Hasta La Ideas

London College of Communications has announced the line-up for its annual Green Week – a series of free talks, exhibitions and workshops exploring environmentally conscious creative work.

This year’s theme is survival and the five-day programme, which runs from February 10-14, includes a look at environmental and ethical photography, design, film-making, journalism, product design and architecture projects.

Nat Hunter and Sevre Davis of the RSA will be debating design for social impact, Tom Hunter and Robert Elms will discuss the theme of home in photography, and the Design Council’s John Mathers will give a lecture on ‘world-changing creativity’.

D&AD is also taking part in the programme, hosting New Blood White Pencil feedback sessions and a two-day National Trust workshop with Fred Deakin. Other hands-on events include a workshop making books from waste materials, an insect-tasting session and activities exploring sustainable materials such as natural dyes, alternative power sources and urban regeneration.

Student and graduate events include an exhibition of design activism from graphic media and design students, an environmental photography show held by LCC alumni and a screening of Brian Hill’s 2010 documentary, Climate of Change, hosted by MA documentary film students.

A full programme is available here. For more info or details on how to book events, see the LCC blog.

How does your pay measure up? Recruitment consultancy Major Players has conducted a creative industry salary survey on design and creative jobs, both permanent and freelance

The survey, Major Players say, is based on 2,000 completed online responses. Participants were asked for their job title, what they were earning, whether their take home pay had risen in the last year, and also their opinions. Using the data collected and, Major Players say, their own expertise, the consultancy has put together the following guidelines on current UK pay levels:

The full survey can be found here

Inspired by toys and board games from their childhood, directing duo Dent De Cuir have produced a musical Gif site playing animations timed to a custom track by French DJ SebastiAn.

An odd but highly entertaining site, PLAY displays a sequence of 17 Gifs designed to match SebastiAn’s 48-second composition.

Each features a cover image or advert for a classic game or toy brought to life with hand drawn animations: Hungry Hippos become man-eating Angry Hippos and GI Joe, a soldier blasting hearts and rainbows. Guessing game Guess Who has also been given a sinister makeover, and Battleships is now a picture of friendship.

Dent de Cuir – Jean-Philippe Chartrand and Benjamin Mege – came up with the idea after being commissioned by fashion trade show Who’s Next to create a video about the theme of this year’s show, toys.

“We decided to approach it as a mini music video. We collaborated with SebastiAn and asked him to create a custom track based on sound samples from toys. On completion, however, we felt like [it] wasn’t properly suited to that media, and came up with the idea of an interactive web platform with musical Gif sequences,” they say.

SebastiAn was given “full creative freedom” to produce the track and after receiving the final edit, Chartrand and Mege selected visuals and created animations based on the sounds and toys sampled.

The pair have directed several music videos for electronic acts, including Evil Twin for Modeselektor which made the official selection at last year’s SXSW festival and one for electronic duo Neosignal featuring Barbie dolls and Star Wars figurines.

They met while working as graphic designers and describe their process as a mix of “hands-on creativity and experimentation.”

“We are very inspired by popular culture…being both kids from the eighties, it was a treat for us to go back to our childhood toys chests and have a second thought about these objects we were raised with,” they add.

Our February issue is an illustration special including our pick of this year’s Pick Me Up artists (the work of one of whom, Carine Brancowitz, features on our cover), BBH’s Mark Reddy on illustration in advertising plus what an agent can do for you. And: designing sounds for cars, the future of news and what we can all learn from the marvellous Mr Paul Smith

The February 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.

February’s focus on illustration kicks off with a discussion with four leading illustrators’ agents on the state of the industry, how illustrators can develop their career and what agents look for in new talent

Then we profile four up-and-coming illustrators from those selected to exhibit at this year’s Pick Me Up graphic art fair

And BBH head of art Mark Reddy reveals why illustration can sometimes be a hard sell to advertising clients and the advantages it can bring when done well

Too busy to keep up with everything online? Our new Month in Review section brings together all the main creative talking points and our pick of work from the previous four weeks along with your favourite columnists

Plus, amazing ‘pareidolic’ (look it up!) imagery from Graham Fink’s show at the Riflemaker gallery

Five things our columnist Gordon Comstock learned from his former employer Paul Smith, a master of branding

What should an electric car sound like and what effect will that have on our cities? We report on the efforts of a group of designers to re-engineer the sounds of our streets

France is to have its first ever festival of graphic design – will it help improve the standing of the industry?

US adman Gerry Graf (creator of the genius Skittles campaign) shares his tips on creative success

How much do we need to know about designers’ personal lives? Rick Poynor argues that an exhaustve new study of the ‘multi-active’ Dutch master Jurriaan Schrofer takes the design monograph to a whole new level of biographical detail

While Andy Cowles reviews Francesco Franchi’s timely examination of the future of editorial design, Designing News

And our Monograph this month documents the extraordinary graffiti-covered Magasins Généraux building in Paris, soon to become the new home of ad agency BETC

The February 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.

The BBC has launched a series of interactive guides about World War One using its new digital learning platform, iwonder.

iwonder is a responsive platform that combines archive footage and original content to create immersive online learning resources. Eight guides were launched yesterday to coincide with the start of the BBC’s World War One programming season, another 17 will be released this month and 100 by the end of this year. The platform will also be used to provide guides covering art, food, science, history and religion.

At bbc.co.uk/ww1, users can explore subjects such as poetry’s impact on our understanding of the war, censorship of the press during conflict and how World War One affected women’s rights.

Each guide is a separate web page divided into seven or eight key points and includes original editorial, video and audio content as well as imagery sourced from various archives including the Mary Evans Picture Library, infographics and a ‘where next’ section linking to external sites for further reading.

The BBC says the guides are designed to provide audiences with a deeper understanding of the war and challenge common misconceptions about the conflict. Each features commentary from a different broadcaster or expert, from composer Gareth Malone to journalist Katie Adie and historians Dan Snow and Neil Oliver.

The mix of content is fascinating and includes a timeline plotting the daily routine of soldiers in the trenches, excerpts from a BBC 4 documentary on wartime plastic surgery techniques and journalist Stephen Gibbs reading extracts from his great grandfather’s account of working as a war correspondent at the British Army Headquarters. There are also interactive quizzes and multiple choice questions.

Andy Pipes, executive product manager of knowledge and learning at the BBC, says the iwonder service will provide a new way of presenting content compared to publishing traditional editorial or broadcasting TV shows and podcasts online.

“More and more of our audiences are accessing our content via mobile and tablet devices…for the first time this past Christmas, the proportion of people visiting the BBC Food website from a tablet or smartphone was larger than those visiting from a PC. This trend is set to continue. With the look and feel of native mobile applications getting ever more immersive, our audience’s expectations of accessing content on their phones and tablets is high. Expecting our users to struggle to navigate a full “desktop” website on a tiny screen isn’t acceptable any longer,” he says.

When designing the service, Pipes says staff were inspired by immersive editorial offerings such as the New York Times’ Snowfall story – but needed a more responsive platform that could be easily updated and adapted.

“We noticed that most [engaging web experiences] seemed to be one-offs and didn’t work well on mobile devices. We were adamant we wanted our new format to have all the qualities of this class of highly immersive story – but tailored for every device – whilst being straightforward for editorial teams to reproduce quickly and repeatedly,” he explains.

To meet these requirements, production staff created a system that’s designed to work seamlessly on tablets, smartphones and computers. Rather than creating bespoke code for each guide, the iwonder platform uses a single framework that editorial staff can update to provide new guides in just a few hours or days.

To make sure pages load quickly on any device, Pipes says the team have developed a system “that loads just the essential components of the page at the right times. Mobile-sized images download first, then when the page’s Javascript detects the browser’s capabilities, higher resolution images get ‘loaded in dynamically’,” he says.

“For pictures with a dense amount of information on them, such as infographics, it’s important not just to resize a smaller version of a big image, but to load in a completely different image that’s best for that screen,” he adds.

The system is also programmed to load the correct media player on any device – so Apple users won’t be offered Flash player – and Pipes says it’s designed to work with older web browswers or those that don’t use Javascript.

This attention to detail is also evident in the guide’s design: icons, headers and linear layouts make pages easy to navigate and browse in small chunks. “It was important for the whole effect to feel manageable, digestible in a single sitting,” a spokesperson told CR.

“The use of circular icons to denote progress also had a subtle effect of moving from dark tones to lighter ones – illuminating new steps of the journey. In terms of response times, especially on mobile devices, care has been taken to eliminate any large graphics that don’t serve the content’s purpose.”

In designing iwonder, the BBC has produced a compelling online platform that’s both a valuable learning resource and a great marketing tool, showcasing the broadcaster’s breadth of content and promoting programmes past and present. Its intuitive design means even those who rarely browse the web should feel comfortable using the service, and the flexible coding framework provides a simpler, more cost effective alternative to bespoke, one-off experiences.