Hasta La Ideas

Made in the US by family-owned Nordic Ware, and exclusive to Williams Sonoma, this charming cast aluminum cake pan (with a golden finish) yields honeycomb-shaped sweets with sharable, pull-apart sections. Its premium nonstick interior makes release and clean-up easy, too.

A subway car-style corridor, worn concrete walls and metal railings feature inside this Shanghai clothing shop, which Sò Studio has designed to emulate New York.

Canal St offers a selection of high-end streetwear and was designed by locally-based Sò Studio to “bring the downtown New York lifestyle to Shanghai”.

The studio believes the two major cities have much in common, despite their disparate locations.

“In New York, you see the coexistence of elements made hundreds of years ago during the industrial age with cutting-edge art, fashion and pop culture,” said Sò Studio.

“Shanghai’s unique ethos is built upon Chinese traditional culture as well as nearly a century of concession,” added the designers. “There is the constant tension that everything new here has also been polished and precipitated by time.”

The New York theme is also suits the store’s name – Canal Street is a major road that runs from east to west of lower Manhattan.

A staircase was removed from the centre of the store’s floor plan to create a short walkway that resembles a New York subway car.

Two plastic, orange-hued seats have been placed up against one wall.

Overhead dangles a series of metal rings, mimicking the handles that standing subway passengers typically hold onto during journeys.

An illuminated yellow sign – akin to what would usually delineate the destination at the front of a train – has been used to point out the shop’s changing rooms. The doorways are partially covered by silver metal shutters.

Other industrial touches throughout the two-floor store include steel clothes rails, exposed bolts in structural columns and wire mesh partitions.

The illuminated countertops of several display plinths have also been covered with sheets of gridded metal to mimic a manhole – covered openings dotted around New York that allow access to underground sewers.

Surfaces throughout Canal St were initially meant to be freshened up with a coat of paint.

However, after completely stripping back the previous fit-out, the studio felt that existing dilapidated concrete walls better reflected New York’s dichotomy of old and new.

“We typically try hard to create a narrative in a space, but this building could tell it itself instead,” the studio explained.

“We surprisingly figured that a hybrid structure with the mark of time turned out to be like a good narrator who attempted to tell us stories in its own way,” it continued.

“We thus decided to reserve [the shop’s] original structure and walls, as we believed that when these old marks met with fresh design, it would produce a stimulating spatial experience.”

Splashes of colour are provided by a green glass box that’s been erected beside the new staircase, and a couple of boxy green display stands that present products.

Sò Studio was established in 2016 by Jessica Wu and Mengjie Liu.

It’s Canal St project joins a number of trendy boutiques in Shanghai – others include Assemble by Reél, which is designed to reflect an urban cityscape, and Neri&Hu’s Comme Moi, which boasts cage-like display cabinets.

Photography is by Yuhao Ding, Elbe, Yufei Li and Mengjie Liu.

Project credits:

Design team: Sò Studio
Design director: Yifan Wu, Mengjie Liu
Space design: Yufei Li, Fei Wang
Image Production: MUYI Concept + Production

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Cadbury is one of those brands that has managed to remain instantly recognisable over the years – from its regal purple brand colour, which dates back to the company’s origins in the 1800s, to the longstanding Glass and a Half logo seen on the Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate bar.

In its newly unveiled brand identity, the company attempts to tread the fine line between heritage and modernity, retaining its signature purple hue but introducing a redrawn wordmark, new iconography and a fresh approach to typography.

Created by design agency Bulletproof, the refreshed Cadbury wordmark is a contemporary take on the signature of the company’s founder, John Cadbury.

Meanwhile, the agency reimagined the Dairy Milk Glass and a Half logo so that it links directly with the brand’s chocolate chunk symbol, and developed a new pattern for the chocolate based on its original packaging from 1905.

Nick Rees, global creative director at Bulletproof, says: “We wanted to recapture the very spirit of Cadbury, so part of the research process involved digging into the Cadbury archives to reinterpret its iconic visual cues to create a modern and playful identity that still has a clear recognition for consumers.”

Much like Cadbury’s recent purpose-driven approach to advertising – which has proven somewhat divisive – the brand is also shining a light on its eco-friendly credentials with the new packaging, which highlights the work it does in its Cocoa Life sustainability programme.

The new brand identity is kicking off in Australia in May, followed by South Africa and Malaysia later in the year, and will be rolled out to other markets including the UK and Ireland at the beginning of 2021.

wearebulletproof.com

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Director, animator and story artist Alex Bernas’ latest film, Sex Moves, sets out to be an antidote to pornography and the unrealistic portrayals of sex we’re often subjected to. Inspiration for the film came after Bernas read a recent study that reported how more and more UK teenagers are watching porn to ‘learn what to do’, which troubled the creative.

“I’m sure we can agree that the sex portrayed in these films is unrepresentative and, at its worst, is aggressive and unnatural,” says Bernas. “Unlike the act itself, these films lack any semblance of humour or awkwardness. I wanted to add a bit of goofiness into the visual language; my film is about the sex but subverts the tropes of porn.” 

Navigating through a bright, multicoloured world, the film starts with the narrator asking strangers how to have sex. It leads to a cast of eclectic (and randy) characters acting out how they like to do the deed as a flurry of romps and innuendos ensue. 

The aesthetic is typical of Bernas’ fondness for bold colours and striking design, and here he borrows from a pop art colour palette with simple character designs made up of basic but malleable shapes. “This means that the characters are uncomplicated and easily identifiable despite the brevity of their scenes,” explains the director. “Keith Haring was a big inspiration for the colours used and for the use of clear, black linework to delineate the characters.”

As well as Haring, Bernas’ work in general is influenced by the many cartoons he watched in the 90s such as Hey Arnold, Ed, Edd and Eddy and The Simpsons. “As a habitual doodler I’m always drawing goofy faces with exaggerated expressions, and I reckon you can see the artefacts of my childhood obsession in my films,” he says.

Bernas gave himself a month to make Sex Moves, spending about a week designing and boarding it out, and then working with a small team over two weeks on the animation. “Giving myself a time limit forced me to make quick decisions, which made the whole process more intuitive than deliberated,” he explains. “Once I’d landed on the film’s concept, I had the framework to speedily make any creative decisions.”

For the sex moves themselves, Alex first took to miming in front of the mirror to work out “suitably evocative (but clean) movements” and then moved on to watching a lot of Marcel Marceau and interpretive dance videos on YouTube for further inspiration. “I didn’t want the sex moves themselves to be smutty, so porn wasn’t a viable source of inspiration,” he says, and it’s why the film is crammed with so many suggestive and saucy gesticulations.

Of course with this suggestiveness, the biggest challenge for Bernas and his team was to keep an air of innocence and avoid it being too seedy. “A big part of that was keeping all the sex moves opaque and open to interpretation,” explains the director. “The characters had to keep their clothes on and couldn’t actually perform any graphic sex acts, instead using visual double entendres and sound effects to convey what they were miming.… The animators focused on exaggerating the characters’ movements and emotions to heighten the sense of fun and create something cartoonishly positive.”

A big part of the film’s charm is the music and sound design, which saw Bernas work with frequent collaborators, composer Lindsay Wright and sound designer Sashko Potter Micevski. Bernas was keen to avoid the onomatopoeic ‘bow chicka wow wow’ type sleazy porn groove and instead settled on something more melodious and cheerful. “We wanted it to carry the action forward, reacting to the increasingly bizarre pantomimes on screen before its eventual climax,” says Bernas. “The sound design was tricky, it had to be visceral but not too gross. Sashko recorded a whole host of different squelches and fleshy thuds and slaps, and we balanced these with natural, diegetic sound. The happy music and disgusting sound effects compliment each other nicely, making sure the film is never repulsive.”

Represented by Partizan, London and LA-based Bernas has worked with big brands including Nike, Apple, Amazon and Google. Sex Moves is just as polished as his commercial projects, and provides a welcome dose of fun and weirdness during these uncertain times. “I’ve been stuck in my apartment for three weeks now, I’m going bananas,” says the animator. “Goodness knows I could use a laugh.” His hopes for the film are simply to make the audience chuckle, but also to open up the conversation around sex and to embrace the more funny, awkward and squelchy moments that happen during it. 

vimeo.com/alexbernas

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Dezeen promotion: architects and designers working across Europe are invited to submit their hospitality projects to the 2020 edition of the AHEAD Europe awards.

Carried out across four different regions – the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Middle East and Africa (MEA) – the AHEAD awards celebrates stand-out hospitality projects from across the world.

The AHEAD Europe 2020 competition will specifically look at projects that have opened, reopened or launched in the region between June 2019 and May of this year.

Entries are arranged into 14 different categories: Bar, Club or Lounge; Event Spaces; Guestroom; Hotel Conversion; Hotel Newbuild; Hotel Renovation & Restoration; Landscaping & Outdoor Spaces; Lobby & Public Spaces; Lodges, Cabins & Tented Camps; Resort; Restaurant; Spa & Wellness; Suite and Transport.

Awards for Visual Identity, New Concept and the prestigious Hotel of the Year title are also up for grabs.

Each project is then carefully evaluated by an expert panel of architects, designers, developers and leading commentators from the hospitality industry.

Judges last year included Patricia Holler, senior interior design director of Marriott International, Stefan Rier, co-founder of architecture studio NOA and Catherine Martin, managing editor of Sleeper magazine.

The 2019 edition of AHEAD Europe saw Palazzo Daniele take home the Hotel of the Year award. Composed of just nine guest suites, the boutique hotel takes over a 158-year-old aristocratic home in Puglia, Italy.

Members of the judging panel were wowed by the building’s carefully-preserved historic fabric and intimate atmosphere, claiming that once guests enter the hotel they feel as if they’re in “a new world”.

Dezeen also produced a short film about the hotel, in which architect Roberto Palomba talked through the painstaking process of restoring several of the hotel’s original frescoes.

Other major winners from AHEAD Europe 2019 include Heckfield Place in Hampshire, England, which occupies an 18th-century residence. It came first in the Hotel Renovation & Restoration category, commended by judges for having a sense of “maturity that’s really quite elegant”.

The Resort category was won by The Retreat at Blue Lagoon Iceland, which is nestled amongst geothermal pools, while the winner of the Spa & Wellness category was Euphoria Retreat – a hotel carved out of a mountain in Mystras, Greece.

Interested applicants have until 29 May 2020 to submit their projects, which can be done online via the AHEAD website. Winners of AHEAD Europe 2020 will be announced in a ceremony at Exhibition London on 18 November.

Champions from all four regions will go on to compete at the AHEAD global biennale that’s set for 2021, where worldwide titles can be won.

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