Those among you who read CR in its papery magazine form will be aware of our regular selections of great new gadgets and products aimed at creative types. The above image was created especially for our January edition by photographer Stephen Seal, using our latest pick of products. As it’s that special time of year when minds can go blank instead of producing brilliant gift ideas, we thought we’d flag up the products here on the blog – along with a bit more info about each of them..
Scandyna speakers have long been a favourite with the design conscious. Shown here is the recently launched Micropod Dock Pack (£299) featuring Scandyna’s iPod dock and a pair of the new Micropod SE Active speakers. Full specs at scandyna-speakers.com
If you can’t afford a Giclée printer, Canon’s new PIXMA ix7000 inkjet printer is the next best thing. It’s perfect for printing photographs and small posters and outputs at up to A3 size. £399 from canon.co.uk
The oval form of Pure’s Sensia Radio houses a 640 x 480 pixel screen on which users can browse internet radio stations, keep up with Twitter and a range of other apps, or simply upload a photo to display in the space instead. £250 from pure.com
Mulberry has just released a new range of products inspired by Apple products. For our selection of products we picked out the Oak Brynmoore tan laptop bag (£550) from the mens selection (shown above) and a ladies iPhone bag (£150, shown below with the rest of the ladies range. More details at mulberry.com The watch casements of the new Jelly Watch range by Toy Watch all pop out of their straps – the idea being you can choose a strap / watch face colour combo to suit your mood / outfit. £130 per watch. £20 for additional straps. stockists: 0207 278 0648. Design one at toywatchusa.com
Digital radio specialist Revo’s new Heritage Radio takes its design cues from 50s and 60s table top radios but is packed full of modern features. DAB and DAB+ digital radio, internet radio with wi-fi and LAN connectivity so you can stream music from your computer, and – of course, iPod docking with full control and charging. And we can’t help but love the combo of real walnut veneer, brushed aluminium and tactile rubber. £229.95 from revo.co.uk
Sony Eriscsson’s new Xperia X2 phone looks to occupy territory somewhere between the Blackberry and Apple’s iPhone. It runs on Windows 6.5, has an 8.1 Megapixel camera and a rather nice flip-out QWERTY keyboard. Initially available only on Vodafone in the UK – full specs at sonyericsson.com
Artist Alfio Bonanno and architect Christophe Cornubert will present an installation representing a metric ton of carbon dioxide in Copenhagen next month, while the city hosts the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). (more…)
And once you have clicked through to a particular event…
Hoffi were awarded the project in July. They were asked to accommodate NTW’s existing online activities, including an online community with over 1,000 active members and also to work with the NTW brand language and imagery that have been developed by Elfen over the past year. Artistic director of NTW John E McGrath says: “Hoffi took a complex brief – a new national theatre company with strong ideas about it’s identity, a pre-existing social network and a graphic design team on board – and managed to do something that was uniquely imaginative while clearly in step with the decisions already in place.”
Elfen’s work for NTW involved developing the brand language, and its application on various media (brochure above and images below). Elfen’s Guto Evans explains that “The brochure is the inital publication to create an interest in the Theatre’s work, they want to involve the audience, writers and performers in the process of creating and influencing the first 12 months of the theatre’s productions.”
“As part of the development and initial research, and then creative expression derived from National Theatre Wales’s brief, we took a physical journey, created spaces in the landscape and documented the process. We investigated how landscape influenced societies, and where society has shaped landscapes, later this process fed into the brand identity visuals.” The idea, Evans explains, is that these spaces are continually filled with different content, just as the theatre is.
The final group of artist contributions to Diesel’s Only The Brave online exhibition space are now up
To promote Diesel’s Only The Brave perfume, Paris-based digital studio HelloHikimori created an online exhibition space in which invited imagemakers each created their own ‘room’.
The site launched back in the spring but new batches of artists have been added every few weeks. The last six projects – from Si Scott, MWM, Lapp Pro, Suprb, eBoy, and JeremyVille – are now up.
Amp London is behind a new website for Antony Gormley that documents thousands of the artist’s drawings and sculptures…
The site – antonygormley.com – took two years to realise and contains a wealth of imagery of Gormley’s work since the early 1970s. It also features numerous unpublished pieces, sketches and drawings.
According to Amp much of the hard work is behind the scenes ensuring that, despite being an image-heavy site, the pages load up quickly. The navigation is also nicely done, with a clean list of Gormley’s pieces listed as thumbnails leading through to larger versions and captions.
“For the gallery pages we had to build an image viewer that could handle an unlimited number of images,” explains Amp’s Chester Chipperfield. “The site was built from the ground-up using custom components and it uses a combination of server-side caching and image loading and unloading, depending on if the image is ‘on’ or ‘off’ the screen. The search feature also uses our own backend indexing utilities.”
In the Resources section there are also numerous essays, photographs of his studio, and audio and videos files for the committed Gormley fan including, a little bizarrely, his 1998 appearance on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
Design Team: Chester Chipperfield, Melanie Bartheidel, James Hurst, Hugh Charrington. Development Team: Russell Hall, Oliver Brook, Bryan Hunt, Rory Cullen, Adrian Ma.
Crest, Jeep, Burger King and Obama were the big winners in the annual totting up of who won most advertising awards worldwide this year
Each year The Gunn Report pools the results of advertising awards schemes worldwide to produce a series of tables listing the biggest winners in each medium, as well as the agencies, countries and advertisiers who performed best in awards over the course of the past year. It gives points to ads winning gold, silver, bronze etc in each of the leading awards, weighting them to reflect the differing importance of the various schemes. Then it tots up the points to produce its tables.
In commercials, Saatchi & Saatchi (New York) took top honours with its Crest campaign outdoing every other spot.
GPY&R (Melbourne)’s Schweppes Burst ad came joint second with Shelter House of Cards by Leo Burnett (London) and Skittles Pinata by TBWA\Chiat\Day (New York):
In Print, BBDO/Proximity (Kuala Lumpur)’s Jeep Two Worlds campaign came top:
Joint second were CLM BBDO (Boulogne-Billancourt)’s Dissolve Your Problems for Alka Seltzer
And BMP DDB London’s Harvey Nichols Bristol ads
In Interactive, Crispin Porter’s Whopper Sacrifice campaign, whereby Facebook users were encouraged to ditch their ‘friends’ in exchange for free burgers, came top. Second was Goodby, Silverstein & Partners for Wario Land Shake It for Nintendo
Gunn’s All Gunns Blazing category is for campaigns that don’t fit easily into the above three. The big winner here was the Obama election campaign. Droga5 took second for its Million scheme to promote attendance in New York schools (see here). Third was BBH (New York) for Oasis Dig Out Your Soul – In The Streets campaign where the band taught street musicians in New York to play songs from their new album
The US was the most awarded country in the world (once again) with the UK second, Argentina third. Volkswagen was the advertiser that won most awards, with Nike second and Axe/Lynx third.
The most awarded ‘traditional’ agencies were DDB London, folowed by Almap BBDO (Sao Paulo) and Dentsu (Tokyo & Osaka). In INteractive, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (San Francisco) came top, followed by Crispin Porter + Bogusky (Boulder, CO & Miami) and Bascule Inc (Tokyo).
The most awarded networks were BBDO, DDB and Ogilvy & Mather.
Overall, there was little change in terms of the names picking up the major prizes last year. As Gunn reveals:
The top 5 Countries of 2009 were exactly the same as last year and in the same order.
Six of the top 10 Advertisers were in last year’s top 10. And the world’s most awarded advertiser of 2009 has topped the table for 9 years out of 11.
The top three in the Traditional Agencies table have between them topped this table in 6 years out of 11. And 9 of the top 15 were in last year’s top 15.
Three of the top 4 in the Interactive Agencies table were in the top 4 last year. And all 3 of them have topped the table in the three years Gunn has had it.
The top 8 Agency Networks of 2009 were exactly the same as last year (but not in the same order). And the world’s most awarded agency network of 2009 has now topped this table for 7 years out of 11.
This is a period of unprecedented change in advertising, yet Gunn paints a picture of a static industry. So what’s going on – are the same names dominating because they have the budgets to carpet bomb schemes around the world or have they just adapted fast to the new realities? Are awards juries stuck in a time warp or, in terms of innovation and genuine ‘creativity’, does Gunn paint a false picture of who is doing the best work?
Does it matter? Well it does in the sense that both agencies and clients use Gunn as the basis for some major decisions – over who gets appointed by clients, over who gets hired by agencies and over renumeration packages. And it certainly matters within agency networks as they assess the output of each office.
More info and details of how to buy a copy of the report here
McCann Erickson Manchester has created a poster campaign for a mental health organisation that combines photography and Processing to great effect
The two six sheet posters are for Leeds Counselling and will appear in doctors’ surgeries, clinics, student halls and other suitable locations throughout Leeds.
They feature faces are made of ‘strings of type’ recounting the types of issues people need to discuss at counselling. The images were created by San Francisco-based ‘Scloopy’ using a piece of software he wrote in Processing.
“We supplied him with black and white shots (by photographer Steve Deer) and text,” explains McCann creative partner Richard Irving. “The software takes the image and draws little lines all over it. The tips of the lines look for brightness in the image. It acts like a fungus and grows in real time to produce the finished result. No two images are ever the same, even if the same info is used.”
Irving says that there are plans to create a ‘live’ version of the process for the web and possibly a cinema commercial.
Dutch independent magazine OK Periodicals has created what it claims is the world’s first crowdsourced magazine cover.
OK Periodicals is a biannual featuring up and coming and established creative talent published by Arnhem-based design studio OK Parking and Bouwe van der Molen Graphic Design. Its third issue took the theme Repeat, hence the cover idea. The OK team designed a front and back cover, then split it into hundreds of small segments.
Original front cover
Original back cover design
Through its blog, OK then appealed for contributors to take a segment each and re-do it in their own style.
Over a week, the contributions came in and were assembled to make the final cover. So, for example, one person received this piece of the original cover and came back with this version of their own.
So this original segment
Became this in the final artwork
This
became this
And this
changed to this
The final front cover looked like this
And the back like this
Successful? Well, not entirely. Even OK’s William van Glessen admits that the resulting artwork isn’t exactly a thing of beauty: “Okay, maybe it’s not very beautiful or aesthetically pleasing,” he says. “But that’s a thing I’m never looking for. The proces of this design and the experimental way of achieving it was for me the most pleasing aspect.”
And, of course, all of the hundreds of people who contributed their segment will presumably want to buy a copy, which has to be good for sales.
GAP’s new Christmas viral – where you can email various seasonal ‘chants’ as performed by a dance troupe to your friends – is objectionable for many reasons, most of which explain themselves when you click on this link. (Be warned, it will take you several hours to recover your equanimity).
But a missed ‘forward slash’ in their list of cheery numbers, gives their message a whole new meaning.
Take the two ‘chant’ names, “Good luck with that bird” (a chant about cooking your Christmas dinner) and “You office party hardied” (a chant about embarrassing yourself at the office party).
Run the two phrases together, as the Cheer Factory site unfortunately does, and you have something that sounds a little ruder:
Give us a P. Give us an R. Give us an O. Give us an O. Give us an F. Give us an R. Give us an E. Give us an A. Give us a D. Give us an I. Give us an N. Give us a G.
The latest issue of Distill, the magazine that aggregates content from style magazines around the world, is to be released as an iPhone app.
Tha app replaces the printed magazine for this issue.
As with previous print issues, the Distill app features fashion and art photography from around the world. Contributing magazines include: A Magazine, Acne Paper, Big Man, Dansk, Exit, Fashion Tale, Hercules, Huge, Interview, Lemon, Man About Town, Men’s File, Muse, Numero, Please, Ponytail, The Room, Rubbish, S Mag, Sang Bleu, Sleek, Slurp, Soon, Swallow, Tokion, V, Volt, Vice, WAD, Wound, and Zink.
Here’s a clip of it in action:
A lot of magazines are currently scrambling to ‘do an app’, some because they believe it represents a genuine opportunity, some just because, well, everyone else is doing one. Distill’s content would seem to lend itself well to the format. The app provides not just imagery but also information on what inspired it and credits. For art directors, it provides a handy does of inspiration and the images, at least in the demo, appear to work well on the backlit screen.
Certainly the fact that users are willing and able to pay for content via iPhone apps has a lot of publishers excited. It also appeals to sponsors who are willing to pay more to be associated with an app than they would to run ads on a website – the Distill app is sponsored by Swatch and was developed by ustwo™.
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.
