the financial crisis…

This month’s Gallery prize is a limited edition Sebastian Lester print

CR December issue - on sale now for £5.70!

[Advertising Art Books CR Back Issues Commercials Graphic Design Illustration Magazines/Papers ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

D&AD: Your Questions Answered (CR Blog)

7 d and 5 h ago

The 2008 D&AD Annual, designed by Research Studios

Since last year’s awards, there has been a lot of discussion on this blog about D&AD (see here and here), its role and its relationship to the professions it serves. Its new president, Garrick Hamm of Williams Murray Hamm, has just started his term of office so we asked CR Blog readers to voice your concerns by submitting questions about the organisation to him. Here are his answers…

Why D&AD? action man 
In the end D&AD is about the pencil and that’s why it was created – to have that gold standard to aim at. But the other things D&AD does don’t get talked about enough. We are forever being compared to Cannes and yes we are an awards show but we’re also about giving back, trying to help the young generation through into professional design and advertising. We need to do a better job of communicating that, which is one thing I’d like to think D&AD is doing this year. The awards is our big event but it’s the charitable side, the fact that we put £2 million back into the industry each year [that we need to communicate]. This year we had 120 colleges at New Blood, with 7000 people coming in. Those things – the Talent Pool, Student Awards, the President’s Lectures, they just cover costs, we don’t make money on them. D&AD is passionate about giving something back, inspiring both youngsters and people like me.

Jason Holroyd from Nottingham Trent was one of the graduates whose work was on show at D&AD’s New Blood event this year

What is the point of awards generally? CR
Getting in the D&AD Annual is like getting applause for a good piece of work. It enables you to feel great and gives you confidence that you’re in the right business and to go on to do something more. Some people say ‘I don’t need anyone to tell me I’ve done a good piece of work’ and that’s fine, but there are plenty of people out there, like myself, who do like other people saying ‘good job’. The first piece of work I got in was something I did with Joe Duffy at Michael Peters. I haven’t got that piece anymore but it’s in the Annual and it’s great I can refer to it and someone in Tokyo or Minneapolis can pick it up and see my work: it’s great promotion for me and my work. People talk about it getting you a better salary – that might still exist in advertising, I’m not so sure, but if you’ve won a yellow pencil you definitely have a better chance of getting in to see somebody at an interview because it acts as a filter. People are forever looking for reasons why they shouldn’t see people. Winning an award doesn’t guarantee you anything, but it does help to get you in the spotlight, especially for students.

D&AD why are you leaving us? Don’t you love me anymore? Is it something I did? James Yencken
We know there has been a problem with graphic design [there were no awards in that category and many designers have expressed disenchantment with D&AD as an organisation, see CR Blog passim]. We’ve listened to people and we are trying to address that. We’ve had a number of forums with graphic designers [to discuss their complaints], with another one in November where we have invited 120 graphic designers to talk about certain pieces of work that got in last year and to nominate pieces from this year – we will go and ask the designers of that work to enter. We’ve also reduced [the entry fee] in graphic design so it’s in line with other competitions and we hope that will encourage smaller studios. Also the judging in graphic design will be by one group rather than three – everyone gets to judge everything so I hope that will bring people together and hopefully they will be a bit more positive. D&AD is really keen on hearing from people who think we’ve left them behind. Write to us. Talk to us. D&AD is not the beast you think it is. It’s full of genuinely nice people who want to do what’s best. Go down there, have a coffee with them , tell them what you think and they’ll be happy to listen to you.

Recent annuals have got very repetitious, often the same piece can appear in the book half a dozen times. Should the number of categories you can enter be limited to stop this? Sean Thomas
Work is entered into individual areas. If it wins in, say, two categories it has met the standard in both. It’s been judged separately by separate juries so I think that’s fine. We shouldn’t stop good work getting in.

I would like to see all work be real paying client work in all awards. So much of the entries are for spoof or non-existent clients run in few places as a favour to get into award shows. bclgrh
D&AD has really strict rules on illegitimate work. Before people judge, the foremen remind everyone that it’s all about craft, excellence and context. We do our best to stop scam ads, we can’t stop it entirely but we do as best we can. One of the reasons why it takes time for work to come out from the nominations to the book is because we check stuff. We do throw things out, we threw something out last year.

The computer games section, in previous years, has been a real waste of space. The titles in there are often far from the industry’s best, or more often than not merely the ones with the larger production values. Either D&AD needs to drop the section in my mind, or work harder to attract those smaller, better developers into entering the awards. Sean Thomas
D&AD has been doing Gaming since 2000. It’s a huge industry with a lot of good stuff but we have decided to drop the category. We want to concentrate on what’s core – we can’t do everything. We have a couple of new categories, like digital installation, those sort of areas are still growing, but Gaming is no longer.

It seems that a disproportionately large number of British advertisers are scooping up the bulk of pencils and nominations. Do you agree? If so, could you please elaborate on what you think may be causing this trend? Across the pond
33% of entries come from the UK, 19% from the US and 8% from Germany, but 46% of the work in the annual is UK. We’ve tried to get overseas jurors because it’s only fair, but it’s about getting the balance which we’re trying to work on this year – 40% of jurors will be from outside the UK.

Might D&AD consider paying more heed to architecture and environmental design? perhaps as a way to provide a somewhat needed breath of fresh air? Bayar
We did have an Architecture category up to 2005 but we pulled it out because of the judging – you need to go and see the buildings and that proved impossible. If you’re going to do architecture it’s got to be the best and that takes an awful lot of organising, plus it has to have a connection with the rest of our community –the Environmental Design category is great for that as is Digital Installations.

There were a lot of grumbles about the awards night last year – what are you going to do differently next time? CR
We’re looking for a different venue because the Festival Hall was great to go to but just too big. There aren’t an awful lot of places with a capacity of around 1000 which is what we need. We think we’ve got a great venue this year that has its heart in the right place, is well linked with charity and represents a good partnership. We will be bringing back the dinner because people want to take clients, go and sit and have dinner. We know we need to cut down on the length of ceremony, to find way of editing it down. We also want to keep the live music and the after party because that’s been better – it’s made the event less of a stuffy hotel do with gold chairs. So we will continue to give it a younger party feel. You have to satisfy two camps really, – younger people who want to party and older ones like me who want to have dinner.

Budget given by client to produce the work should be a factor in each category. How can small agencies compete in the same category as a BBDO for example, who may have had a £20k plus budget as opposed to 2K budget? Brilliance is more easily accessible when you have huge budgets & huge clients. Just Someone With A ‘Pinion
If you look at something like the National Gallery [Grand Tour campaign, shown below, winner of a Gold award] it wasn’t a big budget job. Wherever you are, small or big agency, you still have to do great work, it doesn’t matter about the budget. It comes into play when you can put it into lots of different awards in different areas, but sometimes the bigger the agency, the tougher it is to do good work.

Please stop giving Apple a couple more of our precious trees every year for merely shaving 2mm off the current iPod’s girth.Sean Thomas
It is fair to say that Apple have had a fair share of awards but they do fulfil the criteria of brilliant ideas brilliantly executed. The iPhone completely changed what the mobile phone is about. It’d be crass to say it doesn’t warrant a Black Pencil: it’s everything the black Pencil is all about.

Why do you have to be a member to get a book, why cant you buy them? Vicki Legg 
The book will be for sale again next time round. For the first time ever you can see the annual online now, which is great, but it should be in bookshops. I love the annual, I think there has to be one, whilst I’m there, anyway. Some might say they don’t need one but there are lots who do. I don’t necessarily look at last year’s, the ones I look at are from 10 or 15 years ago. I don’t think people necessarily refer to it for inspiration as they used to because there are so many other places to go now but I do think they come back to it.

Could D&AD take a more active stance on the issues that are affecting the industries day by day - providing the latest information, analysing that information, and then suggesting ways forward? Alistair Hall
The Design Council and the IPA do a better job of lobbying on behalf of their industries than we could. D&AD is already overstretched. I like the idea of it in future but at the moment the awards and education is where our focus is.

Would there be any merit in creating individual subsections of D&AD for the different sections of the industry? Alistair Hall
This comes up quite a bit. D&AD is all about coming together. People disappearing off into different sections is not what the future is about – the blurring of edges and all of that is true, it’s very different to where it was 20 years ago. D&AD should keep advertising and design together.

CRBlog is something of a hub for designers, why not D&ADBlog? Ed Wright
We have a blog and we’re investing more in it this year to try to use it to reconnect more with the younger generation. We’re trying to have more of an open dialogue with people. We’ve talked about moving to a new building, and that it would be great to have a place where people can come and see us, but in the meantime, with the blog people can be inspired, make their comments and have a two-way conversation with us.

Why be a member of D&AD? CR
I think it’s the feeling of wanting to give a little bit back through things like our, portfolio surgeries and workshops. Once you become a member you can start to become more interactive with D&AD and contribute. You have to get work in the annual to be member: it will always stay that way because there has to be some sort of filter. There are lots of people who can’t take up their membership because of cost – if we reduce that I think younger people who want to be a part of it will do so. I want to re-launch membership and make it dramatically cheaper. The reason it was so expensive was because it included the annual. Let’s go back to what most organisations do and have something that’s relatively cheap.This year is all about trying to clarify what D&AD does to make sure people really understand it and know that the charitable activities happen – people still don’t get that. If I can look back in a year’s time and ask people what D&AD is stands for and they say ‘of course it’s the pencil but also what they do for education’, that for me would be great.

I’d like to ask D&AD to stick their pencils up their arses. DeAD 
If you were lucky enough to ever win one you’d know it wouldn’t fit

[Advertising Graphic Design ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

A Cross The Universe (CR Blog)

7 d and 7 h ago

Out today is a new DVD for French dance band Justice, which follows the band on a 20-day tour across the US. The film fits neatly into the rock n’ roll tour film genre, as it documents the daily antics of the band which include plentiful sex, alcohol, fighting, guns, fans and even an drunken impromptu marriage in Las Vegas between one half of Justice, Gaspard, and a random female fan.

The film is shot by previous Justice collaborators So-Me and Romain Gavras. Gavras was behind the controversial video for Justice track Stress, which saw a young gang rampaging across Paris, attacking everything in sight. The video, while an uncomfortable watch, was acclaimed by the industry and recently picked up the Best International Video award at the UK Music Video Awards. Gavras’ ability to make you feel as if you right in amongst the action is evident again here - CR talked to him about his experience of making the film.

CR: At one point during the film, Xavier from Justice says “I don’t really understand what you’re trying to do.” What do you think you were trying to do with this film?

RG: Trying to make justice become the coolest band on earth.

CR: Tour movies contain certain clichés – girls, sex, alcohol, fans, violence, etc. How do you keep this format fresh?

RG: Well, I don’t know if the format is fresh here. But even if they all are clichés, the key words like ‘girls, sex, alcohol, fans, violence’ are always cool. If you tell me okay, this DVD contains ‘girls, sex, alcohol, fans, violence’, you can be sure I’m gonna buy it.

CR: What cameras did you shoot the film with?

RG: Well, this is kind of my secret – So-Me and I had one camera each, it’s a really small full HD with 16 mm lens (really small, from documentary cameras of the 70’s), the camera is no bigger than a melon, they are made by only one shop in the world in Hong Kong.

CR: Your video for Justice’s track Stress became very controversial – has this impacted on the type of films you make for the band?

RG: Not really, the video was not out when we shot the film. But Justice, So-Me and I have the same taste for cool things such as girls, sex, alcohol, fans, violence.

CR: Do you feel you have to come up with something equally edgy to continue the image of the band that was created with Stress?

RG: Once again, some people find it edgy, I find it cool.

CR: Did you feel any sense of responsibility for the furore that video caused?

RG: Not really, as an artist I think it’s my duty to be irresponsible, responsible people are boring, they eat tofu and like Tom Hanks and Coldplay.

CR: Did the band give you total freedom to film whatever you wanted? Were there many moments they decided not to include?

RG: Well the film was made by So-Me and I, and except for a part where we went hunting in Texas and killed animals, it was really fun and cool. But they didn’t wanted to put that in it, so i guess it wasn’t total freedom.

CR: The tour bus driver turned out to be a great character – when did you decide to let him do the voiceovers too?

RG: Towards the end, I asked him to tell us what happened during the three weeks into a microphone, he is like magic. I could listen to him forever.

CR: Has Gaspard heard from his wife since Las Vegas?

RG: Haha nope, he didn’t marry her out of love tho, he was really drunk, and she was too.

[Film Music Videos ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

The NHS Needs You (CR Blog)

7 d and 8 h ago

The NHS was launched with this Halas and Batchelor film, Your Very Good Health, 1947

Make a film and help save lives: Creative Review and NHS Choices want your ideas for a new series of animated public health films

The UK’s National Health Service was launched 60 years ago with the help of a cartoon
character called Charley. Created by renowned animators Halas and Batchelor, Charley and his family explained the fledgling service to the nation in the classic film Your Very Good Health (above).

Through its web portal, NHS Choices, the NHS now makes extensive use of moving image, both to promote public health messages, to explain diseases and conditions and to help those suffering from them. With an ageing population and alarming increases in problems such as obesity, there remains a dire need for effective, engaging communications. Which is where you come in.

NHS Choices and CR are giving our readers the chance to develop a new animated character/s to communicate vital public health messages. The chosen entrant will be given a six month contract to develop his or her concept and put it into action.

We are looking for a character/s that would work well in both static illustration and short animated films that would be distributed nationally on the net and other media. The aim is to use humour, consistently strong writing, and a distinctive visual identity to put over health information credibly, with laughs and without alienating the audience by being patronising.

How to enter
Send us a storyboard or short animation containing a health message which showcases your character/s in the best possible light. We are looking for a strong visual style which is engaging and can be used flexibly across different media. The creative solution should have a universal appeal so please include an outline on how the characters could be implemented and developed over time.

Individual and team entries are welcome from both amateurs and professionals. Up to five entries will then be shortlisted and each given a budget of £3000 to produce their short animation. These films will be viewed by a panel of representatives from nhs Choices and CR with, in the opinion of the judges, the makers of the strongest film being awarded the contract to make the ensuing series.

The winner’s work will gain huge exposure in a high-profile medium that is promoted nationally. The work may well be syndicated. NHS Choices will retain the copyright in the characters and content of the final commissioned films but in the case of entered storyboards and the five test films copyright over characters and content will remain with the filmmakers.

To enter, send storyboards and a covering note, with an estimate of what each film would cost, to Joanna Rahim, multimedia editor, nhs Choices, 80 Skipton House, London SE1 6LH, by January 19, 2009.

Please note, we cannot return storyboards. The judges’ decision is final. If you have any queries, contact joanna.rahim@dh.gsi.gov.uk. Deadline: January 19 2009

[Advertising Commercials Film Graphic Design Illustration ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

Killer iPhone Apps (CR Blog)

10 d and 6 h ago

Give an iPhone owner half a chance and they will happily launch into a lengthy demonstration of the latest slew of ‘apps’ that they’ve downloaded for their pocket-sized gadget. Apps are, essentially, packages of software that utilises (hopefully) the best properties of the iPhone’s hardware - ie the multi touch screen, GPS, and the impressively sensitive accelerometer. These properties, combined with a powerful operating system (Unix) and fast internet connection speeds mean that the iPhone is, in short, a creative programmer’s dream come true. Here at CR, we’ve been checking out a wide variety of apps and have compiled a round up of our current favourites…

Color Expert
Category: Reference
Code Line Comms
Cost: £5.99

According to the iPhone app store, “Color Expert is an interactive colour wheel and swatch library that helps artists and designers identify, translate, capture and showcase colour.” Select a colour from the colour wheel and Color Expert will provide the Pantone reference as well as rgb values (managed cmyk colour conversion is planned for the next version). More excitingly, take a photo using the iPhone’s camera and the app will find the nearest Pantone match for whatever you’ve snapped. It will also work out complimentary and analogous colours and offers a fairly good set of Pantone swatches. You can then email the data directly from your phone to your email account.

FontViewer
Category: Utilities
osxWerk.de
Cost: Free

We’ve included FontViewer in our roundup not because we think it’s perfect, but rather because it represents a step in the right direction. FontViewer is a fairly basic reference tool for graphic designers: it lists the system fonts found on Apple computers and allows you to examine a type sampler for each font. However, there’s great potential in the idea. For example, what about an app that provides a similar function to the What The Font? tool on myfont.com? Something that would allow users to upload an image (taken with the iPhone camera) of a font that would then be identified by the app? Now that really would be useful. We await version 2…

CameraBag
Category: Photography
Nevercentre Ltd
Cost: £1.79

CameraBag is, as the name suggests, a ‘bag’ of different camera effects for use with your iPhone’s camera. Simply take a photo and then select from a list of different effects, including Lomography lookalikes Helga and Lolo and others such as Infrared, Ansel, Fisheye – et voila, your photograph takes on the relevant appearance. Or you can choose an image from your photo library, scroll through the different camera styles and save any that you like the look of. An options panel is available for camera behaviour, image size, preset cropping effects, preset border effects and more. Free updates in the future will include additional lens filter effects.

Oblique Strategies
Category: Music (weirdly)
Far Out Labs LLC
Cost: Free

Oblique Strategies, subtitled, “over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas”, is a deck of cards originally created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to help creatives get out of a rut. Now in its fifth edition, it has long been championed by creative types suffering from ‘block’ (the first set came out back in 1975). The idea lends itself rather neatly to an iPhone app: each card in the pack contains a phrase or cryptic remark which can be used to break a deadlock or dilemma. Essentially it functions rather like a ‘magic 8-ball’ toy, throwing out a series of quirky, inspirational phrases at random, such as “emphasise the flaws”. The app version contains all five editions of the cards and allows the user to draw the top card off a shuffled deck in order to read it. Brian Eno’s involvement means the application has been misplaced in the music category of Apple’s app store. It should probably be moved to productivity.

RJDJ Album
Category: Music
Reality Jockey Ltd
Cost: £1.79

The makers of RjDj describe it as a “mind twisting hearing sensation”. Connect your headphones and choose between several different ‘scenes’ created by different musicians. Each scene reacts to sounds picked up via the microphone of your iPhone to create or influence what you hear. In other words, the sounds around you are analysed, mixed and mashed, twisted, effected, looped and echoed in such a way that ambient noise becomes weird and wonderful music. You can hum and clap to add to the composition and record your mind-bending tracks to listen to at a later time. There is a free ‘Single’ version with only one scene available to play with. Highly addictive.

Bloom
Category: Music
Opal Limited
Cost: £2.39

Bloom, like RJDJ, is also an interactive, generative music toy but rather than reacting to sounds picked up by the microphone, interaction takes place via the touchscreen of the iPhone. Tap the screen to create elaborate and unique melodies which are looped and repeated. If you stop interacting with Bloom, generative software takes over and Bloom creates music of its own. Developed by ambient pioneer and producer Brian Eno and musician and software designer Peter Chilvers, Bloom is part instrument and compositional tool and the blobby user interface has the feeling of an interactive art piece. Let’s have more apps like this please.

SynchStep
Jailbroken phones only
Cost: Free (donations
welcome) from synchstep.com/

Greg Elliot, creative technologist at Poke New York, developed this clever application which puts your iPhone or iPod Touch in tune with the pace that you’re moving at. SynchStep takes advantage of the device’s accelerometer to monitor the speed of a user’s footfall and matches it with suitable music from your iTunes library. If it can’t find the information in your iTunes files, SynchStep will automatically find, download and store BPM data gathered from the internet. Don’t move to the groove: get the groove to your move!

For All Seasons
Category: Entertainment
Nanika Limited
Cost: Free

Created by Andreas Müller, For All Seasons is, he tells us “an iPhone port of an old piece of mine called For All Seasons that I released in 2005 for pc and Mac. For All Seasons is an attempt to use interactivity to help explain a memory, and the emotions that are attached to that memory, to someone else.” Start the application and then choose one of the four seasons. A text explanation of a memory related to that season appears on screen. Once you’ve read the information, tap the screen and the letters on the page form the basis of an interactive animation bringing that memory to life. Lovely stuff.

iGameboy
Jailbroken phones only
rob-sheridan.com/iphone

One of the common gripes with Apple’s iTunes app store system is that Apple controls which apps are sold. This allows it to control the quality of applications, but it can also refuse to sell apps that perform tasks just as well or arguably better than software Apple itself produces. It’s unlikely, for example, that the official app store will sell an alternative web browser to Safari…
This app by Rob Sheridan shows how non-Apple-approved apps can change the look of your iPhone’s interface – in this case, giving the iPhone’s ‘winterboard’ the look of Nintendo’s classic 1989 Gameboy interface. Anyone for Tetris?

Locly
Category: Navigation
Acknack Ltd
Cost: Free

Locly is an app that makes use of GPS and also internet access. Should you wonder where you are and what services, shops etc are in your immediate vicinity, open up the app and it will find whatever you want, be it a selection of cafés or restaurants, or perhaps a highly-regarded sausage emporium. It will also access local images from Flickr, pull up Twitter or Wikipedia entries that are relevant to your location or even information on nearby items of interest found in Safari. The blurb at the apps store promises that it “will work in most countries”.

Air Sharing
Category: Productivity
Avatron Software Inc
Cost: £3.99

Air Sharing allows users to mount your iPhone or iPod touch as a wireless hard drive on any Mac, Windows or Linux computer – as long as you’ve got a Wi-Fi connection. This is a brilliant idea although it does assume that you haven’t filled all your available memory with photographs, music and other applications. But assuming you still have some storage space to spare, then it’s more than just a handy hard drive … not only can you drag and drop files between your iPhone and computer just as you would with any other portable hard drive – but you can also use the iPhone as a reader to view stored documents in many common formats such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, pdf, html, rtf and more.

For more on iPhone apps, see the current, December, issue of Creative Review.

apple.com/iphone/appstore/
iphonehacks.com/

[Uncategorized ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

CS Shanghai: The City Past and Present (CR Blog)

11 d and 4 h ago

Textile hanging featuring Shanghai landmarks by Jellymon

There’s a feeling that Shanghai has returned to its roaring glory days of the 30s, which means huge energy, huge opportunity…and huge inequality

The first speaker session at the Creative Social Shanghai event this morning was by New York-based writer Stella Dong who recently published Shanghai: the Rise and Fall of a Decadent City. Stella gave a great potted history of a city that, as recently as the 1840s was just a quiet market town. “Shanghai is a city that no longer exists but in many ways has come full circle,” she said. “Old Shanghai was a freewheeling place, it was about being greedy for material things and for life which is what Shanghai is once again after a long hiatus.” Modern advertising came to Shanghai thanks to those lovely people at British American Tobacco who, in the early 20th century, came up with the idea to give away calendars featuring pretty Chinese girls [who also appeared on posters, which other brands copied, see below]. The images became iconic and unique to Shanghai.” (Lots of examples of cigarette and other advertising here)

Although still very much seen as the commercial powerhouse of China, Dong wondered whether its pre-eminence as THE place to go to seek fame and fortune will endure in the face of increased competition from other, burgeoning urban centres. “Shanghai was known as the head of the dragon - everywhere else in China follows it. But everywhere else is westernising so rapidly that Shanghai may not remain as THE modern Chinese city, but instead become one of many,” she said.

There was much talk of the uncertainties of the new China - inequality is rising so fast that it may soon approach 1930s levels in the city, China is beginning to feel the effects of the downturn with many designers telling us that budgets are being cut at an alarming rate. Unemployment may follow. The huge gap between haves and have-nots may well be the first big challenge for the new system that has ridden such an extended boom until now.

Nevertheless, from what we’ve been hearing these past two days, the creative scene is, as expected, hugely dynamic here (although, apparently, street art was suppressed during the Olympics in a bid to keep cities clean). The ground floor of the building that our conference is being held in is going to be devoted to Factory - a restaurant, bar, recording studio, pop-up retail store and design centre which will aid up-and-coming Shanghai talent. It’s going to be run by American Sean Dinsmore and backed by ad agency Profero who have leased the entire building.

During the rest of the day, Dinsmore introduced us to some of the design talent that may be making use of the space. First up, fashion designer Dodo who talked about the growth in nostalgia for state-owned Chinese brands of the 70s and 80s, particularly sports brands such as Chrysanthemum tracksuits and Hui Li trainers (shown below). The latter were celebrated in Shumeng Ye’s Book of Warriors which was packaged with a pair of the trainers and sold in über-trendy Parisian store Colette. The factories who make these lines are now too busy making for Western brands to be bothered with reviving Communist-era classics and, in general fail to recognise their appeal, Dodo said.

Another example was provided by the next speakers, design studio Jellymon. Lin Lin and her partner Sam Jacobs moved to Shanghai two and a half years ago. The pair had met while studying at Chelsea five years ago. One of their projects (in collaboration with Wieden + Kennedy) was for the Shanghai Watch Company which made the watch Mao wore. This state-owned factory is run down now and only makes for Western suppliers. Jellymon persuaded them to revive a 70s model which they decorated with work from local artists and designers and which now sell for the equivalent of £100 each.

Jellymon do a lot of work for sports and fashion brands including Nike (Chinese New Year packaging shown)

Adidas (window display, shown)

and local street wear brand Eno (plug-in store shown)

For the Social Jellymon asked young designers and illustrators James Chang, Rubber Pixy and graffiti artist Sice (pronounced ‘Sick’) to create hangings using Blue Nankeen – an ancient method of dying cloth using lime and soya bean flour. The results were a great clash of old and new - A Chinese design aesthetic without being kitsch.

With a studio of just six, Jellymon say they are constantly having to fight off ad agencies trying to nab their staff. As I found earlier in the year in India, ad agencies in China are using their financial muscle to pick up top design talent and employ them as art directors or use them to do branding work. This means that graphic design struggles for recognition and status and has to live very much in advertising’s shadow. Nevertheless, Jellymon say the graphic design scene is growing in Shanghai, as shown in a current exhibition at the Source streetwear store and gallery.

More tomorrow….

[Advertising Graphic Design Illustration ]
View original post

|Add to del.icio.us | Share

The Secret of Efficient Meetings (CR Blog)

11 d and 5 h ago

Are you bored of sitting around in meetings that are needlessly long? Are you keen to increase efficiency and reduce wasted time in office pow-wows? Well, perhaps Fleeting Seating: The Slightly Uncomfortable Chair Collection is what you’ve been waiting for - a collection of specially designed chairs that should guarantee shorter, more efficient meeting