Those among you with iPhones and iTouches probably know all about the myriad apps available that can add to the functionality of your Apple devices. What you may not know is that there are enough musical apps to start your own band – as demonstrated rather slickly by London based girl band, The Mentalists, in this viral created by London agency, Wax…
In the film, above, the band perform a cover of MGMT track Kids – entirely on their iPhones /iPod Touches using this selection of very affordable iPhone apps:
Ocarina (£0.59) which you play a bit like a melodica, blowing into the iPhone mic Retro Synth (£0.59) handles the bass line Mini Synth (£1.19) plays the keyboard part Digi Drummer Lite (free)
Please note, the above links will work if you have iTunes installed – and each will take you direct to the appropriate page in the App Store. To download iTunes, click here
While Apple’s current advertising strategy for the iPhone focuses on the usefulness of some of the apps available on its AppStore, this viral was actually created to promote the band, The Mentalists – who also play real instruments.
Credits: Wax Agency, The Mentalists and Steve Milbourne & Phil Clandillon
Armando Iannucci’s In The Loop, the feature-length spin-off from his wonderful political comedy The Thick Of It, is using this rather nice Fairey-inspired teaser poster
The poster features the film’s undoubted star, spin doctor and swearer par excellence Malcolm Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi). The Guardian has an exclusive clip from the film here.
Here’s a well-done stop animation title sequence for Faythe Levine’s documentary, Handmade Nation. Word is it took them 26 continuous hours to complete.
In making this film Faythe Levine traveled over 19,000 miles to document a growing movement of artists, crafters and designers. Fueled by the common thread of creating, Handmade Nation explores a burgeoning art community that is based on creativity, determination and networking. To learn more about the film and where it is showing click here.
Day two of Cape Town’s Design Indaba began very promisingly, with a demonstration of the best that South African animation has to offer. Jannes Hendrikz and Markus Smit from The Black Heart Gang showed their beautiful 2006 short film, The Tale of How. The Black Heart Gang are interesting in that they’re just a trio comprised of a video-maker, an illustrator, and a writer/musician and that, between them, have produced such well-crafted and involving work…
The BHG have also produced a series of 13 prints based on scenes from the film (which was originally written as a poem by Smit). The success of The Tale of How led them onto a similarly sea-bound spot for United airlines, in which a lobster conducts an animal orchestra.
Next up was Commonwealth, the Brooklyn-based studio formed by husband and wife David Boira and Zoë Boira-Coombes.
Impossible to pigeon-hole, these architecturally-trained designers have been responsible for making, or collaborating in producing, all manner of objects where the process of creation often mixes cutting edge technologies with traditional craft.
One of a pair of masks made in SLA photoresin and horse hair, for a collaborative project with Timothy Saccenti
Furniture is key to them, but they’ve turned their hand (and in some cases their studio-based three axis CNC mill) to a range of work: from record sleeves for Warp, vases with Josh Davis designs, bronze door handles to, most recently, a pair of bright green masks, complete with hand-plugged horse hair.
Boira’s father was an artist and in a revealing diptych, a picture of Boira Snr showed him working on a large canvas; clearly an important echo from the past as, twenty years later, a photo of the younger Boira showed him adopting a similar pose as he got to work on a Commonwealth project.
Indeed, for all their contemporary technical know-how (which is vast) and mastery of materials, the pair reveal an innate love of making things.
Morfina door handles, in bronze
They often use animation tools to instigate the design of a project – as in their Fleshless Floor created for a NYC gallery space – but the end result, in this case, also relies on the natural beauty of layered wood and a particular finishing technique that makes the surface look like skin.
Boira-Coombes put it nicely when she said that, for Commonwealth, the “technological tools have given us a change to engage with the traditional processes. They’re a mode for translating your ideas better.”
Table from Commonwealth’s Lard Series
The studio also challenged the ideas of exterior/interior relationships via a beautiful table and bureau set, that reveals a luxurious, wet-looking, sensual area within each sliding drawer; adding an intimacy to an otherwise minimally designed exterior.
“We sometimes don’t know how to control the things we work with,” said Boira-Coombes, “our best work could be in 20 years. We really don’t know what’s coming.” Whatever is, it’s undoubtedly going to be exciting.
From London, interiors, furniture and product designers BarberOsgerby gave a run through of their working process and induced the first collective “ahhhhh” from the audience when they revealed the final outcome of their Iris Table project for Established & Sons on the big Indaba screen:
Blue Iris Table by BarberOsgerby
Each striped segment is a piece of anodised aluminum. It’s heavy and much, much bigger than it looks in this picture (about four feet across at a guess?). I think the BarberOsgerby boys have collected a fair few new fans in Cape Town.
Dai Fujiwara, creative director of Issey Miyake proved to be an inspired choice for the Indaba line-up.
He explained the genesis of the A-POC (A Piece of Cloth) concept and the intrinsic ‘flatness’ of fabric that, in the creation of a garment, becomes three-dimensional. The A-POC idea is centred around interactivity, with the consumer cutting out a shape for an item of clothing from two pieces of material.
The notion of “hidden stories” also permeated Fujiwara’s accounts of the research processes that go on at the Japanese studio. Color Hunting is one such example.
Image: Giovanni Giononni
Fujiwara showed a film of his trip to the Amazon jungle to research the specific colour palette of the environment, to be used in a collection. His team were shown matching colour swatches to giant leaves, tree trunks, flowers and, bizarrely, the river itself.
While such a project certainly raised a few knowing eyebrows, it seemed that – pretentions aside – this was more about the vision of someone determined enough to carry an initial concept through to its conclusion.
Indeed, writing off Fujiwara’s Amazonian Color Hunting as a frivolous exercise was by the by.
What proved interesting was that, rather than one leaf being much the same colour as another, the meticulous colour comparisons revealed a range of “weak greens”, of light beige and, when it came to matching the colour of the river, among the light browns and greys, a hitherto undetected peach tone emerged. Back in the studio the assembled colours looked great and knowing how they were related to one another added something quite special to the work.
Khoda, an ambitious endeavor that was sliced together with 6,000 individual paintings at a rate of 20 per second. The piece took two years for film student Reza Dolatabadi to complete.
Shepard Fairey’s Obama poster and The Guardian’s infographics both appear in the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year show which opens today at London’s Design Museum
When the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year Show debuted last year it had a mixed reaction. ‘Good first attempt, but plenty to think about for next time’ seemed to be the consensus. This year’s exhibition opens today – CR went along to the private view…
I have to declare an interest here – I was a nominator both this year and last. The process is fairly informal. A letter from the Design Museum invites you to suggest worthy projects from the current year (although, judging from some of the work included, time scales are flexible). You can nominate as many projects as you like in whatever categories. And then a few months later they tell you which of your suggestions will feature and ask for some text on your choices.
A segment demonstrating the technology used in Troika’s All The Time In The World installation at Terminal 5 which displays the time in London and at interesting sites around the world – such as the world’s highest mountains or most popular museums
Inevitably, this approach results in what appears to be a fairly random array of projects in the final show, and certainly a selection that differs markedly from the results of the industry award schemes, but it is this idiosyncrasy that I enjoy about it.
The weakness of all award schemes (and, yes, I include our own Annual in this) is that the only way to make them work economically is to have paid entries. Inevitably, then, choice is limited. The Design Museum show, on the other hand, is a totally blank canvas.
The Pixel Clock, designed by Francois Azambourg for Ligne Rosset – the clock’s face is made from honeycomb-effect fibreglass
Tony Mullin’s Green Felt Protest Suit – the idea is that demonstrators can wear the suit in areas in which political protests are banned. When filmed for TV, the protester’s suit will act like a green screen meaning that messages can be projected onto it visible to TV viewers but not the authorities
Juries on award schemes can flatten things out – the majority view holds sway. During judging there are often conversations about how the industry will receive the choices being made – is the selection a fair reflection of the year? Do we have enough of this type of work or that? Should we include a certain project because it did well at a rival scheme?
The Design Museum show method, on the other hand, encourages the quirky and the controversial – pieces of work that one person feels strongly about. That inevitably means that some will divide opinion and, as a result, encourage debate – both about the work and about what constitutes ‘good design’. Which is surely what a good exhibition should be all about.
Personally, I also think that this show is not necessarily about the ‘best’ design projects of the year but more about selecting projects that in some way have had an impact – either by changing thinking or influencing the culture or offering a new viewpoint.
The July 08 Black issue of Italian Vogue featuring only black models
From Onkar Kular and Noam Toran’s The MacGuffin Library – in Hitchcock movies the MacGuffin was always an object at the heart of the story, usually being sought by the protagonists eg The Maltese Falcon. The designers her imagined a new set of such objects, created using rapid prototyping.
There are obvious weaknesses in the show. Relying on the personal experience of the nominators can mean that geographical spread is uneven – I chose the Design Indaba 10×10 housing project, for example, because I had seen it in action in Cape Town.
And from a communications point of view it in no way represents the work that the average designer will have been engaged upon for the majority of his or her year. There are no big branding projects. Very little mainstream work at all. So it doesn’t provide a snapshot of the design industry as most practitioners will experience it. It’s not an accurate portrait of where the majority of activity is, but then neither are most awards.
The work of Job Wouters, aka Letman, including CR’s February cover
What the Design Museum show does provide is an interesting snapshot of where the design profession would like to be. It reveals design’s aspirations and its ideals. For that reason I think it is a valuable addition to calendar.
We just launched a new site celebrating the yellow-clad hero of pressure treated pine: YellaFella, Yellawood’s ambassador of quality building products. Be sure to check out the "Fight the Bad Guy" part if you’re having a tough week and need someone to take it out on. YellaFella launched his first series of commercials about his Adventures in Rotwood. We produced the website over a few short months, working with actors, musicians, cowboys, animators and the 3d effects gurus- The Westside Collective. I helped with art direction and the flash. Aaron did the front-end design work. Check out YellaFella.com
The February issue of Creative Review is out on Wednesday 21 January, with features on Luke Hayman, Letman, Indian advertising, The Guardian’s new home, The Elms Lesters Painting Rooms and more…
Our Work section features first sight of the logo for Condé Nast’s forthcoming Love magazine, Dougal Wilson’s puppet-tastic video for Coldplay and Spin’s identity for Argentina’s PROA gallery
Features include an interview with Pentagram’s Luke Hayman in which he reveals the secret of his success – CR, of course (ahem)
A profile of Job Wouters, aka Letman, hand-lettering artist extraordinaire and brother of our former Creative Future, Roel. Job also designed our cover this month, which carries on our theme of basing the design around a listing of that month’s content. Also, our guest typeface this issue (as seen here) is Dessau Pro Stenzil Variant by Gábor Kóthay, distributed by Fountain
How The Guardian’s editorial design has grown, almost accidentally, into an all-encompassing visual language for the paper, which now includes signage at its new home (by Cartlidge Levene)
And an examination of the role that advertising can play in ensuring that India doesn’t repeat the mistakes of the west in the face of growing consumerism
Plus, in Crit, we have all the usual discussion and comment including a look at advertising’s love of pain
And the all-important findings of our research into studio snacking and listening habits
Plus, subscribers will notice a change to Monograph this month. We are now using this rather beautiful Stephen Sultry Grey cover stock
Inside this month we feature Paul Belford’s collection of vintage Bollywood posters
And here’s the back cover with a key to the various pens that Letman used to design the front
So far, on CR Blog, we have limited the moderation to anything that is openly offensive or potentially libellous. However, of late the quality of the debate here has been suffering from a rash of comments that really contribute nothing.
We don’t mind swearing, but to post a comment along the lines of “shit. the lot of them” or “that’s crap” does nothing to generate the type of informed debate that we hope the site can foster. We are all for criticism but, if you don’t like something, we want to know WHY.
So, as from now, we are instigating a more active moderation policy. Anything that, in the opinion of the moderators, is pointlessly abusive or adds nothing to the debate will be deleted.
And, as a reminder, here are the other criteria that we would ask you to observe:
“CR encourages comments to be short and to the point. As a general rule, they should not run longer than the original post. Comments should show a courteous regard for the presence of other voices in the discussion. We reserve the right to edit or delete comments that do not adhere to this standard.”
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.
