La piccola compatta di casa Fujifilm promette bene. Si chiama X-A1, sensore da 6.3 Megapixel APS-C, scatto continuo da 5.6 fps, display da 3″, WiFi, Full HD video shooting a 30 fps. Per tutto il resto dpreview vi schiarirà ogni dubbio.
Reflektor, the highly-anticipated first track from Arcade Fire’s new album has launched online this evening with the band releasing a new interactive web experience, created in collaboration with Aaron Koblin at Google and director Vincent Morisset. We talked to Morisset about how the piece was created…
The new digital experience, which can be found online at justareflektor.com, has been created to promote the title song from the album, which is released on October 29. It invites users to interact with an online film via their mobile phones, using the phone to create an effect on the screen that is “a bit like beaming something from your hand”, as Morisset puts it.
Stills from the justareflektor.com
The work joins a back catalogue of impressive digital experiments by Arcade Fire, stretching back to 2007 when the band collaborated with Morisset to create what is widely acknowledged as the first web video, for the song Neon Bible. This was followed by some interesting digital artwork for 2010 album The Suburbs, and a second site for the band by Morisset, for the track Sprawl II, plus of course The Wilderness Downtown, an ambitious piece that became an instant success.
The Wilderness Downtown, created with Koblin and director Chris Milk, began life as a project for Google Chrome rather than Arcade Fire, and it was Milk’s connection with the band that brought them on board. This new project began in a similar fashion, with Morisset and Koblin initially coming together to create something for Google. The duo first met at the OFFF Barcelona in 2011 and immediately connected. “There was this kind of mutual respect, we promised each other that we would work together one day,” says Morisset. “Last year was good timing. We looked at ideas, they were really broad, we went in a lot of directions. We were excited about the potential of connecting devices together, we talked a lot about that. We had the idea of putting a tracker on a mobile device.”
The duo played around with gyroscope data and found this a successful way of letting the mobile create a detailed effect on screen. “We were able to create something much more complex, you have orientation, speed and also positioning.” At this stage, they began talking to Arcade Fire and found that the first single from the album was a perfect fit for their experiments. “The concept of you and something on the other side of the wall echoed the song,” continues Morisset.
The finished web experience was created by both Morisset and Koblin, with Morisset’s regular team of collaborators, which include Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit, Caroline Robert and Brandon Blommaert, also playing a key role in its creation.
It is designed to be viewed on a Google Chrome browser and is split into two halves. Across both is a film written and directed by Morisset and shot in Jacmel in Haiti with the help of a local film school, Cine Institute. It stars Axelle ‘Ebony’ Munezero, a Montreal-based dancer and choreographer. She features particularly in the first half, where the audience is invited to interact with her movements on screen using their phones. By sweeping your phone, visual and light effects appear on screen. And in a particularly clever touch, you can still make the sweeping motions appear even when the image is paused.
Halfway thorough, Munezero is shown breaking a mirror. The camera zooms in and suddenly the viewer sees their phone reflected in the glass on-screen, with their own image at the centre. The words ‘Break Free’ appear on screen, and users are encouraged to reject playing around with the interactive experience and watch the rest of the film in a more traditional fashion. To reflect this change, the content here becomes more “emotionally driven”, says Morisset.
“When she breaks the mirror, there was this idea of getting back to something more real and grounded,” he says. “We approached that part of the shoot more in a documentary style.” It happened to be Flag Day in the town so the team were blessed with some stunning footage. Morisset describes the project as “the best of both worlds”, allowing him the opportunity to experiment with the looser approach of documentary filmmaking and then combining this with truly cutting edge technology.
The team shooting in Haiti
As with all web-based experiences, a major part of the challenge for the team was to anticipate all the environments in which the piece would be encountered, and adjust the technology accordingly. “You never know the context in which people will use it,” explains Morisset. “If it’s dark, if it’s bright, what kind of computer, what kind of phone.
“We’re not just dealing with technology, we’re dealing with unique environments,” he continues. “A big part of the data is our engagement and gesture. We developed a HTML5 video player where we control real-time WebGL shader effects. We pair camera vision with the gyroscope and accelerometer data from the mobile device that we send to the computer through WebSockets. It’s by far the most complex thing I’ve ever worked on.”
Despite this advanced tech, the team were determined for the piece not to just become a technology show; instead they intend it to be first and foremost an emotional experience. “There’s been a lot of trial and error to create something that felt magical but still had a sense of something real,” says Morisset. “It could really easily go into a Photoshop filter thing, so that the demonstration of technology becomes the subject.
“For me it’s always been an obsession to combine these things, to make something rich and nuanced, so you forget the technology.”
To play with Reflektor, visit justareflektor.com. The making-of film below gives more info on how it was put together. You can play around with the technology behind the experience here.
Credits:
Written, directed and produced by Vincent Morisset
Creative Direction by Vincent Morisset and Aaron Koblin
Produced by AATOAA, Unit9, Google Creative Lab, Antler Films
Lead creative developer: Édouard Lanctôt-Benoit
Artistic direction: Caroline Robert
Visual effects: Brandon Blommaert
Google Creative Lab creative director: Aaron Koblin
Technologists: Doug Fritz, Jono Bandel, Aleksandar Rodic, Mr.doob
Producers: Sabah Kosoy, Valdean Klump
Marketing managers: Jenny Ramaswamy, Clem Wright
Unit9 Interactive producer: Amelia Roberts
Lead developer: Maciej Zasada
Developer: Fábio Azevedo
Antler Films producer: Sach Baylin-Stern
Director: Vincent Morisset
DOP: Mathieu Laverdière
Costume designer: Renata Morales
Choreography: Axelle ‘Ebony’ Munezero
Editor: Nicolas Roy
Haiti Line Production: Cine-Institute Jacmel
In addition to the Reflektor experience, Arcade Fire has also released a conventional music video, directed by Anton Corbijn. See it below:
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Cartoon from The Awesome World of Advertising
Fed up with life at the agency coalface? Sick of working all weekend and not getting any credit for it? Murat Mutlu feels your pain. His heartfelt rant sums up the frustrations of many a creative today
Over the past few months it seems like I keep having the same conversation over and over again with friends in dozens of agencies around London. It usually starts off like this: “Who do you think is the best agency is at the moment? Is anyone doing good work?”
And ends with them explaining why they are thinking of moving on. The reasons why are always the same:
“I want to work on an actual product people want to use”
“I want to build my own thing”
“I want to explore more new technology and ideas not gimmicks”
“We never do any interesting work”
“We only care about hitting targets”
“I don’t feel like I’m learning”
“We never push back and tell the client their ideas are shit”
The exodus of talent we’ve been hearing so much about at executive/director level is now filtering down to smart young digital/mobile creatives, planners and account managers. And can you blame them?
The people who generate all the ideas and work are evolving and realising that they themselves could be reaping the rewards rather than the agency. Agencies, on the other hand, are happy to keep trying to live in a world which is ceasing to exist. Clinging onto the same ideas, tools, and ways of working with CEOs who are either oblivious to the current mindset or too frightened to instigate change. It’s the perfect storm of increasing entrepreneurialism, decreasing loyalty and an industry revelling in mediocrity.
Startups are offering equal or better salaries than agencies with more perks and chances to get equity, brands are taking design and development in-house after realising they’ve been spending a fuck-load of money on sub-standard work, pure play product and design studios are quickly emerging with young and talented leaders, and of course technology is lowering the barrier to starting your own business, in both time and cost with the freelance market also booming.
Many agencies are offering whatever trend makes them seem relevant to existing and potential clients (who sadly lap this shit up). Whether that’s UX, User Centred Design, MVP, incubators or the current shiny thing – innovation labs.
While many people will shout “Well agencies aren’t about innovation or hacker-like creativity, it’s just about billable hours”, the sad truth is that whether they are or not, this is what agencies sell, not only to clients but to staff, and that’s the problem.
Promises made in job descriptions and interviews aren’t kept. You never get an agency intro that says “We pride ourselves on creating branded apps that no one wants and churning out banners that no one clicks on. We say yes to all our clients’ daft suggestions because we know it’s the easiest way to make money. Oh and you’re gonna leave here with nothing worth putting in your portfolio. Fancy joining us?”
The talent is there, as is the desire. Agencies can try to stop the bleeding and try to create places where talented people want to use their skills to build great things for clients and users, or they’ll take their passion and curiosity somewhere else.
So here’s a small but potent list of reasons why talented creatives are leaving your shitty agency. It’s a view from the ground for the agency execs and CEOs. My own thoughts and those collected from designers and creatives (and a few PMs/devs/planners too) in agencies around London.
1) You won’t stop taking on shit work
We understand, you’re an agency, you need to keep the lights on and pay people. We get that. Everyone gets that.
But at the same time we expect you to have ambitions just like we do.
In the beginning it was cool to take the low-hanging fruit of animated GIF mobile banners and cookie-cutter augmented reality apps, just like we thought making club flyers at uni was cool when we first got into design, but after a while that shit has to stop and you need to start aiming higher.
It’s your job to get the best brands and companies doing interesting projects that push our boundaries. If you’re not winning these projects then that’s something you need to address, it’s down to you.
2) You don’t innovate
One of the worst feelings as a creative in the digital or mobile space is when it feels like the industry is just passing you by. In the time it takes to finish one or two mediocre projects the industry takes another leap forward with new software, frameworks, services, devices, APIs, design patterns and interactions, and we take a step back.
The place where you spend 8+ hours a day should be teaching you new skills and giving you hands-on experience and progressing you as a designer.
Clients are often reactive and risk-adverse, they want something after everyone else has done it to death. It’s understandable that clients have this approach. Brands may not be comfortable with putting experiments and prototypes into the wild, but there’s no reason why you can’t explore this stuff without them.
If you sell ‘innovation’ as one of your agency’s capabilities (who doesn’t these days?) then you should be making experiments and prototypes with technology, plain and simple.
3) You keep hiring shit (and not doing anything about it)
Passion and engagement are contagious. But so is negativity and mediocrity. There’s nothing more brutal than watching C players bring down A players. And when your A players leave, who’s going to attract your future talent?
Agencies are fast paced places to work and it’s common for teams to scale up in the blink of an eye. It’s inevitable mistakes in hiring are going to be made whilst under pressure, but the problem is that you don’t have the guts to correct them until it’s too late. Bad hires are like a cancer, they bring down morale, work and confidence in the business.
So how do you fix it? Advice from Mark Suster:
“One of the ‘tells’ for me of a management team that will not be extra-ordinarily successful is that they’re not always recruiting. I’ve seen it before – I send a talented member to a team and they say to me, ‘we don’t really have a role for that person’. Really? I always have a role for talented people. I may not have a BUDGET for talented people – but I always have a role for them. What role? Who the F knows. But let me at least have a coffee and feel out their enthusiasm, talent and ambitions. I might choose to do an upgrade on my existing team. I might be grooming them for when I have more money or more revenue. I might not be able to persuade them now but I want them to know my company so that when I’m ready to step on the gas I have a list of A players I want.”
4) You don’t stop taking on projects that can’t be delivered unless we work 12 hour days
Ahhh working til 9pm several days a week, it’s just the agency way of life right? Wrong, it’s bad management.
Tell your account managers (or yourself) to stop selling things that can’t be completed unless we work ourselves to death. I’ve seen people strain their health, relationships and family lives for what? So a deodorant can get more brand awareness? So that we can meet the unrealistic deadline you promised whilst trying to win a pitch? Or so a client can get dozens of mockups before they go on holiday?
This is advertising we’re talking about, not some higher calling. Everything we make is forgotten about in 6 months. Who gives a shit?
Matt Steel puts it in perspective in a brilliant, must-read blog post:
“Before his work as a business coach, Peleg ran a successful design firm in LA. He once told me that in the 18 years he owned Top Design, he never encountered a true design emergency. That simple truth resonated deeply with me. At Peleg’s firm, they weren’t saving lives or fighting wars. It was a service firm, and they lived accordingly. His team was in the office from 9-6 Monday through Thursday, and 9-2 on Fridays. They set realistic expectations for their clients and met deadlines. The business thrived.”
As Matt says later on in his post, sometimes you have to stay late because you’ve created a problem or need learn a new tool but too many unrealistic deadlines means that you stop creating because you love what you do. You begin working out of fear.
“When fear rules our lives, even the most amazing calling in life can be downgraded to a career. On the trajectory of fear, careers wane through the grey purgatory of jobs, and jobs break down in quivering heaps at the fiery gates of slavery.”
Fear becomes the driving force, the fear of missing a deadline, disappointing a client or wasting time trying to find inspiration. You begin churning out work and forget the reason why you wanted to be a creative in the first place.
The rewards for creatives are often minimal, we’re happy for a pat on the back and to be included in a ‘thanks for your effort’ all staff email but the chances of getting money, shares (LOLZ), or even getting your name dropped into the press release for all that hard work are slim to zero.
Which brings us to the next point:
5) You don’t give staff any credit
I really don’t understand why more agencies don’t give exposure to the people who do the actual work. Instead of putting yet another fucking generic CEO/creative director quote into a PR piece, why not grab a line from some of the people who actually worked on the project and busted their arse meeting its deadline?
The junior creative who stayed late for two weeks getting the project out of the door, the account manager who endured weekend calls from the client asking to make a logo bigger, these guys are the agency heroes. Thank you emails are great but they don’t come up in Google and you can’t link to them on blog or CV. Do the right thing.
Another way to give staff exposure is to start a blog and everyone contribute. Agencies are full of engaged people with ideas and passions, why not let them have dedicated time to blog?
6) You don’t buy us decent equipment
This is a no brainer.
Our job is to create, not worry about the ancient equipment you dragged out the cupboard. No designer wants to play ‘Guess whether Photoshop has crashed’ for half of the day.
Have you ever had to toggle between designing in Photoshop, a PDF containing wireframes, a email from a client with amendments, Facebook and Twitter all on one poxy 15-inch TFT Dell monitor that the last finance director left behind?
Get your designers some big fucking screens.
So there you have it.
I know people will say that agencies have always had high-turnover of staff and that these reasons have always existed, but I’ve been doing this for just over 7 years and it just feels different this time. There’s so many more options now that weren’t around 3-4 years ago, the way people are talking and the general mood has completely changed.
Whilst working at Isobar, every talented graduate or young UI designer I tried to recruit wanted to get experience working on products. They didn’t care about the type of work the agency produced. The brands were no big draw either. iPhone app for a beer brand? Mobile site for moisturising cream? So what?
When one of the designers told me “I want to look after users, not brands”, I had no reply, he was right. That’s all that you ever really do in a place like that.
I stayed in touch with a few of them, they work in tech companies or startups now.
Once they get a taste of real problems and caring for the end user, it’ll be near impossible to go back to doing marketing fluff.
Dustin Curtis wrote in his recent post:
“Learning how to think like this is like discovering halfway through your life as a flightless bird that you have wings and can fly. And once you discover it, there is no going back. It’s addictive and powerful. It ruins your ability to be a worker bee, because you’ve tasted blood: you become a killer bee, intent on understanding why things are the way they are, finding their flaws, and pushing the universe forward by fixing them.”
This feeling is the one that is rarely understood by the execs but it’s critical to realising the future of the industry. Maybe when the hackers and makers are running the show, things will change.
The cartoons in this piece are reproduced with permission from The Awesome World Of Advertising. See more here
Murat Mutlu is a product designer and co-founder of Marvel App. This post was first published on Mutlu’s site Mobile Inc. Follow him on Twitter @mutlu82
The intriguing partnership between Google and Nestlé to name the latest Android OS after the KitKat chocolate bar will be supported by a range of advertising activity including a beautifully observed spoof film on the ‘future of confectionery’
In the film, a KitKat spokesperson talks us through the features of the precisely engineered choccy treat:
It’s really nicely done, although at the risk of sounding like one of THOSE people, it does remind us very much of Wieden + Kennedy’s Mintacular film from last year, which also spoofed Apple product films.
What’s more interesting is the nature of the deal itself. JWT tell us that the initial idea came via a Google developer who is a ‘fan’ of KitKats and who mentioned th idea in the course of regular communications with the agency. Each version of the Android OS has been named after a sweet treat, ever since Android Cupcake in 2009. Each new version has taken a similarly themed name in alphabetical order so that it now became K’s turn.
Although the idea of naming the new version KitKat was apparently suggested informally it has now become a fully developed campaign idea. According to JWT, no money changed hands as it was seen to be ‘mutually beneficial’. Over 50 million specially branded KitKat bars – for which JWT designed the packaging – will be available in 19 markets worldwide. The packs will lead consumers to the website android.com/kitkat where they will have the opportunity to win prizes, including a limited number of Google Nexus 7 tablets, and credits to spend in Google Play, Google’s online store.
Kudos to JWT for spotting the opportunity and for being fleet of foot enough to make it all happen for such a huge client. No doubt we will be seeing this one again once next year’s awards are announced.
Campaign credits
Creative agency: JWT London
Executive Creative Director: Russell Ramsey
Creative Director: Barry Christie
Creatives: Joe Fox, James Keane, Chris Jones
Designers: James Keane
Developers: Dave Morgan, Henry Moyo, Matthew Payne, Davide Fortuna, Tobias Fieldhouse
The London office of ad agency JWT is staging an exhibition of animated GIFs by some of the leading artists in the field who will be talking about their work at an event on September 11
The show, called Loop, will feature work from an international selection of artists (including Paolo Ceric, work shown top, and Robin Davey, work shown above), all of whom exploit the limitations of the animated GIFs to great effect. Their work will be presented as framed still images which visitors can bring to life using the Blippar augmented reality smartphone app. In fact, Blippar will work on the images on this blog post – just download it here and point your phone’s camera at the images on screen.
Rainbow by David Dope
The show was put together by JWT creative Yoni Alter. “There’s some amazing talents creating GIFs on Tumblr and I thought that work deserves to be seen by everyone, besides it’ll be cool to get the GIFs out of the web into the real world,” he says. “But how do you exhibit GIFs in a gallery if you don’t have many screens? We worked on some projects with Blippar before and thought it would be good for that.”
Stairs by Ian Acton
“What I like about these GIFs is how they get the most out of the limiting format,” he says of the selection. “The repeating sequence in each GIF lasts for around one second but you can watch it for hours: One constant and hypnotising action.”
CR readers can attend an evening event at JWT in London on September 11 when several of the artists will be talking about their work. All you have to do is Blipp this invitation and follow the instructions to RSVP
A blissful August weekend brought an attentively curated line-up of sights and sounds, to a glorious northern location, for the arty, musical haven of Beacons festival. With an atmosphere bursting with positive vibes and creative passion, it soon became clear that Beacons was the type of place where you are just as likely to have a chat with a stranger about the who’s who of 2013 need-to-know bands as you are about the what’s what of the latest and greatest design studios.
With the rise of the independent festival scene, and boutique festivals evolving and diversifying to incorporate an increasingly varied bill of creative acts, more festivals are also beginning to place emphasis on a sharper arts programme running alongside the music. Just three years in, with a washout first attempt after severe flooding, Beacons is already starting to establish itself as a frontrunner on the small festival circuit, with an impressive, eclectic bill of art and music, curated with several fingers to the pulse of local, national and international talent.
The compact site on Heslaker Farm, near Skipton in the beautiful rolling hills of the Yorkshire Dales, attracted local creative folk and hipster city types alike. And for four predominantly sunny days, Beacons offered a dreamy, arty alternative festival experience to the mainstream branded big guns on offer the same weekend.
With an arts programme that combined artists and organisations from Yorkshire and beyond, The Space Between was home to a variety of projects and creatives, with films, performance, exhibition space, workshops, demos, talks, and design focused stands, along with other attractions and installations around the festival site.
A enticing selection of handmade products from Yorkshire based artists – including screenprinted posters and cards, bespoke t-shirts and illustrated badges – were on offer at The Pop Up Box (below), a retail project developed by Leeds based creative agency Temp Studio. The project stems from an earlier venture, Retail Ready People, a pop-up creative retail space in Leeds city centre, offering volunteers a chance to ‘redesign their high street’, with a training programme helping develop skills in marketing, retail design and visual merchandising.
The project, a partnership with charities vInspired, Retail Trust and The Empty Shops Network, mixed work from young designers and artists based in Yorkshire with more established local designers, acting both as a shop and social space, with a café and performances from local bands.
The Pop Up Box built on this idea, with a giant handmade wooden box housing projects from young local designers, providing access for emerging brands to sell in a physical space, rather than just online. Beacons was the first stop for the box, and all the profits – after designers have their cut on a sale or return basis – will go into the next space.
As we see a growth in similar projects in Leeds and other cities, despite the need to engage creatives and communities outside of a city’s cultural quarters and in more rural regions, supporting independent retailers and actively encouraging regeneration through creative partnerships in inner city areas still remains integral to projects such as these.
‘We’re still fighting against too much empty space, sky-high rents and the dominance of the usual big retail players,’ says Isla Brown, director of Temp Studio. ‘We just want to help both young people and young designers not to have to knock doors down to get their products noticed and into customers hands.’ Through this portable project, work can be trialled with new audiences and reach a wider market, whilst hopefully sparking some discussion over the temporal nature of many creative spaces.
New for this year, Dawson’s Arthash House, was a space for festival goers to kick back and enjoy independent films, digital art and animation, along with work from local designers and crafts people such as Tony Wright (above), from Oldfield Press, a letterpress workhop based at Altered Egos gallery in Haworth. The stand offered a chance to press your own Beacons poster from a set of woodcut blocks, including a pointing finger dating back more than one hundred years, alongside letterpress prints from local artists.
Wright, (incidentally also Terrorvision’s frontman), had turned his hand from painting to printing, aiming to create work that was still individual and handmade, but ‘easier to let go of’, creating posters and other commissions from greetings cards to labels for chilli sauce. He has also experimented with less conventional letterpress techniques, including creating prints by etching designs onto vinyl records and running them through a mangle.
Having also been involved in a pop-up creative space in Skipton – Derdlab Press, a traditional Victorian printshop and exhibition – the work stands testament to a growing popularity in ‘hands-on art’, as Wright calls it, as despite a demand for cheap, fast, mass-produced print, networks of craft-led design is finding support from local communities, councils and charities.
From woodcut printing to wood carved portaiture with Kyle Bean (below) in the Things to Make and Do Tent, with a drop-in workshop using reclaimed wood to create portraits of icons linking to the festival theme, ‘Visions of the Future’. Bean’s imaginative work as an artist and designer, with clients including Selfridges and the Design Museum, often reappropriates everyday materials and rethinks handcrafted techniques. The portraits were originally a commission for Wallpaper*, when Bean was approached by the magazine and asked to illustrate the contributors for the Handmade issue.
To create the portraits, a black and white contrast image of the face is printed onto carbon paper and traced onto reclaimed wood, and highlights are then carved out with varying sizes of chisels and knives. Carving into the dark weathered surface to reveal light fresh wood underneath creates a stencilled, contrast effect from a distance, with lots of interesting twists and scratches close up. Inviting festival goers to ‘take a tactile approach to making the portraits’, Bean’s alternative illustration workshop gave participants a taster of his inventive handcrafted techniques.
A collective of zine makers from Yorkshire, Loosely Bound, brought zine making workshops to Beacons, sharing techniques on how to create various styles of the self-published books/pamphlets, and recording memories of the festival. The collective are supported by Fabric, a charitable organisation for artistic development in Bradford and the surrounding areas, where the group originally met at an artist networking dinner event. Coming together to share, swap and learn from each other, the group both create new collaborative zines and organise events and workshops to engage a wider audience of people in zine making.
Their name highlights the diversity of zines that members produce, from perzines (personal zines), to photography led, graphic art inspired, written or drawn, with both lo-fi and handmade methods and digital online zines, and covering a huge range of subjects. Take a look at the video below of the workshop in action …
Other attractions and creative activities included DIY t-shirt screen-printing in the tearoom, a series of films including shorts from Aesthetica magazine’s short film festival, and projection bombing across the site with animation and videos from local, national and international artists. Featured in several locations, 12 Months of Neon Love by Victoria Lucas and Richard William Wheater, a sequence of lyrical statements from well-known songs recreated in red neon signage, accented the festival with a nod towards amalgamating the artistic and musical elements.
The support for small arts organisations and emerging businesses, from festivals such as Beacons, is acknowledged by those involved as a significant opportunity to engage people in projects that they may not otherwise have contact with, and build sustainable networks, whilst providing exposure for creative projects in environments that test the boundaries of products and practices beyond online shops and traditional workshops and studios.
Although the arts field may be in its infancy aesthetically, and could perhaps do with a rethink in terms of location – currently situated away from the main arena, to one end of the campsite – Beacons is off to an impressive start when it comes to programming a more progressive and design-focused bill of creative projects and arts attractions, with unfamiliar forms of visual communication, process-led work and digital arts, rather than simply falling back on more traditional festival crafts.
The interest in the arts side of the festival was strong, and with the incredibly friendly vibe, chatting with various festival goers, amongst the indie-electro buzz band fans, underground music lovers and beatheads, there was a substantial rep from arty types, designers, directors and other creative professionals. In the temporary environment of a festival such as Beacons, those attending are often looking for an experience of escapism that is more than just a party, and the demand for a different type of arts programme like this is growing. The arts bill no longer acts merely as a sideshow to the main musical event, but with considered arts partnerships and well curated work, festivals such as Beacons will continue to flourish into cultural hotbeds of creative energy.
Photographs courtsey of Beacons Festival 2013, Sam Huddleston, Charlotte Parmore, Giles Smith, Howie Hall, Nicola Redofrd, Sam @ Loosely Bound
Eight top graduates are profiled in our September issue – each has a page with which to introduce themselves to the creative world, and we also take a look at some of their best work to date. It’s the CR Gradwatch class of 2013…
The September issue of Creative Review is available to buy direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money too. Details here.
Before the 20-plus pages of new graduate work, Patrick Burgoyne looks at the history of an institution that has, since 1952, represented the very best in graphic design: the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI).
Once an elite club for the profession, the AGI has extended its membership to a younger generation of practitioners – and next month brings its Open conference to London for the first time. (This issue’s subscriber-only Monograph, see below, features a collection of AGI-related ephemera, collected by designer Ben Bos.)
Over the past three months, along with our online army of volunteer talent spotters, we’ve reported on a wide range of the UK’s art and design degree shows and have picked eight graduates to look out for.
First up in our Gradwatch feature is University of the West of England illustration graduate, George McCallum. A cake version of his Chest of Drawers furniture introduces his feature. (The cake also found its way to the CR office – yum.)
Chelsea College of Art graphic design communication grads Johnny Holmes and Charlie Patterson (aka Opposite) form our second profile. The pair also designed/stitched our September issue cover.
Next up is the otherworldly work of Royal College of Art visual communication graduate, Guilia Garbin. Her final MA project was an illustrated collection of four stories about the last generation of print workers of Fleet Street in London. 
And School of Communication Arts team, Ran and Max (Roanna Stallard and Max Maclean), make up our fouth grad profile. They introduce themselves via a wordsearch, quiz and their Ten Creative Commandments. 
A graduate of the design for publishing course at Norwich University of the Arts, Matthew Callaby has already designed the visual identity for Sony Music at this year’s BRIT Awards. His intro page is an abundance of juicy monsters.
And our final Gradwatchee is Rachel Dixon of Gray’s School of Art’s visual communication course. Her Reading and Leeds festival project won a YCN Student Award earlier this year. 
Staying with our educational theme, CR’s Rachael Steven looks at various university-run enterprise schemes which enable students to work on commercial briefs while studying – but are the rewards fair to them?
And rounding off the features this month, Mark Sinclair meets Nick Asbury, one of the best branding and design writers working today.
Asbury discusses the rise of ‘tone of voice’, the importance of poetry in helping him write for brands, and how he has managed to produce an acclaimed series of products with his wife, Sue – including the Disappointments Diary 2013.
In Crit, Wayne Ford visits the Museum of London’s exhibition on the Radio Times as the magazine turns 90. 
Jeremy Leslie looks at some magazines which aim to help young graduates and creatives, and talks to the founder of new title, Intern.
Paul Belford praises a Tampax advert from 1981 for its unpatronising stance; while Daniel Benneworth-Gray dons his outdoor gear to go looking for his own work in the wild.
Gordon Comstock ponders why finding new advertising talent can prove so difficult; and Michael Evamy salutes the longevity of the work of design agency Lippincott, which is 70 years-old this year. 
And finally, in our Monograph supplement this month (for subscribers only), we have a special selection of material and ephemera produced for the AGI over the years from the collection of designer, Ben Bos. 
The September issue of Creative Review is available to buy direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money too. Details here.
Yesterday, the UK illustrator Mr Bingo informed the website Society6 that one of its user’s pages was allegedly displaying and selling his work. The page, which has only been taken down in the last few minutes, reveals a worrying glimpse into the unchecked selling of artworks online…
The piece in question, ‘A New Hope’ (above) – an edition from Mr Bingo’s Hair Portraits series – was made in 2007 and is available for all to see at his website, mr-bingo.org.uk, and also the Nelly Duff gallery, where it is still sold as a handsome gold foil edition.
But a visit to the page of an artist called – yes – ‘Thug’ on the Society6 site, and visitors were presented with a select group of illustrations, the origins of which were … somewhat debatable.
There’s the Hair Cuts Star Wars piece that looks uncannily like Mr Bingo’s Hair Portrait, and a couple of other works that may be familiar to CR blog readers: an image akin to the waveform image from the cover of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album, designed by Peter Saville, and one clearly in homage to the late Arturo Vega’s logo for The Ramones.
Each of the ‘works’ could be bought as a print (of varying sizes – the cheapest is about $16), or as a tank top, a T-shirt, hoodie, tote bag and so on. Society6 claims that when customers buy goods from its website, they are then produced as “gallery quality art prints, iPhone cases, T-shirts and other fine products – without giving up control of your rights”.
But what about Mr Bingo’s rights? “I’ve personally only got in touch with them via Twitter, which I do in my typically brash way,” he revealed earlier today, adding that “more professional humans” were also in touch with the company on his behalf (which may have resulted in the webpage coming down).
“A number of people on Twitter – who I’ve never met – have let me know that they’ve sent messages to Society6 about the matter and nobody has received any kind of adequate response other than a link to [its] rules and regulations,” Bingo says.
According to the Santa Monica-based company’s extensive terms and conditions, all work uploaded to the website must be created by a “verified member” of Society6. It’s easy enough to sign up, upload work, select the media in which it can be made available, and set a price – then agree to the ts&cs* (see bottom of post).
But making a complaint to the site, if an artist has seen work that they believe infringes their own copyright, is harder to do. The onus is heavily on the ‘infringed’ party to do the leg work – as Sheffield-based illustrator Matt Ferguson found out.
“Someone let me know that my art was up for sale on their site,” he says. “I obviously didn’t OK this to happen …. The file [was] only 72dpi and not hi-res enough for print.”
Ferguson says that the work in question was created solely for online promotion connected with the film, Pacific Film, and was never licensed to be printed. “Society6 made me jump through a lot of hoops to get the art taken down, but I wonder – do people who upload this stuff have to go through so many hoops?”
Ferguson managed to get the page removed, but was left unsatisfied by the website’s treatment of his case. “I only got bog standard pre-written emails once the stuff was taken down. No apology and also no monetary compensation for lost earnings, which I thought was outrageous.”
A quick Twitter search of complaints made towards Society6 reveals that artists Christopher Uminga and Chris Piascik also alleged that works of theirs were appearing on the site without their permission. In both cases, the pages in question have now been taken down.
But these and Bingo’s case highlight the difficulty in protecting copyrighted artwork online. When a decent enough jpg can easily be grabbed and reposted as part of someone else’s portfolio, what’s to stop them passing it off as their own work, and even making money out of it?
Well, for one, it should be harder to submit work to sites like Society6 and its roster of artists work monitored much more closely. Even a cursory Google Image upload search would reveal matches with existing files online.
And while the platform might serve a purpose for many artists selling their own artwork (Society6 claim to represent thousands of people’s work), when issues to do with alleged plagiarism and infringements of copyright occur, it makes no sense to have such a lengthy process in place to deal with them.
Not least when, in Bingo’s case, no-one seemed to be replying to any tweets via the Society6 Twitter account either.
CR contacted Society6 for comment yesterday and were informed, via an email from an unmonitored account, that in order to make a claim for an infringement of one’s intellectual property rights, enquirers must follow the procedure detailed in the terms and conditions.
As yet, Society6 has not responded to a further email for comments. Mr Bingo, despite his way with words on Twitter, remains calm. “To be honest, I just put a few tweets out there,” he says. “I’ve got much better things to be doing really. I’d rather spend my time making new work than worrying too much about who’s doing what with existing work.”
When Bingo or CR hears more, we’ll update the post. For now it seems that Society6 has at least responded to Bingo’s tweets – by removing ‘Thug’ from their website.
*From Society6’s terms and conditions, for members: “You represent and warrant that you own all intellectual property rights in your Content or that you have obtained all copyrights, trademark rights, rights of publicity and other rights required for you to make your Content available through the Society6 Services” and that “your Content and the manufacture, distribution and sale of Products that include your Content does not and will not infringe the intellectual property rights or other rights of any person or entity….”
Les graphismes et rendu des images dans les jeux-vidéo ne cesse de s’améliorer avec les années et nous offrent des univers de toute beauté. C’est ce qu’a souligné récemment Amy&Pink en publiant des images tirées du jeu « Fallout 3″ et qui montrent les progrès et la poésie qui peuvent se dégager de cette culture digitale.
DDB New York has created another high-impact campaign for charity WATERisLIFE that turns pop culture on its head, following on from last year’s ‘Hashtag Killer’.
The ‘Kenya Bucket List’ campaign subverts the popular ‘bucket list’ term (which stands for a list of things an individual wants to do before they die). It centres around the phrase to highlight the fact that one in five children in sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t make it to their fifth birthday due to unsafe drinking water.
The campaign film follows a four year-old Maasai boy, Nkaitole, who has never left his village, as he embarks on his personal bucket list adventure, ticking off experiences such as getting his first kiss, playing football in the national stadium and seeing the ocean for the first time.
The campaign launched via WATERisLIFE’s social channels, and will be accompanied by a series of print ads, each of which will highlight individual bucket list experiences (see some behind-the-scenes photographs below). It will also include video clips in which American children recite their bucket list on Facebook. All donations from the video will help those who appear in it, used to provide clean water and sanitation to Maasai villages.
Last year, DDB and WATERisLIFE’s Hashtag Killer campaign similarly subverted the #FirstWorldProblems hashtag by traveling to Haiti to film locals reading some of the trivial tweets under that label back to their original authors.
Want to learn a new skill? Hone your craft? Or just switch off that Mac and do something a little less boring instead for a while? Then our August issue is for you with details on workshops, short courses and a host of ideas to reinvigorate the creative mind. You can buy the August issue of Creative Review direct from us here. Better yet, subscribe to make sure that you never miss out on a copy – you’ll save money too. Details here.
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