Closca won the prestigious Red Dot Design Award this year with its Fuga helmet. Not only is the Fuga safety-certified in Europe, Canada and the States, the helmet is super-convenient. The thin-shell design folds down—reducing its own space by 50%—meaning……
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A travers « Birds of Paradise », le photographe israélien Itamar Freed, passionné par la capacité des oiseaux à naviguer dans les airs et sur la terre, a voulu étudier le lien qui existe entre les hommes et les oiseaux. Il a mis en scène des oiseaux vivants et empaillés au milieu d’hommes et de femmes dénudés qu’on peut considérer comme des divinités. Les oiseaux semblent incarner le seul lien entre les hommes et les cieux.
Birds of Paradise is on view at Gitler &_____ Gallery until March 30, 2015.
Represented by Feinberg Projects Gallery.
Fondée en 2009, la firme de design QisDesign fait partie de la société d’électronique taïwanaise BenQ. Voici l’une de leurs récentes créations, la nouvelle Infinito Light, une suspension de LED qui fonctionne à la fois comme éclairage classique et comme éclairage d’ambiance.
Facebook employees have moved into their new Frank Gehry-designed Silicon Valley headquarters – a 40,000-square-metre office building with “the largest open floor plan in the world” and a huge rooftop park.
Company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted an announcement on his own Facebook page revealing that the social media giant’s staff had begun occupying the new building on its Menlo Park campus in Palo Alto, California.
Known as MPK 20, the building was conceived by Canadian architect Frank Gehry, 86, as the world’s largest open-plan office – approximately 2,800 employees will occupy one large room.
“Our goal was to create the perfect engineering space for our teams to work together,” said Zuckerberg.
“To do this, we designed the largest open floor plan in the world — a single room that fits thousands of people,” he added. “There are lots of small spaces where people can work together, and it’s easy for people to move around and collaborate with anyone here.”
Zuckerberg has posted a single aerial photograph of the building on his Facebook page, with the promise of more “once we’re fully unpacked”.
Local users of Facebook’s image-sharing platform Instagram were also invited to photograph the space yesterday. Their pictures show some of the artworks that have been created especially for the building by 15 local artists, as well as the 3.5-hectare rooftop park, which features a half-mile walking trail, a coffee stand and over 400 trees.
The building itself was designed and built in just three years, and comprises a relatively simple construction of metal, concrete and glass.
“The building itself is pretty simple and isn’t fancy. That’s on purpose,” said Zuckerberg. “We want our space to feel like a work in progress. When you enter our buildings, we want you to feel how much left there is to be done in our mission to connect the world.”
Gehry – whose best-known projects include the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao – has described the completed building as a “remarkably human environment” with a “toughness” and “rawness”.
“From the start, Mark wanted a space that was unassuming, matter-of-fact and cost effective,” he said in a written statement. “He did not want it overly designed. It also had to be flexible to respond to the ever-changing nature of his business – one that facilitated collaboration and one that did not impose itself on their open and transparent culture.”
Gehry was first appointed to the project in the summer of 2012, but was later asked to tone down his plans to make them more anonymous. In late 2013, he was also asked to design Facebook’s offices in London and Dublin.
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designed by Frank Gehry appeared first on Dezeen.
Two of the UK’s leading architecture magazines have announced a reshuffle with the appointment of new editors for the Architects’ Journal and the Architectural Review.
The April edition of the Architectural Review (AR) will be the last under Catherine Slessor, who has been with the monthly magazine for over two decades and editor for five years.
She will be replaced by Christine Murray, who has been the editor of the weekly trade magazine Architects’ Journal (AJ) since 2010, and launched the AJ’s Women In Architecture campaign and awards programme.
Related story: Domus appoints new editor
“Slessor is a trailblazer in the male-dominated worlds of publishing and architecture, but she is also a gleaming link in a golden chain that joined the AR’s present to its glorious past, the AR of [Nikolaus] Pevsner, [John] Betjemen, [Ian] Nairn, and other luminaries,” said AR history editor Tom Wilkinson in a tribute published on the AR website.
“The questing spirit of the AR that she upheld – the search for an architecture of aesthetic and technical excellence that supports and nurtures, rather than crushes and exploits – will continue as incoming editor Christine Murray takes up the role.”
Rory Olcayto, who has been acting editor of the AJ for 14 months while Murray was on maternity leave, will now take the helm. Will Hurst will take over Olcayto’s former role as deputy editor.
Olcayto joined the AJ from rival title Building Design in 2008. “I couldn’t imagine a more exciting time to be editing the AJ,” he told Dezeen. “The role of the architect is changing fast – technology, economics and politics are all helping to move it beyond its origins as the profession concerned with mere building design.”
“Our job is to track that change, help shape that change, and give a voice to the architect in the wider world. It’s a great honour to take on the challenge,” he said.
The AJ was founded in 1895, while the AR started in 1896. Both magazines are published by London-based media company Emap.
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Scottish studio PagePark Architects has won a bid to restore the Charles Rennie Mackintosh-designed Glasgow School of Art building, which was devastated by fire last summer.
The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) Restoration Committee has appointed local office PagePark Architects to restore and rebuild the fire-damaged building, which houses the school’s Fine Art Department and an exhibition space used to host the annual degree show.
Located on Renfrew Street in the centre of the city, the sandstone-clad Mackintosh Building – commonly known as the Mac – was designed by Scottish architect and GSA alumni Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the 1890s and is considered his seminal work.
PagePark fought off competition from four other shortlisted practices including London studios John McAslan + Partners and Avanti Architects to be awarded the commission to lead design work on the restoration project, which will reportedly cost £35 million.
The fire broke out on 23 May 2014 towards the end of the summer term when students were preparing for the school’s annual degree show.
The blaze is believed to have started in the basement before spreading up the west side of the building to the roof, causing irreparable damage to the library’s distinctive wood-panelled walls as well as a glazed passageway called the “hen run”.
“We have, over many years, had the privilege to work on and in the context of the Mackintosh legacy,” said David Page of PagePark Architects, “the highlight of which will now be the opportunity to bring The Glasgow School of Art into splendid re-use for its students and staff, the people of Glasgow and the huge audience beyond the city.”
The firm has carried out restoration work on a number of Mackintosh’s commercial and domestic buildings, including the refurbishment of the National Trust property Hill House and the conversion the former Glasgow Herald offices into The Lighthouse architecture and design centre.
“The team assembled by PagePark Architects impressed us not only with their deep knowledge of the building, but of the wider work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh,” said GSA director Tom Inns. “They displayed a superb methodology to the task of restoration – in particular their room by room analysis of the structure, materiality, craftsmanship and intent of Mackintosh in designing, specifying and overseeing the construction of his masterwork.”
“They also bring an understanding of the building’s particular importance to Glasgow – its people and history – as well as of its status as an international design icon,” he added.
A statement released by The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service shortly after the fire said that over 90 per cent of the structure and 70 per cent of its contents had been preserved, with damage contained to the library and studio spaces in the building’s western wing.
The PagePark design team will work with the school to develop detailed plans for the restoration of this part of the building, while an external expert advisory panel will be established to provide guidance on the project.
Work is expected to begin in early 2016, with a view to reopening the majority of the spaces in time for the 2017-8 academic year.
Images of the fire-damaged school by Mcateer Photograph.
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Glasgow School of Art appeared first on Dezeen.
Interview: Paul Gaudio is Adidas‘ first creative director in 15 years, and a key part of the sportswear brand’s strategy to use design as a weapon against arch-rival Nike. In this exclusive interview, Gaudio talks to Dezeen about Adidas’ experiments in wearable technology, its collaboration with Kanye West and why copying is inevitable in sports design.
Gaudio – previously head of Adidas‘ Digital Sports division – is the first person in over a decade tasked with making everything designed by the German sports brand “look and feel and smell and taste like Adidas”.
His appointment eight months ago as global creative director forms part of Adidas’ ambitious plans to topple Oregon-based Nike as the dominant brand in the USA, where Nike products represent 59 per cent of trainer sales and Adidas just 10 per cent.
“We felt we needed to compete with design. That’s a very clear aim. We expect to be the very best creative organisation on earth,” Gaudio told Dezeen. “We want to challenge ourselves to take the brand somewhere new.”
Gaudio’s promotion followed the appointment of Eric Liedtke as executive board member for global brands, who told Dezeen he needed to “overcompensate in America from a design point of view”.
In an effort to achieve this, last year Adidas poached three of Nike’s senior design staff, and has moved Gaudio from its headquarters in Germany to its offices in Portland, Oregon, as part of the offensive.
Related story: Adidas plans to use design to conquer America
He has now been tasked with creating a clear design thread that connects the work of over 500 creatives working across multiple departments and businesses. This encompasses the brand’s fashion collaborations – including the range designed by musician and self-professed polymath Kanye West with Adidas’ Originals brand – as well as a wide array of technical partnerships.
“Collaborations with people like Kanye, these tend to be things that we use to make statements to ourselves or to our consumers about who we are and what we can do,” explained Gaudio.
“Of course we want to sell things, but not every product we make is equal,” he said. “Some products are created to be huge, multi-million, commercial drivers, and others are made to set the tone, to put our flag out there and to make statements.”
Gaudio describes the collaboration with West as part of Adidas’ “open source” approach.
“We like to say we’re like an open-source brand. We love to collaborate,” he said. “We really like the idea that Kanye West, a huge celebrity, he wants to be creative, to do more than just make music. He is a creative force within himself.”
“We provide a place for him to create and we become that facilitator, that output for his creativity,” he added. “That’s really the approach we take with everything, whether it’s with other collaborations or whether it’s how we work with our designers internally.”
But there is a limit to how open he wants the brand to be. Like Nike, Adidas regularly pursues cases of copyright infringement, and the two brands are often at loggerheads. Gaudio says there is a difference between outright copying, imitation as a form of flattery and finding inspiration in other people’s work.
“We are definitely being knocked off around the globe and we don’t appreciate it,” he said. “When you are walking into a mall in Korea and you see a shoe that looks like yours but maybe has an extra stripe on it, I don’t think that’s something that anybody feels good about.”
“At the same time, designers in general are… I don’t mean it negatively, but we tend to be copycats. We see something that we love and it influences us,” he added. “If there are things that look and feel similar, I don’t see that as any kind of threat. That’s the creative culture, driving the aesthetic of the industry forward.”
Gaudio, who studied industrial design at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, joined Adidas in 1992. By 1996 he was design director for Adidas America, but left the brand in 2000 to dabble in startup businesses and motorcycle design. He rejoined in 2006, and became head of Digital Sport in 2011, managing the interactive coaching programme miCoach for consumers as well as the brand’s “elite” services for professional athletes.
“We can essentially put sensors on athletes during their practice and get all their real time data back to the coach on the sideline to help them train,” explained Gaudio. “That’s the tip of our spear. That’s our Formula One technology.”
In 2013, his team launched the Smart Run, a bracelet device that connects to the miCoach training app and combines an MP3 player with various motion sensors to track performance and offer tailored coaching plans. This was followed last summer by the Fit Smart – Adidas’ answer to wearable activity trackers like FitBit and Nike’s FuelBand – which has been nominated for an IF Design Award.
“There are a lot of products on the market that go on the wrist and measure things. But they were very much lifestyle orientated,” said Gaudio.
“We do things for people who, if not athletes, are at the very least are intending to use sport and fitness to reach their goals. So it’s not really a watch. It’s not an activity tracker or a piece of jewellery either. It’s a sports product.”
Gaudio’s other major launch was the Smart Ball, a football that collects and tracks flight and impact data when kicked. The ball won an innovation award at the Consumer Electronics Show in January – one of the tech industry’s most important events.
But according to Gaudio the next big leap for the sports industry will go beyond adding tech into existing products and wrist bands, and will fundamentally change the way Adidas operates.
“You will definitely see more innovations around what products are made of, how they get made, why they get made,” he said.
“We see big changes coming, and I don’t mean flying shoes. The industry is poised for a big change in how we create and how we build products and distribute products.”
Read the edited transcript from our interview with Paul Gaudio:
Anna Winston: Tell me about your role at Adidas.
Paul Gaudio: I’ve been involved with with the brand for over 20 years in a lot of different functions. I started with brand innovation and product design, and then went off and did some startup things and some consulting and then came back to the brand. At that point it was more of a strategic role, looking at brand strategy and marketing. That, little by little, led me into the topic surrounding wearables and digital sports and the whole quantifiable self. Pushing the brand into that direction and ultimately, for the last few months, moving into my new role as the global creative director. The scope for that is… managing might be the wrong word, but leading the 500 or so creatives that we have around the world doing footwear design, apparel, hardware categories, retail and education design, branding, etc.
I’m an industrial designer and went to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I had forgotten completely about the brand, to be honest. I was out of school and was working as an industrial designer, and a friend of mine said “hey, I’m working there, what do you think?” and I said “what? really? I had kind of forgotten about you”.
This was in the very early 1990s and he sent me some shoes, some really interesting shoes, that for the first time got me looking at athletic footwear, apparel and products as pieces of equipment that could help athletes get better. That is the core of the brand.
Anna Winston: How do wearable tech and responsive products fit into the bigger picture for Adidas?
Paul Gaudio: For me this was the most obvious step. If we are here to help people get better, then why don’t we give them all the tools and information that they need to reach their goals, that they need to make their mark or whatever it is they are after; if they want to run a faster marathon, if they want to look or feel better, understand themselves better, manage their health better.
It was something that we jumped on very early. As a brand we started doing wearable technology as far back as 1980 with the micro-pacer, the first running shoe that could track your distance. It had a pedometer on board, built in. And that had never been done before.
So for us it has been a natural progression. We believe that technology can help people be better, or at least turn the lights on and help them reach their goals and change their behaviours. There was a huge wave that came and we were fortunate to see that coming and to understand it.
Anna Winston: Could you talk me through the thinking behind the FitSmart?
Paul Gaudio: There are a lot of products on the market that go on the wrist and measure things. Some are more successful than others. But they were very much lifestyle orientated – more for people who are looking to get credit for movement and trying to live a healthier life. That’s all very good. But we wanted to take a different point of view.
We do things for people who, if not athletes, are at the very least intending to use sport and fitness to reach their goals. So it’s not really a watch. It’s not an activity tracker or a piece of jewellery either. It’s a sports product. It’s something that we designed to be used when you are working out, when you are sweating. And that obviously drives the whole function and form of the product because it’s got to be low profile, it’s got to be strong. We want it to look strong and powerful, easy to use and all of those things. That’s very much why it looks like it looks. It’s a very simple little design. But that is important when you are doing sports because you just don’t want to be bothered by things.
Anna Winston: People are quite familiar with the idea of wearing something on their wrist to track behaviour. A football seems less obvious.
Paul Gaudio: This came out of our miCoach elite training system – we can essentially put sensors on athletes during their practice and get all their realtime data back to the coach on the sideline to help them train their athletes, manage the athletes and help them understand what they are going through, the process of training and fitness. That’s the tip of our spear. That’s our Formula One technology.
All of those sensors that we have developed to sense the body’s movement with super sophisticated algorithms, can also track the play of the ball. Athletes and coaches want to know everything, and they want to track the ball. So we followed that and pretty quickly it went straight to a prototype. When we started playing with it and sharing it with consumers, pro-athletes and kids alike would just light up every time they got a chance to kick it. So we thought “hey this is great, we should market this”.
Anna Winston: Do you approach these products as technology or product design? Where do they sit?
Paul Gaudio: We have a digital sports team that we set up over the last five or six years, with a combination of industrial designers and user experience designers. We have technical teams, we have mechanical engineers, we have electrical engineers, we have software folk. So we have built a full-service hub inside of the company that bridges the gap. Part of it is integrating our sensor technology into our footwear and apparel, and part of it is the hardware components that become wearable.
Anna Winston: How does what they do relate to what’s going on in the rest of the company? The work that Adidas Originals is doing, for example, seems quite separate.
Paul Gaudio: Well for example when we develop something, say the miCoach Elite System, we do that in partnership with the businesses and experts around football. When we developed the wrist-based training devices we worked with our running businesses and our training businesses to get the insight into the consumer, to work on how we bring the product to market, how we make sure we integrate that into our overall story of the brand. Likewise, if we are offering things like apparel that allows sensors to be carried, or products that allow sensors in footwear to communicate back to the user in some way, we do that in a partnership. We are kind of in the middle.
Anna Winston: How do you develop a consistent design language for 500 creatives working in multiple different businesses and development areas within the brand?
Paul Gaudio: That’s why we go to work everyday – not to be too flippant. We haven’t had a global creative director here at Adidas for 15 years, so the reason in part for me being here is to make sure we can bring those things together and have a connective tissue and fingerprint that consumers can start to feel and understand, regardless of what market they are in, what retail format they might walk in to, what product they might pick up. Any experience they might chose to partake in, it should look and feel and smell and taste like Adidas. That’s really why I am here.
We have processes and structures and calendars and all the usual things that big companies have to co-ordinate, but creative direction is kind of the starting point for everything. The creative teams, the 500 or odd people who are out there, they bring work to life. But my focus and the focus of our creative leadership team is the “why”. Why are we doing it and how should we be doing it. How does our brand want to behave and act and look and feel.
Anna Winston: Why are you the first global creative director for 15 years? That’s quite a big gap.
Paul Gaudio: I can’t really answer that. Obviously the company goes through different organisational changes and priorities over time. As we started to look at what we needed to do in order to compete, we felt we needed to compete with design. As a creator of brands, we feel that we need to be the best. That’s a very clear aim. We expect to be the very best creative organisation on earth.
We’re a big team of people and we have a lot of very talented and diverse creatives across the planet and so we want to set very high expectations for ourselves and we want to challenge ourselves to take the brand somewhere new.
Anna Winston: Aside from sales, how do you judge that something has strategically been a success in design terms?
Paul Gaudio: Collaborations with people like Kanye, these tend to be things that we use to make statements to ourselves or to our consumers about who we are and what we can do. Statements of leadership and statements of creativity. So we measure ourselves by the reactions and response of our consumers. Yes, there’s the direct sales aspect of it, but we also look at what people are saying about us. In my mind to be the best, people have to say you were the best. That is the measure. When we get that feedback from consumers and from the culture around us, then we consider it a success.
Of course we want to sell things but not every product we make is equal. Some products are created to be huge, multi-million, commercial drivers, and others are made to feed and to set the tone, to put our flag out there and to make statements.
Anna Winston: You’ve only been in this role for eight months. Were you very involved in the Kanye West collaboration?
Paul Gaudio: It’s been around for quite a while. I’ve become connected to it like everything else in the company now. As a brand we are very collaborative. We like to say we’re like an open source brand. We love to collaborate. We don’t see ourselves as limited or exclusive or narrow.
We really like the idea that Kanye West, a huge celebrity, he wants to be creative, to do more than just make music. He is a creative force within himself. We provide a place for him to create and we become that facilitator, that output for his creativity. That’s really the approach we take with everything, whether it’s with other collaborations or whether it’s how we work with our designers internally.
Young people, young designers, come to Adidas because they know they can create. That they are able to chase and fulfil their creative dreams and visions. That is the same if I bring a software engineer in and he fantasises about working on the next wearable technology, or a young fashion designer from Paris who saw the Kanye show and was blown away by it. We welcome all. Our doors are open and our brand is open. That’s really what it is about.
Anna Winston: Are there still boundaries between sports clothing, everyday clothing and high fashion?
Paul Gaudio: I think they have dissolved. They started dissolving back in the 1970s, when people started wearing Adidas trainers with jeans. The consumer just says “hey, that’s something I want to wear. That is something I want to associate myself with. That’s something I like”.
Clothing, footwear, fashion – whether you are playing sport or going to school – are very intimate statements that you are making. And I think people make those decisions universally now. But Adidas still comes from sport. The fabrics, they might come from high-end basketball uniforms for example. That crossover is something we are going to continue to push and to drive.
The culture of sport has influenced everything. The most popular people on earth are athletes. People that aren’t athletes want to associate with athletes. The entertainers and the athletes, that whole culture has come together and therefore codes around those cultures and the fashions and uniforms have blended into a mishmash. So we have things that are built for hardcore performance and they are going to be always super sharp and pure and simple – built for the Olympics or built for a marathon or built for jumping higher or running faster. But then everything kind of drafts off of that, all the way down the hallways, through to the street and onto the catwalk. We may stretch it into fashion, we may stretch it into the street, but sport is the foundation of it. And I think that is unique. The fashion guys don’t come from sport. We do.
Anna Winston: Is copying an issue for Adidas?
Paul Gaudio: Yes. We are definitely being knocked off around the globe and we don’t appreciate it and we don’t let it expand. The products we design and create are the results of our obsession and passion and handwork and when you are walking into a mall in Korea and you see a shoe that looks like yours but maybe has an extra stripe on it, I don’t think that’s something that anybody feels good about. What I will say though, is that I think the idea of sharing and being open for co-creation, that’s a different story. And I think that imitation is flattery and I am happy to see that part of it.
At the same time, designers in general are… I don’t mean it negatively, but we tend to be copycats. We see something that we love and it influences us. It’s a natural part of the creation process. So if there are things that look and feel similar, I don’t see that as any kind of threat. That’s the driving creative culture, driving the aesthetic of the industry forward and I think that’s a normal part of it.
Anna Winston: What’s the next step for sportswear, beyond the current wave of wearable tech?
Paul Gaudio: Obviously I can’t pull back the curtains all the way, but we see big changes coming, and I don’t mean flying shoes.
The industry is poised for a big change in how we create and how we build products and distribute products, and we are excited about our place in that. Right now, the space is very narrow. With apparel, it’s clothing, it’s stuff that you stitch and sew. The innovations are not always within the actual product, they are around the product. You will definitely see more innovations around what products are made of, how they get made, why they get made.
We are not stopping, we are not taking our foot off the gas. We are very excited about what we can bring next.
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Adidas global creative director appeared first on Dezeen.
Speaking at an Instagram event in London yesterday, photographer Adrienne Pitts, Instagram creative strategist Alistair Cotterill and Jade Harwood of knitwear brand Wool and the Gang shared their tips for using the platform, offering advice for brands and creatives on hashtags, comments and content…
In a discussion chaired by CR’s Patrick Burgoyne, Pitts, a lifestyle and travel photographer based in London with over 83,000 followers, said she uses the site as a visual diary, taking images every day and creating hashtags to curate libraries of her photos which are inspired by a particular place or theme.
Image via @hellopoe (Adrienne Pitts) on Instagram
On whether she has ever been wary of sharing so much of her work online, Pitts said: “I’m happy to share it, I get so much inspiration from what I see and I’ve learned so much from other photographers using the site [for example, how to create a certain effect or take a particular type of shot]. There’s nothing wrong with sharing your knowledge and getting your voice out there,” she added.
While she has been contacted for commercial work on the basis of her Instagram posts, Pitts said her account is “intensely personal” and very different from her commercial portfolio, but that her Instagram images “still fit with my [professional] aesthetic and style.”
Images via @woolandthegang on Instagram
Harwood, who co-founded Wool and the Gang with designer Aurelie Popper and model Elisabeth Sabrier, said the brand’s Instagram photos are taken by an in-house photographer and often tagged with the hashtag ‘share your knits’, which is printed on its packaging (Instagram photos are also featured on the brand’s website, and are being built in to product pages). Wool and the Gang uses its account to start conversations with customers, encouraging them to share knitting tips and photographs of their purchases, said Harwood, and regularly posts images of new products and materials.
Images via @woolandthegang on Instagram
“[When we started Wool and the Gang] we wanted to make knitting feel sexy and cool, and as a visual platform, Instagram was perfect for that. We try to share pictures that we call ‘knit porn’, that make people want to touch our product,” she said, adding: “We always try to have a balance between selling the product and using humour [for example, through pictures of kittens and alpacas], and behind the scenes pictures – people want to see the real people behind your brand.”
Discussing their use of hashtags, Pitts said she will encourage brands to use just one hashtag and one ‘mention’, adding that “audiences know when they are being bombarded” and will “respect your content more” if it is carefully curated. Cotterill agreed, adding that users should only add hashtags that are relevant, rather than simply using multiple ones “for the sake of it.”
Harwood and Pitts also recommended keeping comments on posts “short and sweet”. Cotterill agreed, but said it can depend on the content – “there are no set rules…Humans of New York does some great posts, sometimes with very short comments and sometimes longer ones…it really depends on whether you are adding something [with a longer comment],” he explained.
Image via @hellopoe (Adrienne Pitts) on Instagram
With Instagram still a relatively new platform (founded in 2010), Cotterill said it was very much trial and error and that brands should experiment with their content. The company only launched ads late last year – a risky move after four years without them – but has been working with a handful of brands to test the new feature, and said Cadburys, Film4 and John Lewis had all seen significant results so far.
“I think Instagram can work for any brand – but its about working out who you want to be, establishing a visual voice and making sure you are adding to people’s experience of the platform,” he said. Citing brands who are using it in creative or surprising ways, Cotterill said Hermes was doing great work with video, while Philips has built a strong following by posting photographs that explore the role light plays in people’s lives. “It’s about standing out by fitting in,” said Cotterill, recommending that brands create bespoke content for the site wherever possible, rather than simply repurposing existing imagery.
Philips’ Instagram page
Speakers also recommended a fairly restrained approach to posting – Wool and the Gang posts three to five times a day, said Harwood, but Pitts said that for some users, once a week will suffice. Cotterill recommended a ‘less is more’ approach, adding: “wait until you’ve got something to say and say it well.”
John Lewis’ Instagram page. The retailer has recently been using Ads on Instagram
Despite Instagram’s recommendation that users only share photographs shot on phones, Harwood, Cotterill and Pitts admitted that this was often not the case – and that it was no bad thing. “For a lot of people, this is their biggest audience, so you should share your best work,” said Pitts, while Cotterrill said he was starting to see audiences posting stop-motion animations and illustration as well as mobile photography.
The discussion was followed by a Q&A with designer Paul Smith, who discussed creativity and his love of music and photography, as well as his use of Instagram (Smith has almost 200,000 followers and regularly posts pictures using the hashtag ‘takenbyPaul’. He has also made scarves featuring some of his Instagram pictures). An edited version of his interview and the panel discussion will be published online later this month.
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