Comedian Stewart Lee is somewhat sceptical of social media. He doesn’t do “the tweets”. His face isn’t on Facebook. Here, quite possibly, is why…
Social Stew was posted on the BBC’s website earlier and shows Lee in a meeting with BBC Marketing (Online), discussing the web and social media angle for the launch of the second series of his Comedy Vehicle. Ideas such as Stewart’s Long Arm (on Facebook, above) and the Angry Stew app are suggested.
The clip features a brilliant portrayal of a BBC social media strategist by Kevin Eldon, plus an ironic piece (given the fact the film is being blogged and tweeted) on rap star Ironik from the new series.
You want to buy a brand new Range Rover Evoque – but what options are right for you? Do you go for the sporty version or the luxury version? Three door or five door model? A new interactive online film – devised by agency Brooklyn Brothers in collaboration with director Nick Gordon of Somesuch & Co and digital production company Less Rain – helps you make those choices in an engaging way…
Rather than simply being a website that allows users to play around with the paint colour, door configuration choices and different interior options of the new Range Rover Evoque, Being Henry is an interactive film in which viewers get to decide how Henry proceeds through the narrative at various stages. Does he head straight into the restaurant to meet his sisters and grandma, or does he decide to walk around the corner and “forget” about his family reunion?
Each choice viewers make on behalf of the film’s lead character, Henry, takes him on a different journey through a multiple strand story, and each choice also dictates a particular set up of a new model of Range Rover’s Evoque model – which you find out when the film has played out. You then have the option to play around further with the car’s colour, interior etc, or replay the film and try making different choices.
For example, choose to ignore your family re-union to spend time with a young waitress, and the car you end up with will be the two door coupe version, rather than the five door family version… It sounds interestingly lateral yet potentially bland, but high production values, an unfussy, intuitive digital interface created by Less Rain, great performances, and a genuinely engaging set of numerous storylines and even more (over 30) endings, means that actually it’s tricky to stop re-playing the film and exploring the different choices / narratives. With various plots that include such characters as a gun-toting grandma, a mafia-linked baker, and an attractive young waitress waiting for Henry in the back room of a diner – it’s all rather good fun.
Our Annual issue is out now, rounding up the highlights of the past year in visual communications. At the front, you’ll find our judges’ choices of Best in Book which this year includes lasers, apps and even TV commercials (remember them?)
Each May, we publish our Annual, our main awards issue (if you’d like a copy, just call +44(0)207 292 3703 for your nearest stockist or to buy direct from us). The work is displayed over 114 pages according to the month in which it first appeared but, at the front, our judges pick their favourites for our Best in Book section. This year, in no particular order, these are:
Speed of Light by UVA/Borkowski (now known as Beige) for Virgin Media To celebrate ten years of broadband internet, PR agency Borkowski persuaded its client Virgin Media to steer clear of traditional media in favour of a spectacular laser installation created by United Visual Artists. The installation, Speed of Light, took over all four storeys of the Bargehouse on the Thames riverside in central London for a period of ten days during April of last year. Visitors to the space were invited to immerse themselves in a labyrinth of laser sculptures, built on the idea of, UVA said, “speed being light, and light being data”. Our original post on the project is here
Pot Noeldle by AKQA Christmas ads are, by and large, of a type. Family-orientated, often rather schmaltzy, there are rarely many spots that surprise or delight anymore, despite it being the biggest time of year for consumer spending. The arrival in early December of AKQA’s Pot Noeldle spot was therefore a particular cause for celebration, as it cut through all the sparkly dross with its charming animation and witty observations on life in modern Britain. For more, see our post here
Arcade Fire: The Wilderness Downtown by B-Reel/Chris Milk Since the release of Arcade Fire’s website for the track Neon Bible in 2008, now widely recognised as the first interactive music video, the band has continued to experiment with using digital technology to create unusual music experiences. In late summer last year, the band achieved another huge success with its innovative interactive video for the song We Used To Wait, taken from the album The Suburbs. The site was created in collaboration with digital production company B-Reel and director Chris Milk, and is designed to be used on the Google Chrome web browser. See our original post about it here
Diesel: A Hundred Lovers by Stink Digital/Anomaly A central trend in advertising in 2010 was finding ‘normal’ people, sourced through social media networks, to help promote brands to their friends and others, and at times even appear in ads themselves. One of the most charming ads of the year to utilise this was a clothing catalogue-cum-music video created for Diesel by Anomaly and Stink Digital. The video formed part of the Be Stupid campaign, a manifesto crafted for the brand by Anomaly that proclaimed that stupidity was the way forward in life. “To be stupid is to be brave, when you risk something that’s stupid,” it announced. “The stupid aren’t afraid to fail.” To illustrate this, various images of attractive folks getting up to cheeky antics were released online. For the A Hundred Lovers film, ‘stupid’ fans of Diesel were contacted via social media sites, and invited to star in the video. In a reference to Jean-Luc Godard’s classic film Bande à Part, they are shown performing a dance routine in a bar. The dancers are all dressed in Diesel clothing, of course, and viewers are encouraged to pause the film and then click on clothing they like the look of to get more info about the garments and be given the opportunity of purchasing them directly online.
Nokia: The World’s Smallest Stop-motion Character Animation by Wieden + Kennedy/Aardman Animations At 9mm in height, miniature animated film star Dot is officially the world’s smallest stop-motion character. So small, in fact, that to produce the charming short film for Nokia’s N8 smart phone in which she stars, Aardman Animations made 50 different versions of her in order to generate all the body movements required. Agency Wieden + Kennedy were briefed with demonstrating the potential of the Nokia N8’s 12 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera, which is capable of HD video. The animation, directed by Ed Patterson and Will Studd at Sumo Science, follows Dot on a platform game-style adventure.
Claridge’s identity by Construct London design studio Construct gave the branding of London’s famous Claridge’s hotel a thorough overhaul, starting with the hotel’s crest and logotype, which has been redrawn using a refined weight of typeface SangBleu. Because it is a working hotel with a huge number of items traditionally branded (from teapots and egg cups through to slippers and dressing gowns), Construct’s task of not just branding, but implementing a consistent and cohesive sense of identity throughout the hotel and the objects within it was by no means straightforward. In fact, the rollout of the branding happened throughout last year as there were so many different ideas to implement. As well as introducing a sophisticated colour palette of jade, gold, white and black, bold chevron patterns appear on the inside of bags, envelopes and on various objects, publications and goodies guests at the hotel are likely to encounter. See our original story on the project here
Nike: The Film Room by R/GA At the inaugural World Basketball Festival–a four-day celebration of the performance and culture of the game– held at Harlem’s famous Rucker Park, Nike let kids practice and learn signature moves from NBA pros. Players Kevin Durant, Rudy Gay, Andre Iguodala, and Deron Williams were on site at the specially-built Film Room to improve the kids’ technique. Using a combination of green screen technology, HD cameras, and a custom-built computer programme to analyse footage, The Film Room deconstructed the kids’ movements frame-by-frame, second-by-second, separating the player with the ball from the background. After performing their move, kids were presented with their very own personalised, 18 × 24″ Nike poster starring themselves in action.
Nike+ GPS by R/GA The Nike+ platform was expanded upon by agency R/GA with the launch of the Nike+ GPS app which enables runners to track and log their progress and broadcast the data via Facebook. As useful as this sounds, there were some additional elements to the new app that made the whole experience more personal. On opening the app, users choose ‘indoors’ or ‘outdoors’, the latter enabling the GPS function to track the runner’s progress. With the Get Cheers feature, the runner’s Facebook status is automatically updated, letting friends know that they have started out on a run. As the run progresses, friends who ‘like’, or comment on the status update, earn the runner ‘applause’ which is played out over their headphones. To complement this motivational aspect to the app, a range of guest stars such as Lance Armstrong and Tracy Morgan also offered words of support and encouragement. And by way of turning the dial up to 11 on one’s efforts, songs (Eye of the Tiger, perhaps) can also be cued up to begin whenever a boost of energy is required.
Nike: Write the Future by Wieden +Kennedy Amsterdam Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam’s Write the Future spot for Nike brilliantly captured the excitement of the build up to the World Cup in South Africa last year, making it the stand-out advertising of the tournament. At its centre is the idea of what might go through a footballer’s mind when playing for their country. Will they succeed and bring glory to the nation, or return home a dismal failure? Will statues be unveiled in their honour, their story played out in a biopic; or will they disappear in a haze of tabloid fury and end up heavily bearded and living in a dirty caravan? Such is the metaphorical way of the footballer, their fate entirely dependent on how well they perform on the pitch. Of course, all the big guns are here in director Alejandro G Iñarritu’s fantastical display: Wayne Rooney, Cristiano Ronaldo, Didier Drogba, to name but a few. The cameo-laden spot even features cheeky appearances from Kobe Bryant and Roger Federer, but the highlight surely is Homer Simpson falling for a rather sweet animated ‘nutmeg’ manoeuvre, courtesy of, yes, one “Ronal…’doh!”
Going, Going, Gone Red! by The Partners To help raise money for London’s children’s hospice, Richard House, The Partners collaborated with over 100 of Britain’s top illustrators in an unusual project based around the parlour game ‘exquisite corpse’, which invites players to create a section of a drawing before passing it onto others to complete. The illustrators taking part in the project, which included James Joyce, Tom Gauld, Supermundane, and Wallzo, each contributed a unique print to the website. All of the images were created in the colour red, to remain in keeping with Richard House’s broader fundraising campaign Go Red!, which encourages participants to raise money for the charity by doing almost anything, such as eating, drawing, singing etc, so long as it involves the colour red. Aside from the colour though, the prints feature wildly different styles, from the intricate to the cartoon-like.The illustrations have been divided into three separate sections – heads, bodies and legs – which users of the site can combine to create their own unique image. Once happy with a drawing, visitors can buy it for just £60, with all proceeds raised on the site going to the Richard House charity. Only one print of each combination will be produced, but with 64,000 possible mixtures of heads, bodies and legs to choose from, the project has the potential to raise approximately £3.8 million. It is ongoing and at the time of going to print there are a number of unique drawings still available on the site.
Amnesty Death To The Death Penalty by Pleix/TBWA\Paris Death To The Death Penalty was launched in October 2010 to help promote Amnesty International’s campaign to abolish the death penalty in the 58 countries around the world that still have it. Written by TBWA\Paris and directed by Pleix through production company Warm & Fuzzy, the film opens with a scene featuring a group of waxy white sculptural figures, not unlike pale toy soldiers. A man tied to a pole is facing a firing squad of four soldiers while an officer barks the command. Then a series of close-up shots show the figures distort and melt and it becomes clear that they are made from candle wax. The rifles begin to droop and the soldiers melt and drip.
Museum of London StreetMuseum app by Brothers and Sisters The Museum of London launched an iPhone app in May 2010 which cleverly brought its extensive art and photographic collections out onto the streets of the UK capital, building on an approach established by its You Are Here ad campaign devised by NB: Studio. The free app, called StreetMuseum and created by Brothers and Sisters, makes use of geo-tagging and Google Maps to guide users to various sites in London where, via the iPhone screen, selected historical images of the city appear. See our original post here
The Creative Review Annual is out now, published as a special 196-page double edition with our May issue. If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine. If you subscribe before Wednesday April 27 you will receive the May issue/Annual as part of your subscription.
On May 19, London plays host to the Brand Perfect Tour, a series of one-day conferences bringing together brand managers, creatives, designers and developers. We have a number of free places (worth £395 each) available for CR readers.
Brand Perfect is organised by Monotype Imaging. There will be three events this year – in London, Hamburg and New York. The London conference is on May 19 at the Century Club, Shaftesbury Avenue.
The idea of the day is to bring together brands and their designers and agencies to discuss how brands maintain consistent communications across all the digital channels now available to them.
Speakers for the London event include JWT CEO Guy Hayward,Wolff Olins‘ Marina Willer, SomeOne‘s Simon Manchipp and Philip Clement of mobile specialist bemoko.
In the afternoon, there will be a series of workshops looking at digital content with a particular emphasis on typography. Jonathan Barnbrook will lead one of them, billed as a guide to basic typography for the uninitiated and aimed at underlining the importance of typography to clients.
Tickets for the event cost £395 but we have a limited number of free tickets available for CR readers. If you would like to apply to reserve a place, please email Sarah Davies with your name, job title and company name at s.davies@centaur.co.uk
For this year’s Annual cover, Minivegas created an A out of every story and image from the CR Blog over the past year. Readers can download the app and have a go yourselves
Our Annual cover each year is based on a different treatment of the letter ‘A’. In 2010, Craig Ward grew the shape out of thousands of pollen cells in an immunology lab. This time, Minivegas, through Nexus Interactive Arts, have, literally, drawn inspiration from our website, creating a downloadable desktop app they call The Annualizer.
Issue and Annual covers from the May edition of Creative Review. Both images were created out of the past year’s online activity from CR using The Annualizer app – text for the issue side, images for the Annual side
“We decided to make an A from CR’s prolific online output,” they say. “We felt that its form should be implied, discernable by its physical influence on elements from CR’s blog and Twitter content. Some of our early efforts were a little abstract, but we settled for wrapping thousands of strips of tape in the loose shape of the ‘A’. The strips would contain words and pictures from the blog.
Close-up of the issue cover
“Using recent blog activity doesn’t really cut it for an annual, so with a little ‘Wget magic’ [a computer programme that retrieves content from web servers], we slurped every article and image from the last year,” they explain. “We got 10,000 unique proper names and places, hashtags and usernames, and about another 5,000 pictures. That’s a lot, even for six images, so the number of comments on a blog post became a metric for how ‘big’ a story and its content ended up in the final image.
The Annualizer in action as it sucks up the content from our website and Twitter feed over the past year to create the letter ‘A’ – various aspects of the image can be adjusted before a final render is downloaded. Try it here
“To add some dynamics, we ran the scene as a cloth simulation to blow our strips around a bit. Exploding the letter is fun, though in the end the shapes looked a bit messy so we toned that down a bit. Final snapshots of strips in motion were exported for a high-quality render,” Minivegas say.
The Annualizer app using images rather than text and (below) close-up of the Annual side cover image from CR May 2011 issue
If you’d like to have a go with the app, it can be downloaded here where there is also a fly-through video. Please bear in mind that it only works on Macs with system OSX10.6 – we’re sorry if this excludes readers with other systems but time and budget constraints didn’t allow us to make other versions available.
Many thanks to Minivegas and Nexus Interactive Arts
Credits Production: MINIVEGAS / Nexus Interactive Arts Producer: Beccy McCray Coding: Dan Lewis / MINIVEGAS Creative direction: Luc Schurgers / MINIVEGAS Art direction for CR: Paul Pensom
The Annual is CR’s biggest issue of the year featuring an additional 100 pages of the best work of the past 12 months. If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine. If you subscribe before Wednesday April 27 you will receive the May issue/Annual as part of your subscription.
Ambient musicians across the globe unite to support Japan relief efforts
As the Japanese earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis begin to fade from the headlines, heartfelt efforts to help the nation recover continue. One that recently stood out brings together a group of ambient recording artists who are stepping up with their talents to support the cause.
The compilation album, called For Nihon, is the work of husband-and-wife musician team Keith Kenniff and his wife Hollie Kenniff. Like that project, this one beautifully fuses music and a digital component; in this case, British DJ Luke Twyman—whose Solar Beat music box caught our attention last year—designed this site allowing visitors to create beautifully-simple circular patterns and sound by skimming a mouse around the page.
The album itself, originally sourced from Twyman’s community of musicians, organically grew to include upwards of 40 contributors, including Rafael Anton Irisarri from the U.S., Japan’s Ryuichi Sakamoto and Robin Guthrie (U.K.).
Pick up the two-disc CD or download it (coming soon) for $20 each, with 100% of sales going to the Japan Society‘s Japan Earthquake Relief Fund.
CR May features an extra 102 pages of great work in The Annual, plus we have features on how designers can help Japan, David Byrne, Penguin’s Great Food series, the late Ron Collins, and Andy Rementer. Our ‘A’ is rendered from data from the blog…
If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a year here and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine. If you subscribe before Wednesday April 27 you will receive the May issue/Annual as part of your subscription.
Minivegas created this month’s cover using a specially created app that stripped out every story and image featured on the CR blog over the past year and rendered the data into an ‘A’ (the project was produced by Nexus Interactive Arts). CR readers will be able to download the app for themselves and we’ll post more details about this, how the cover itself was made, plus a film of the process in action, later in the week.
Inside the May issue we have The Annual, our showcase of the finest work of the year, which includes 12 Best in Book projects and over 100 pages of great work.
In the regular issue, Mark Sinclair looks at the ways that designers can help in times of crisis (and we set a special brief for some students at Kingston University); while Rick Poynor meets David Byrne, a man of many considerable artistic talents.
We talk to Penguin’s Coralie Bickford-Smith about the Great Food series covers.
Also, Andy Cameron examines the rise of the location-based app technology, and where it’s going next; and Mark Sinclair writes about Candy Chang’s Before I Die installation.
In this month’s subscriber-only Monograph, we have a selection of the prints available from the Designers for Japan initiative, which CR has been involved in setting up.
CR May/The Annual is available from April 21.
If you would like to buy this issue and are based in the UK, you can search for your nearest stockist here. Based outside the UK? Simply call +44(0)207 292 3703 to find your nearest stockist. Better yet, subscribe to CR for a yearhere and save yourself almost 30% on the printed magazine. If you subscribe before Wednesday April 27 you will receive the May issue/Annual as part of your subscription.
A day in the life of creating our site makes GPS art to celebrate the new Range Rover Evoque
Advertorial content:
Anticipating tonight’s NYC launch of the Range Rover Evoque it seems like the right time to share a video I’ve been working on as part of my involvement with the Pulse of the City campaign. While the larger program is an evolving, interactive guide to 10 cities, one component is the Pulse iPhone app that tracks your movement and converts it to a piece of digital art. This past January I used the app to track a day in New York visiting a bunch of different venues where I often find inspiration for the site.
Over the last few days, jubilant creatives have been celebrating the news that their work has been shortlisted at D&AD. So why are many of them now retracting their joyous tweets and, in some cases, apologising to clients?
Since last week, D&AD has been releasing the details online of the hundreds of projects that have been selected for In Book inclusion, those Nominated for a pencil, and, under another heading, work that has been Shortlisted. It is this final category that is causing particular confusion.
Yesterday afternoon, one well-known UK design studio tweeted their delight that one of their projects for an international brand had been “shortlisted” at D&AD. By this morning, the tweet had disappeared, as had the one retweet CR recalled seeing.
Many more creatives turned to Twitter to voice their concerns over the confusion that the use of this non-category has generated, and a short statement was added in bold to the newly-published lists of the In Book and Nominated work on D&AD’s website.
“The shortlist is all the work that survived the first round but was not awarded,” it read. This was also the sole response to tweeter, @onlyben, when he asked the organisation what exactly was going on. In another exchange @Visuelleuk tweeted, “It could be a pencil. Bloody confusing though isn’t it with ‘nominated’, ‘in-book’ & ‘shortlisted’.”
Well, yes. To the outsider, even the regular awards categorisation is challenging. The Nominated work can win a pencil and appears in the book; the In Book work, while in the book, cannot be nominated for a pencil. Bringing in a Shortlisted category, for work that isn’t going any further than first round voting, only adds to the nomenclature party.
Another prominent UK-based designer told CR that he has had numerous exchanges with studios that, on seeing their project in the Shortlisted category online, assumed this meant it was in the running for an award and duly passed on the good news to the relevant client.
“I emailed a client to say ‘hey look, well done’ and then yesterday had to write a retraction email,” he said. “Luckily I didn’t fire off ten, otherwise that could have been really sticky. [The] problem seems to be rooted in the fact that ‘shortlist’ sounds better than ‘In Book’.”
That’s true yet, as everyone knows, a shortlist is a narrow group of things; the best of what’s been whittled down from a longlist. It shouldn’t be a retroactively named list of also-rans. But, perhaps, for D&AD it’s another level of recognition to be celebrated? Another chance for the work that nearly made it to garner some praise?
But a quick Google later and The Other Media’s triumphant post on their ‘success’ in the Digital Design category is all too sad to see. You can read the post here. It’s sad because according to the D&AD list online, they don’t actually stand to win anything. They’ve only been “shortlisted” along with 16 others.
“Maybe D&AD were aiming for more transparency,” our anonymous designer continued, “the details of what gets in or what just misses the cut are forever shrouded in controversy. Trouble is [I’m] not sure this has helped. Perhaps they are trying to boost numbers by adding this extra layer. It seems to be embarrassing all round – various people will have got excited to be shortlisted only to find out that hasn’t happened.”
Furthermore, by issuing the details of the work that was considered for the coveted In Book and Nominated positions, entrants can now see exactly how far their work got in that process but still won’t know what stopped it going the extra oh-so-important mile. Equally, those studios and agencies who resort to tactical blanket bombing of the awards sections now have their efforts on show for all to see.
Rather than offering transparency, the designer CR spoke to implied that most of his studio were actually now even more wary of the judging process. That can never be something D&AD would want.
A quick mention of a nice little project for a good cause. For Nihon is a compilation album in aid of the Japan Earthquake Relief Fund: its microsite, designed by Luke Twyman at White Vinyl Design, lets users accompany a soundtrack by mousing over the names of contributors…
The For Nihon compilation features a host of electronic and ambient talent including Robin Guthrie, Ryuichi Sakomoto, Max Richter, Peter Broderick, Olafur Arnalds, Jon Hopkins and Dustin O’Halloran and will be released digitally and as a double CD. All of the proceeds from the sale of the compilation will go to the Japan Earthquake Relief Fund set up by New York’s Japan Society.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
On May 19, London plays host to the Brand Perfect Tour, a series of one-day conferences bringing together brand managers, creatives, designers and developers. We have a number of free places (worth £395 each) available for CR readers.
