Hasta La Ideas

Our latest pick of new illustration includes an animated campaign for Prada sunglasses, some large-scale murals for Fuller’s beer, a beautifully illustrated book about monkeys by Owen Davey and a new edition of Toni Morrison’s Beloved novel from The Folio Society.

Prada Raw Avenue

Judith Van Den Hoek (above) and Wong Ping (top)

Production company Acne partnered with The Mill and Milan creative agency April to create Prada Raw Avenue, a charming animated digital campaign for Prada to promote the brand’s new range of sunglasses.

Six illustrators (Carly Kuhn, Megan Hess, Blair Breitenstein, Judith Van Den Hoek, Wong Ping and Vilda Vega) were asked to create a series of scenes featuring Prada eyewear and clothing, with illustrations then made into short flip book-style animations.

The resulting films were posted on Instagram and the Prada Raw website, and feature a lovely mix of hand painted and digital artwork, from Ping’s bright and surreal designs to Kuhn’s more traditional pen and ink drawings.

Vilda Vega

Blair Breitenstein

Megan Hess

Vilda Vega

Owen Davey – Mad About Monkeys

Owen Davey‘s latest book, Mad About Monkeys, is a beautifully illustrated compendium of facts about the world’s 250 species of monkey, from pygmy marmosets to Japanese macaques. The book contains information about various species’ behaviour, traits and habitats alongside some striking geometric artwork, and Davey’s cheerful illustrations perfectly capture’s the animal’s inquisitive personality.

Davey says the idea for the book came about after discussing new projects with publisher Nobrow, and later drawing a gelada monkey. “I had actually done a non-fiction book about monkeys and apes during my uni degree at Falmouth, so it seemed like a perfect fit,” he says.

The book took around a year to produce, including six months to write and illustrate it, says Davey. “Writing a non-fiction book is a very labour intensive task. You can’t make anything up. The research has to be truly solid.”

For visual research, Davey studied photographs, films and footage found on the internet, but says his monkeys are a stylised interpretation of the species they’re based on, rather than anatomically accurate depictions. “There are a couple of illustrations in the book which are to scale, so that meant that I had to get the sizes right and measured out correctly, but I tried not to get too bogged down in minute accuracy,” he says.

“The illustrations are obviously stylised,” he adds. “If a monkey’s body had a vaguely circular element to it, I would make it completely circular. I would try to simplify angles and curves into more geometric alternatives. It was very much a case of me doing little character studies with each one I drew. I wasn’t trying to completely replicate what the monkeys look like…I wanted there to be a sense of fun that reflects the humour often invoked by our primate pals.”

Davey describes the project as “a dream book to illustrate” and says he has long been fascinated by the animal. “If you read the book, you’ll quickly see why I find monkeys so fascinating – they are incredibly clever, wonderfully resourceful and undoubtedly human in many ways, which all help to tap into human curiosity,” he says. “There is so much variety within them as a species, from sizes and shapes to colours and habitats.”

Mad About Monkeys is published by Nobrow and costs £12.99. You can order a copy here.

Tal Brosh – Phytology

Bethnal Green Nature Reserve was once part of an idyllic 47 acre meadow in East London. Much of this green space was lost when the area was built on in the 19th century, and heavily bombed in World War Two, but since the 1990s, local residents have been working to transform the neglected patch of land into a peaceful medicinal field.

The Phytology field now contains over 30 species of plants which are believed to have health benefits, from St John’s Wort to wild garlic and burdock. The site is open to the public each Saturday, and visitors are welcome to harvest plants and take them home.

To commemorate the area’s history, the Phytology team installed a billboard in the space, and have been commissioning a series of illustrators to create artworks documenting its past. Over the past four months, illustrator and designer Tal Brosh has painted four images on the billboard. Each represents a different incarnation of the field, from a medieval meadow to a war torn bomb site, and each painting is layered over the previous. Brosh’s work will be on show until July 4, and is also documented on the Phytology website.

Jean Jullien – Petit Appetit

Petit Appetit is a new exhibition of food-themed prints and sculptures by Jean Jullien, on show at Colette Paris until July 18. Created with food magazine Frictose, the exhibition includes some brilliantly witty artworks poking gentle fun at our relationship with food and drink, and the way we consume it.

Jullien has also designed a chair with furniture brand Olow for the exhibition, as well as a giant sculpture (shown below) with design collective Abois, and a range of chocolates, lollipops and ice-cream:

Tom Cole – Fuller’s Frontier

Images via tomclohosycole.co.uk

Illustrator Tom Cole has created an eye-catching series of large-scale murals around East London to promote Frontier, a new craft lager for local brewery Fuller’s.

The artwork is refreshingly free of the usual cliches found in summery booze ads, relying instead on some creative interpretations of the word flavour alongside some bold illustrations of the beer itself. Murals are installed on Great Eastern Street and Village Underground, and Cole’s illustrations are also running on billboards and print ads.

Folio Society – Beloved

The Folio Society has released an illustrated edition of Toni Morrison’s harrowing novel, Beloved, which features some poignant artwork by Joe Morse.

The book is inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, an African-American woman who escaped slavery in Kentucky in the 1850s and fled to Ohio, but was pursued across state borders by slave owners. The story isn’t presented in chronological order, but told through a mix of poems, flashbacks, nightmares and memories. It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1988, and was later made into a film starring Oprah Winfrey.

Morse’s illustrations for the text are inspired by 19th century African-American tintype photographs, which he came across on an online auction site when researching imagery for the project. “The images were so vivid, and the subjects so alive that I spent days just building characters, drawing dresses and hands,” he says. Artwork features shades of indigo (which Morse often uses as a base colour) throughout, and were created in watercolour then coloured in digitally. “I wanted an atmospheric feel in these images that captured a sense of depth and space,” he explains.

Illustrations by Joe Morse from The Folio Society edition of Beloved © Joe Morse2015

Before being commissioned to illustrate the book, Morse was asked to submit a trial artwork for Morrison’s approval, based on a scene from the first 30 pages of the text. “I had to submit a rough and the excerpt from the book, [so] I just went ahead and painted the image as I felt that would be the best way to get my idea across, which I of course second-guessed, and did a new image as a linear rough that was much more graphic and submitted that.

“Art Director Sheri Gee then emailed me back and suggested seeing more of the characters and giving us more of the relationship … she basically was describing the painting I had first executed. I sent my original piece in and 2 weeks later, Toni Morrison approved me to do the book. Now the brief began, and the emphasis was to be on ‘the novel’s rich imagery and ambiguity and to reflect [its] more gothic and supernatural elements,” he says.

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Illustration by Joe Morse from The Folio Society edition of Beloved © Joe Morse2015

Illustrating a text that addresses such difficult subject matter (the book deals with death, rape and brutality as well as oppression and racism), and one that isn’t presented in a linear format, is a challenging task. Morse says he was keen to produce images which were relevant to the novel, and would provide another way into Morrison’s text, rather than acting as page decoration. “They needed a logic and reason to be there,” he says.

“In a book that is so rich in visual images it is easy to get lost in the abundance of material to draw from. I wrote a list at first of scenes to work from and it became ridiculously long and useless,” he adds. “I then looked at how Toni Morrison used memory or how Sethe (the novel’s protagonist) described rememory – memories that never die, a past you can’t escape. The idea of connecting images across characters and linking the past with the present informed my choices. I focused on precipitating events, moments in the book that change the characters,” he adds.

Illustration by Joe Morse from The Folio Society edition of Beloved © Joe Morse2015

The title is the latest in a series of Folio Society editions featuring some beautiful and imaginative artwork, from Ben Jones’ beautiful work for A Clockwork Orange to Tatsuro Kiuchi’s illustrations for Day of the Jackyll. Styles range from painterly to graphic and abstract, spaning a range of mediums. Gee says she looks for artists who demonstrate “great draughtsmanship, usually coupled with noticeable mark-making or texture.”

“I like traces of tradional media in the work I commission, though that doesn’t work for everything obviously. Alongside strong draughtsmanship, being able to draw or paint a convincing narrative scene, with equally convincing characters, is quite a skill, which goes beyond just observational sketching. It’s about being able to add character, tension, mood etc to a scene, which is so important for our commissions, regardless of medium or style,” she adds.

Beloved is out now and costs £39.95. You can order copies at foliosociety.com

Judging the Cannes Lions Promo & Activation category. Image: Cannes Lions

Too small? Too big? Too soon? It wouldn’t be Cannes if there wasn’t some controversy over what won. But this year feels different. This year’s festival and the work that won has prompted some more fundamental head-scratching about the ad industry and where it is headed.

There are two separate but related themes here. The first, as flagged up by both Dave Trott and Jeff Goodby ahead of the festival, is that the where once advertising was part of mainstream culture, something that everyone saw and talked about, now the work that wins is often small-scale and inward-looking.

In a widely shared interview with Adweek, Dave Trott complained that “Ad festivals prevent creativity. You’re not doing advertising for six million people in the street anymore, but for ten people on the jury, and for a few clients.”

This view was echoed by Jeff Goodby in a piece for the Wall Street Journal. “It used to be that the business was about doing things that were big and famous and mind-blowing. Everybody knew about them…. No one knows what we do any more. For the most part, we are famous from only one end of the Croisette to the other.”

Related to this is the nature of the work that it is winning. In a piece for The Guardian, Tom Goodwin of Havas Media argued that Cannes and other awards “celebrate the worst of an industry that’s in love with technology and itself, not the people it purports to sell to”.

Prior to that, he says “I’ve never met anyone who has seen a vending machine reward them for laughing, I’ve never walked through a door marked ugly, got a Coke from a drone, or been offered a crisp packet with my face on. I’ve never had a friend share their personalised film, I’ve not seen outdoor ads that are also street furniture or had an ATM give me a funny receipt. I’ve not received a magazine with a near field communication thing and I’ve not had a virtual reality experience outside advertising conferences. I’ve not once seen a member of the public 3D print anything. The one thing that binds together the more than 200 Cannes winners I’ve seen, is that they are ads only advertising people have a good chance of seeing. I’m not sure that’s what the industry should be about.”

Two winners in particular this year have caused concern, though they are symptomatic of the wider issues Goodwin raises. In typically robust style, TBWAMedia Arts Lab CD Ben Kay claimed that “at least three Grands Prix awarded to work of utter, steaming bullshit: two for the Volvo Paint excretion and one for the Iron Fish mendacity“.

On LifePaint, he says: “They played the game and won. And that’s all this is: a game. For every Epic Split or [iPhone] World Gallery … there’s a scamtastic, industry-cheapening cack heap to create a big gain for the people involved but another step back for the credibility of advertising as a whole.”

Let’s look at the “it’s the pictures that got small” argument first. Yes, there are a lot of vending machine/drone/QR-code ‘bullshit’ projects round that generate lots of noise within the industry. They are very shareable, very tweetable and are made hugely seductive by the artfully deceptive case study videos that accompany them.

But hang on, this is also the industry that had the whole country talking about a penguin called Monty – a commercial that generated as much press coverage as a Hollywood movie. And what about Sainsbury’s Christmas 1914 spot? It prompted an entire episode of Radio 4’s Moral Maze plus countless think pieces and media debates. Not to mention the 58 millions views and counting that Always’ Like A Girl has picked up on YouTube, or the phenomenal viral success of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which was impossible for anyone on social media to avoid. So don’t tell me that advertising has disappeared from popular culture.

Advertising is still capable of big, popular work that the woman or man in the street will talk about. But it’s also an industry that loves novelty and, in Twitter, has the perfect platform to unthinkingly disseminate those ideas. The drone/vending machine-type stunts thus make a lot of noise, very quickly. But does anyone subject them to closer inspection than a passing ‘Huh! That’s clever’? Do they have any impact at all in the ‘real’ world?

And here’s the problem when it comes to creative awards – a lack of any meaningful scrutiny by organisers or juries, particularly for projects that make grand claims to be changing the world or saving lives, and are honoured on the basis that they have done or will do so.

Awards juries, used to evaluating craft skills or concepts, are not given the tools to make that judgement – locked in a room for days, a well-made (often partial) case study can prove compelling, seductive and difficult to challenge.

Matt Eastwood, worldwide CCO of JWT, and Promo and Activation jury president, described LifePaint as a product that had made a “‘positive contribution to humanity” and will “genuinely save lives”. Really?

It may achieve those aims in time, but so far it has only been available in limited quantities at six shops in London and Kent. Even though Grey does state that, following interest in the campaign, it will roll out further, it’s surely too early to make such grand statements.

Previously, the responsibility to actually achieve something tangible was the realm of effectiveness awards, but these projects are different. Any evaluation of them surely has to include some assessment of whether they have been designed in such a manner that they will deliver on their promises? Current judging mechanisms really don’t allow for that.

And nor are judges from ad agencies necessarily interested. At D&AD this year I had a conversation with someone who had been on the jury for Colgate-Palmolive’s ‘turning packaging into advertising’ project. The idea was to print public health messages inside cartons distributed to small shops. Those cartons, supposedly, once emptied would be passed on to local schools who would put the posters that were printed inside up on their classroom walls as teaching aids, which were backed by lesson plans accessible via mobile phone.

Turning Packaging Into Education from Young & Rubicam Group on Vimeo.

Someone else on our group who was familiar with the country concerned suggested that retailers there tend to save cardboard boxes and use them for storage in their shops, so she thought it highly unlikely that many of these clever and beautiful posters would ever make it to schools. The case study video makes no mention of how the boxes get from retailer to school, nor of how many have been produced. The CD had obviously not considered any of this – he said it wasn’t his concern. It was a ‘great’ idea, that’s all that matters – but is it a great idea if nothing meaningful comes of it?

Perhaps the answer is to alter the time frame over which such projects are judged. That way, some proper scrutiny of their impact could come in.

Another part of the problem this year was the ever-expanding list of winners – 22 Grand Prix awards were handed out – and a lack of any one runaway success, which has meant that projects such as Like A Girl and LifePaint have been awarded on the same footing, despite the disparity in their reach. It has resulted in a sprawling list of winners with more attention paid to the controversial cases than the accepted ‘best work of the year’. To remedy this, perhaps, as Archibald/Williams Sydney ECD Matt Gilmour suggests in a recent column in Little Black Book, it is time to introduce one overall winner at Cannes, a Palme d’Or of advertising if you like. That way, one piece of work could shine above the rest and represent the ad industry to the wider world. Although, if it did happen, we’d no doubt all row about the winner of that too.

Apple’s World Gallery iPhone 6 campaign, which won a Grand Prix at Cannes, is part of a wider strategy to shift the brand towards luxury – a new kind of luxury, writes Artomatic’s Tim Milne

A couple of months ago on CR, Paul Belford wrote in praise of Apple’s Shot On iPhone 6 campaign, which scooped the Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes for its long time agency partner TBWAMedia Arts Lab. Such is the way with awards that this might not have been the most innovative campaign, but since Apple is to advertising what Five Guys is to burgers – do something conventional (posters and TV; focus on the product and its benefits), but do it very well – the Cannes jury probably felt it was their best shot at covering their favourite brand in glory.

Though this was a campaign for (the camera on) the iPhone 6, it reveals a subtle change of direction as Apple tries to find new ways to keep up the momentum of continuous expansion (and keep Wall Street happy). This is a shift towards luxury and at its heart is the Apple Watch.

Making the brand more luxurious helps to sell watches, but selling watches also makes the brand appear more luxurious. However, this is a new kind of luxury, a luxury that’s not based on exclusivity and privilege.

Apple has to do luxury differently. Exclusivity means making less of something and Apple needs to make millions of things, so it has to cultivate a bigger collective aspiration to make this work. And it’s not alone in trying this: Starbucks told America that $4.00 a day on a fancy coffee was an affordable act of self-indulgence; Audi have cars for every conceivable niche and budget, so nobody need leave their showrooms empty-handed and Nike makes people believe they’ll all perform better in a $300 piece of sportswear. All of these brands are creating a new kind of collective and inclusive aspiration that tugs hard at emotional motivations to self-nurture because everyone else is.

The Shot on iPhone 6 campaign is Apple-advertising-as-usual (here’s the product and here’s what you can do with it) projecting a powerful vision. Where people appear, they’re all young. The images are rarefied and abstract with more than a nod towards art and exotic travel. This is an aspirational vision of youth culture that’s empowered and liberated – not just from clunky expensive camera equipment, but also from societal and parental constraints – to explore every wild corner of the world with just the phone in your pocket. This is youth-with-money and the freedom to roam the planet without any of the burden of mortgages and children that come later in life. It’s straight out of Conde Nast Traveller magazine – not the 18-30-holiday brochure.

The posters are free of sales messages and proliferating social media logos – Apple doesn’t do social media or digital advertising, but clearly understands its principles in the use of crowd-sourced images and a community around the iPhone 6 that owning one brings access to. We are ‘treated’ to full size imagery of an exotic location far, far away from the drab, gritty, claustrophobic urban spaces in which the posters appear. There is an implication of benign benevolence at work – the mighty Apple with all its money and power has taken over these public spaces (for our benefit) turning them into pop-up gallery spaces – art for everyone. In our message-filled world, serenity is a luxury good and Apple brings us a kind of sponsored tranquillity on our way to work.

The motivation is part technology and part consumer driven: diminishing improvements in functionality is making consumers upgrade less frequently. Apple had to come up with something new and radical…and it has – a piece of wearable technology – but in calling it a watch we accept what we do with it (put it on our wrist) without asking what it’s for, which might stop us before we got to the tills and thus limit its market (e.g. Nike’s Fuelband was for health and fitness). Watches are perhaps the most arcane of luxury goods; the language of exclusivity is abstracted beyond functionality – a fake quartz Rolex will keep better time than a real automatic one. So, Apple can piggyback on the language of luxury while enjoying some breathing space to see how people use the device.

Better equipped than Nike, Audi et al, Apple can redefine luxury on its own terms. It has the maniacal attention to detail, the clear vision and the resources to control every aspect of the customer experience and so can realise its vision without interference from uncontrollable outside influences. This is why it chooses traditional media over guerrilla stunts or daft emoticon campaigns (another big winner for CP&B / Dominos Pizza at Cannes).

Defining its own vision of accessible luxury is a manifestation of power and maturity around a simple transaction: give us your money and we’ll give you the feeling of luxury – tranquillity and freedom from garishness – and join a community that feels exclusive and privileged, but isn’t, because there’s millions of you.

Tim Milne is the founder of physical communications innovation and production service Artomatic

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Graduate shows 2015: Royal College of Art graduate YunTing Lin has created a new material from plant fibres and naturally fermented cellulose, and used it to create a storage system and speakers (+ slideshow).

Nanocellulose Fibreboard is a non-toxic, 100 per cent recyclable and 100 per cent biodegradable material made from a composite of plant fibres, such as flax, bound together using nanocellulose – a fibrous substance created by bacterial fermentation.

The two materials are mixed with water and then compress-moulded into the required shape.

“Eco-friendly material doesn’t need to be boring – it can be desirable,” explained the Taiwanese designer.

Bacteria and other microbes like yeast and algae are increasingly being used to grow materials. Designers such as Suzanne Lee have used microbes to produce types of fabric in vats of liquid, which she turned into items of clothing, while a biologist and a designer are currently developing a bacteria and yeast “micro-factory” to be used at home.

Lin created three products to demonstrate the potential of his material: an interior construction panel, a modular storage system and Bluetooth speaker.

“There are so many new sustainable materials out there, but sometimes they don’t look attractive, so I started to wonder about the possibility of having a material that could be eco-friendly, beautiful and easily accessible,” he said.

The ability to vary the density of Lin’s material enables the production of a low-density version with acoustic and thermal insulation properties, which make it suitable for interior construction.

Coloured fibres can be used to control the final hue of the interior panels, without the need to paint their surface or add additional materials. Alongside interior construction panels, furniture is one of the most common uses for fibreboard products.

Seeking to demonstrate his material’s potential to replace fibreboard, Lin designed and made a modular storage system comprising single box units jointed together with dowels that enable free rotation.

“Its sustainable production and recyclability could transform the environmental issues that current fibreboard causes,” said Lin, who studied on the RCA’s Design Products course. “Unlike MDF and chipboard, which require a laminated skin for decoration, Nanocellulose Fibreboard features a versatile pattern.”

Finally, cone-shaped compress-moulded Bluetooth speakers illustrate the material’s potential to replace moulded plastic while demonstrating its acoustic properties.

“The manufacturing process requires less energy than producing plastic, therefore I believe Nanocellulose Fibreboard could be widely used as a casing material for consumer electronic products,” said the designer.

The US consumes over 500 million square metres of MDF and particle-board every year.

Lin’s new material aims to overcome problems associated with MDF, such as a reliance on wood, the inability to recycle it, and the release of urea-formaldehyde from the resin used to bind the fibres, which has been linked with cancer.

As it uses similar manufacturing process to MDF, Nanocellulose Fibreboard could be produced in existing MDF factories with a few simple alterations to the machines, according to Lin.

The project is being presented at the RCA’s graduate show in London. Show RCA 2015, which runs until 5 July, also features a spiral staircase that straps to any tree trunk and a “power glove” that can be used to sculpt hard materials like stone and wood by hand.

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