Hasta La Ideas

With a background in building airplanes, boats and even custom furniture, Max Hazan has an endless list of references to pull inspiration and ideas from. Through this varied experience Hazan has found motorcycles to be his…

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A bandage pack containing a bone marrow donor registry kit has won a White Pencil at the D&AD Awards (+ movie).

Help! I’ve Cut Myself and I Want to Save a Life kits, which can be bought over the counter, contain plasters and bandages for covering small cuts, as well as cotton swabs. A small amount of blood from a cut can be caught on a swab and posted to a marrow donor registry in a pre-paid envelope, which also comes in the simple green and white package.

Graham Douglas, a member of creative agency Droga5, came up with the idea after his twin brother was diagnosed with Leukaemia and an unknown bone marrow donor saved his life.

“Unfortunately, the marrow donor registry is one of the most underrepresented donor programs in the world,” says Douglas. “It’s no wonder really – most people think registering as a marrow donor is painful and complicated, when really all it takes is a couple of drops of blood.”

Douglas’ idea aims to catch potential donors when they are already bleeding, and give them all the necessary components to send their sample to a donor registry easily.

He set up the scheme with pharmaceutical company Help Remedies and international marrow donor registry DKMS, and registrants have tripled as a result.

Help Remedies create colour-coded medicine packets named after symptoms rather than ingredients, for example paracetamol labelled Help! I’ve Got a Headache.

The annual D&AD Awards honour exemplary design and advertising projects. One White Pencil is awarded each year to reward creativity for social good.

Other winning projects at this year’s D&AD Awards, which took place earlier this week, include Thomas Heatherwick’s Olympic Cauldron, BarberOsgerby’s Olympic Torch and the new UK Government website.

Last year, Apple was named best design studio of the pasty fifty years at a special ceremony commemoration the awards’ 5oth anniversary, while D&AD president Neville Brody described plans to remove creative subjects from the school curriculum in the UK as “insanity”.

More medical design we’ve featured includes Christmas stockings filled with blood for donation and a range of pill containers by Yves Behar.

See more design for health »
See more stories about D&AD »

The post Help! I Want to Save a Life by Graham Douglas
for Help Remedies and DKMS appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen and MINI World Tour: in our first movie from the German capital, DMY Berlin founder Joerg Suermann shows us around his favourite neighbourhood of Kreuzberg and tells us why he believes the relaxed atmosphere and low cost of living that attracts many designers to the city can also trap them there. 

“Berlin is a never-finished city. The living cost is not so high here, which means the people have time to think and time to make experiments,” says Suermann. “This is quite a comfortable situation for the designers.”

“But we have also problems,” he continues. “We have not so much industry in Berlin, we have not so many companies that need design. But we have a lot of creative people and so the competition is really hard here.”

Suermann moved to the city in 1993, three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which had divided the city for nearly 30 years. Ten year’s later, in 2003, he founded DMY International Design Festival Berlin.

He says the lifestyle of Berliners has only recently started to change. “I think now, after 20 years [living in Berlin], it’s changed a bit. Now the money is also coming to Berlin, we can feel it. The rent is going much more expensive. But it has also a positive side: for the designers they get more contracts here, they have more work.”

However, there are still many areas of the city where the cost of living is still low compared to other cities, Suermann says. One such example is Kreuzberg, the central Berlin neighbourhood where he lives and works, which was formerly bordered by the Berlin Wall. “Nobody wanted to live in Kreuzberg, so a lot of foreigners moved here because the rent was really, really cheap,” he says.

“Now a lot of creative people also come into this area [and] the mix is really interesting. It’s quite lazy – it’s really nice that you can have this easy neighbourhood so near to the centre [of the city].”

“We have a lot of galleries here, studios, clubs, bars, cafes,” Suermann continues, pointing out SO36, one of the first German punk clubs to emerge in the 1970s, as well as Burgermeister, a burger restaurant located under a railway bridge in a former public toilet.

“You can start on Friday evening with your party and then continue until Monday morning,” he says. “For Berlin it’s typical; there are a lot of people going out after breakfast.”

But Suermann sounds a note of caution to those young designers expecting an easy ride once they arrive in the city. “A lot of young people come to Berlin and they think, ‘okay, I’m now in the hotspot and I [will] get successful here.”’ he says. “But after a while they find out it’s a really hard fight here.”

“If you don’t go outside [of Berlin] you will [get] stuck here. You can have a nice life here, but you have a low income and you’re stuck. And then it’s really complicated to come out of this situation.”

“Most of the successful designers have their studios here, they live here, but they’re working with companies outside from Berlin. I think that’s really important.”

We’ll be posting more Dezeen and MINI World Tour reports from Berlin over the coming days.

We drove around Berlin in our MINI Cooper S Paceman.

The music featured in the movie is a track called Reso Dream by Simplex. You can listen to the full version on Dezeen Music Project.

The post “It’s easy for young designers
to get stuck in Berlin” appeared first on Dezeen.

New York designer Joe Doucet created this mirror that makes the viewed look as if they’re immersed in water as a tribute to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

The blue lower half of the circular mirror refracts the light slightly compared to the total reflection of the top, so a small portion of the visage appears in both. The effect is similar to looking through a glass tank that’s half-full of water.

Joe Doucet‘s studio is located in Lower Manhattan, one of the areas worst affected by the storm, and he designed the piece to be a daily reminder of the natural disaster.

“The mirror came about by my thinking that it had been less than six months since Sandy and I almost never thought about it,” he says. “I was struck by how quickly we forget tragedy.”

Named after the unit of measurement for water depth, the one-off Fathom Mirror was created for an exhibition and auctioned off with work by other New York designers to raise money for disaster relief.

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, photographer Iwan Baan captured images of Manhattan’s dark, flooded streets.

Our selection of stories about reflective designs includes a series of hinged brass mirrors that look like butterflies and a mirror with blurry edges that reflects a dreamy image of its surroundings.

See more mirror design »

The post Fathom Mirror
by Joe Doucet appeared first on Dezeen.

Focus sur le travail du designer graphique estonien Anton Burmistrov qui a réalisé 3 posters pour « Sputnik Event » qui n’est pas sans rappeler le style de l’artiste israélien Noma Bar. Dans cette série, il propose une double lecture de ses créations, dissimulant une image dans l’image avec beaucoup de poésie.