Hasta La Ideas

In autumn 2007 Koeweiden Postma pitched for a new logo and housestyle for the Dutch government. They made it to the final round but didn’t get the job: here’s what the Dutch could have had

It’s a constant frustration to us here at CR that, due to client confidentiality clauses, design studios and ad agencies are seldom allowed to show the projects that didn’t make it. So often, they are more interesting than the ones that finally get the nod.

Last week at the Designyatra conference in Mumbai, Hugo van Bos of Koweiden Postma showed his studio’s pitch for the Dutch government’s new identity. They proposed two routes.

Route one drew on the Dutch landscape and its characteristic Polders of reclaimed land.

The idea was to translate that familiar gridded landscape into an identity featuring the Dutch royal lion and a reference to the national flag

The identity would be flexible enough to work with all the government departments, using the red and blue device to separate information

It would work like this on a letter

And it could be used on signage like this

Route 2 would reference the coats of arms of the different Dutch regions and cities

Again using the lion, the logo could look like this

Which was refined further to this

Which would then work like this

The squares would vary according to the department or subject

So it could work like this on a letter

And this on signage

But, after reaching the last two, the Dutch Government went with an identity by Studio Dumbar which looks like this

You can see the whole Koeweiden Postma presentation from Designyatra here

We’re loving the thought-provoking, technology-tweaking art pieces of Tim Schwartz, former Assistant Curator of Digital Media at NYC’s Museum of the Moving Image. First up, his silly but sobering Paris gauge:

The piece is attached via a network cable to the internet where it monitors news and search results for “paris hilton” and “paris france” and displays an average result in real-time.

Then there’s his card catalog, a physical embodiment of his iPod’s contents:

A card catalog designed to hold all of the songs on my iPod, 7,390 songs. Each song is cataloged on a single card. The cards are organized in reverse chronological order, that is the songs I listened to most recently are in the front of the catalog, and the songs I haven’t listened to in two years exist at the back. The piece is seven feet long when closed and just under fourteen feet when opened.

Lastly, gotta love his Google Image Periodic Table:

I created a periodic table of elements by taking the first image returned by google when the name of an element was searched for. This piece creates a snapshot of what our culture associates with these particular words. For example, Platinum is associated with a hair color most often, Krypton with Superman, and Lithium with its pill form.

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France-based Matthieu Tarrit’s Polar Vehicle is a cold-weather research base you can drive to the site.

His wicked laser lawn mower incinerates grass stalks to height, then sucks up the ashes.

See more of Tarrit’s book on Coroflot.

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