Hasta La Ideas

A new video installation for the window of Parisian department store Printemps Du Louvre from creative consultancy Big Active, creates a moving kaleidoscope of archival imagery in the shop window.

Printemps Du Louvre is the new flagship branch of the luxury French department store situated in the Carrousel Du Louvre, an underground shopping mall close to the Louvre museum in Paris. It is Printemps’ first new space for 30 years, and exhibits from contemporary artists occupy much of the inside, with emphasis placed on the in-store experience, in turn drawing consumers away from online shopping.

The project brief – in simple terms, to attract visitors towards the window and into the shop – meant competing with prestigious neighbours, whilst developing something that would work with the existing, modestly sized windows of the store.

“The environment itself was a challenge, the windows are opposite the Apple Store and the iconic La Pyramide Inversée,” says Greg Burne, of Big Active. “We knew we had to produce something visually highly impactful, brand neutral, which would hold it’s own and lure people away from the endless Louvre museum queue.”

In keeping with the type of high-end, experiential shopping experience that the store prides itself on, the windows needed to welcome in visitors with something a little bit different.

Tasked with directing and designing the film, was Mat Maitland with a team from creative consultancy Big Active, who specialise in art direction, graphic design, illustration and moving image, with animation from Paul Plowman and music by Buffalo Tide.

The video installation features archival iconography and other images from Printemps the Louvre, which plays in a three-minute loop. The screen sits inside a mirrored frame, designed to reflect the film and create a kaleidoscopic effect, with the products physically placed in the centre.

matmaitland.com

bigactive.com

UK studio Universal Everything has designed an immersive app for Radiohead using artwork by Stanley Donwood and music from the song Bloom. We spoke to UE’s Matt Pyke and Mike Tucker about how it was made.

Polyfauna is free to download on iPhone, iPad and Android. Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke says the concept was born out of an interest “in early computer-life experiments and the imagined creatures of our subconscious,” and provides “a window into an evolving world.”

The app guides users through a series of different landscapes, from vast forests to mountainous regions in daylight, darkness and at sunset. Visuals are set to expanded versions of Bloom and sounds from the band’s 2011 album, King of Limbs, composed by Radiohead and producer Nigel Godrich.

Users are greeted with a different virtual world each time they open the app, which they can explore by tilting their device to look up, down and around. They can also interact with it, creating lines, shapes, spiny creatures and plants by touching or swiping their screens.

Universal Everything has been working on Polyfauna for around six months and was first approached by Radiohead in 2011. “I received a mysterious email from Yorke under a pseudonym – he said he’d seen some of our work [an installation in Paris and a website for Warp Records], and would like to collaborate on an app,” he says.

The app was to be “an audio visual expression,” says Pyke. Donwood, who has created artwork for Radiohead since the early 1990s, had produced a series of sketches and paintings of trees, woods and landscapes, and the band were keen to bring his artwork to life.

Working with the artist and the band, Pyke and Universal Everything developer Mike Tucker created a series of 3D worlds that can be explored from all angles. “It’s not supposed to be used at a desk but while you’re stood up and moving around, like you would with a pair of binoculars,” says Pike.

Users can also take snapshots of the various scenes and shapes they have created and upload them to Radiohead’s new website.

“We wanted to add a nice layer of interaction so users weren’t just passively looking around. Stanley’s work has strong evidence of being created by hand, so we wanted to allow users to create life, too,” says Pyke.

The code which allows users to create these 3D creatures was generated using mathematical formulas that calculate the geometric pattern of a spine or fern growing in the wild.

Each user’s shapes will be unique, and Pyke says he hopes the ability to take and share screen grabs will create a sense of discovery. “It’s like users are taking on the role of an explorer and documenting a new place they’ve found. Every place will be different, so they are all undiscovered,” he says.

The number of scenes in the app is, in a sense, infinite, as each time users enter, they are met with a different combination of light, weather, landscape and moon phase, says Tucker.

“There is a disposable culture surrounding phone apps – people tend to download one, give it a play for a few minutes and subsequently delete it if they aren’t impressed. With Polyfauna, we created an experience to be completely unique each day, making a reason to come back and enjoy it days or months later,” he says.

The overall effect is designed to simulate a sense of living inside the band’s music, says Pyke – Godrich and Radiohead’s atmospheric compositions include snippets from throughout the King of Limbs album, and are exploded, distorted versions of tracks rather than traditional remixes.

There are 31 sound track mixes in total and each is broken into four individual channels, which Tucker says are “physically located in the 3D environment. This means as you physically turn your body, each channel will shift, as if you are hearing instruments from afar,” he adds.

It’s an impressive piece of work from Universal Everything, and Radiohead’s most intriguing digital experiment to date.

“It was a really nice collaborative process,” says Pyke. The band has such an experimental ethos – allowing fans to pay what they wanted for their album, Rainbows, for example – and they were all really interested in creating an experiential process, one that stretches the traditional structure of music,” he adds.

You can download Polyfauna here.

The Design Museum has announced the nominations for Designs of the Year 2014. The diverse line-up includes life-saving inventions, experimental architecture and some intriguing graphics and digital work…

Seventy six projects have been shortlisted by industry figures and entries are divided into six categories: product, digital, fashion, architecture, graphics and transport. As always, this includes designs chosen for their beauty, orginality or unusual approach – entries include a floating school in a Nigerian lagoon, a watch that allows users to feel the time as well as read it and the ABC Syringe (below), which changes colour when exposed to air thus alerting users to its pre-use or potential exposure to infection.

Digital

In the digital category, the screen-based aspects of McCann Melbourne’s multi-award-winning Dumb Ways to Die rail safety campaign has been shortlisted alongside Bristol studio PAN’s Hello Lamp Post – a platform that allows residents to converse with street furniture using the text function on their mobile phones. (Read our blog post on the project here). Bare Conductive’s Touchboard project also offered an ingenious take on interactivity, turning almost any surface into an interface using electrodes.

As well as immersive gaming experiences such as the Oculus Rift headset, the digital category contains some potentially life-saving  inventions. The Aerosee (above) is a crowdsourced search and rescue drone that enables smartphone, desktop or tablet users to search mountains in the Lake District for people in danger, and the Portable Eye Examination Kit enables eye exams to be carried out in remote or low-income areas where traditional eye exams aren’t possible.

Nominations such as Vitamins’ Lego Calendar (above), the allowing studio to visualise how much time they spend on different projects using different coloured bricks (when you take a photo of it with a smartphone all of the events and timings are synchronised to an online calendar), and City Mapper (below) an app that helps users navigate large and complicated cities on foot and public transport, simply make life easier.

Graphics

Nominees in the graphics category include Experimental Jetset’s ‘Responsive W’ identity for the Whitney Museum (above, which we covered back in July), Marina Willer and Brian Boylan’s identity for the Serpentine Galleries (below), and the M to M of M/M Paris: a 528-page book on graphic designers Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustiniak, designed by Graphic Thought Facility (featured in CR Nov 12 issue, read our piece here).

Also featured is the Art Directors Club Annual 91 with illustrations poking gentle fun at the industry (see our post here).

Chris Ware’s amazing Building Stories graphic novel (see review by Jimmy Stamp here) in the form of a a boxed set, consisting of 14 distinct printed works-cloth-bound books, newspapers, broadsheets and flip books.

Stephen Jones’ issue of A Magazine Curated By, which was dedicated to Anna Piaggi and the art of illustration

Jean-Marie Courant, Marie Proyart, Olivier Vadrot’s identity system for the Frac Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur

An identity for the Escuyer underwear brand by Modern Practice

Chineasy, a Chinese language learning system created by entrepreneur ShaoLan Hsueh and illustrated by Noma Bar:

James Bridles’ Drone Shadows, a series of installations depicting an outline of an unmanned military aerial vehicle promoting Jeremy Scahill’s investigative documentary Dirty Wars:

Grand-Central by Thibault Brevet, an open internet platform that lets people express themselves freely through a tangible output device (see top an above). Users can submit text via their smartphones which is then ‘written’ in marker pen by a mechanical printer – creating a physical embodiment of a digital message.

Arts and culture journal, The Gourmand, Created by David Lane (Creative Director), Marina Tweed & David Lane (Founders/Editors-in-chief)

And Anthony Sheret, Edd Harrington and Rupert Dunk’s Castledown Primary School Type Family – a typeface commissioned for a primary school in Sussex that evolved into a project aiming to create a unified, dyslexic friendly type system in UK primary schools.

Because of the way it is put together (submissions from ‘industry experts’ which are then reviewed by a Design Museum-appointed panel rather than a paid-for entry system), Designs of the Year always throws up a quirkier selection than industry awards such as D&AD. That is both a strength and a weakness in that some nominations can appear a little random but there are always delightful surprises and some welcome attention for designers who may not figure in other schemes.

Makoko Floating School in Nigeria, A prototype floating structure, built for an historic water community. Designed by NLÉ, Makoko Community Building Team

Shortlisted entries will be on display at the Design Museum from March 26 to August 25 and you can view the full list of nominations here.

A visitor’s vote will be open to the public. The museum is introducing a social vote this year, too, allowing Twitter and Facebook users to choose their favourite of two exhibits from the show each day. Design of the Year is supported by Bird & Bird

Cheltenham Design Festival is back for a third year bringing together top names from the creative industries to explore how great design can make a difference and improve our lives.

Two days of talks and workshops this year fall under the banner of ‘Design Can…’, taking place at the Parabola Arts Centre in Cheltenham.

D&AD President Laura Jordan Bambach discusses why purpose is essential for the future of the creative industries; design luminaries Kenneth Grange and Ken Garland will be in conversation, and Garland also presents a separate event on publishing; and Erik Kessels of KesselsKramer explores the ever-expanding toolbox of the designer when it comes to telling the story of a brand.

Other speakers include Jack Schulze, founder of design consultancy BERG, on new technologies and the creative industries; hat-trick design’s Jim Sutherland discusses the joys of doing as well as viewing design; and Harriet Vine, one half of Tatty Devine, talks to the BBC’s Fi Glover about how challenging traditional design can help a business flourish.

And not forgetting graphic designer Morag Myerscough talking creativity and belonging; the European Space Agency explain how good design is a mandatory requirement in space; architectural theorist Alistair Parvin on his plan for democratizing architecture, and artist Dominic Wilcox shares his thoughts on combatting creative block.

Tickets go on sale in mid-February, with individual events costing an affordable £6, and day tickets at £20 (£10 for student and under 18s).

For more info visit cheltenhamdesignfestival.com, and follow this year’s speakers on Twitter at Twitter: twitter.com/CheltDesignFest/lists/cdf14

Cheltenham Design Festival 2013 from Cheltenham Design Festival on Vimeo.

Design and motion studio ManvsMachine has deconstructed Nike’s iconic Air Max shoe for a new campaign promoting the Air Max 90 range.

ManvsMachine was asked to design a campaign showcasing the individual features of each shoe in the new Air Max collection, which is the first to combine Nike’s Air, Lunar and Flyknit technologies.

Using Cinema 4D animation software, V-Ray rendering and a distinctive “fractured-flow” edit style, the studio created a series of CG films in which various features of the shoes have been abstracted and animated, showcasing a range of textures and the most recognisable design elements of the Air Max:

“The films are full CG, and the production process was handled in-house in our Shoreditch studio, from creating accurate 3D models of the shoes and wrapping them in photographed textures, to designing, building and animating sculptural elements and environments…once underway, this process took about three months,” explains studio founder Mike Alderson.

ManvsMachine also worked on in-store graphics with retail design agency Hotel Creative, creating a series of 3D printed sculptures and a simple graphic system to illustrate the different features of each trainer:

“The sculptures were all 3D printed and sprayed in London [sizes range from 305mm to 800mm]. We created the objects in Cinema4D and handed them over to…Hotel Creative, who integrated them into the retail design,” explains Alderson.

Films will be used online, in-store and in outdoor advertising, and the installations and graphics are being rolled out in stores nationwide.

It’s another slick campaign from ManvsMachine, who created a charming animation last year to promote Nike’s Re-Use a Shoe initiative, in which worn out Nike trainers are ground down into a new material that can be used to make surfaces for playing courts, tracks and fields.