Hasta La Ideas

Thomas Allen’s book cover art, as featured in issue 1 of It’s Nice That

Since April 2007, Will Hudson and Alex Bec have trawled the internet for great creative work and published their findings on their blog, It’s Nice That. Two years on, and in and interesting online-to-print transformation, they have just published the first in a series of printed editions of the best of their posts, offering more in-depth articles and images from their favourite projects…

“Although we recognise their importance, we didn’t want to try and produce another design magazine as they typically exist – we wouldn’t have done as good a job and that’s not where our skills lie,” say HudsonBec on the It’s Nice That website.

“Instead, we want to publish an archive of the most interesting work with nice big images and a suitable amount of copy, a series of conversations with interesting figures within the industry, as well as publishing some more unexpected content written by current practitioners.”

Issue 1 includes work from, among others, Peter Callesen, Bryan Dalton, Karl Grandin, Happypets, Myoung Ho Lee, Oliver Jeffers, PES, Alex Trochut, Julien Vallee and Felice Varini and is available here for £10.

A list of stockists is here.

There are also interviews with Jacob Dahlgren, Hort, Michael Hughes, Riitta Ikonen, Hugo & Marie, Andy Rementer and Roel Wouters, and features written by Andreas Konrath, Tao Lin, Stewart Smith and Ian Wright.

Issue 2 will be released at the beginning of October this year.

It’s Nice That is designed by HudsonBec in collaboration with Joeseph Burrin
Print by Push
Paper by Fenner

The current issue of CR features The Annual, showcasing the best work of the past year. Nine projects have been chosen for our Best in Book section, the ultimate accolade. We are featuring each of them in a series of posts with additional content to further explain each project. In this post, see how Dare’s Find It app will help you locate your tent at Glastonbury and the stats behind Poke’s Balloonacy project

Dare was lucky enough to be given an open brief from Sony Ericsson to come up with a variety of ways to show off the full GPS capabilities of the brand’s mobile phones. The strategy aimed to provide users with a range of free, useful applications. Dare Labs, the agency’s bespoke new product development department, came up with Find It. The application allows users to tag any object and then navigate to the pre-tagged destination via the HE-100 GPS enabler in the phone. The tagged object could be a parked car, a hotel or, perhaps most useful of all, that particularly hard-to-find tent at Glastonbury. All is explained hereVery useful in the dark, we imagine.

Poke’s Balloonacy project, meanwhile, looks like it will be a fixture at awards shows this year. This film demonstrates how the online balloon race worked:

While this fly through of the race shows the balloon characters and the sites they appeared on -very fast.

Balloonacy 40,000 balloons in 22 seconds from Mattias Gunneras on Vimeo.

And this timelapse film shows how the race panned out on Mattias Gunneras’s blog

Balloonacy time laps from Mattias Gunneras on Vimeo.

Credits

Find It
Entrant: Dare. Client: Mattias Järlevi, Digital Campaign Manager, Sony Ericsson. Innovation Director: Perry Price. Associate Creative Director: Matt Firth. Art Director: Matt Firth. Designer: Ian Fooks. Developers: Ryan McGrath, Sonia Rakotomanantso. Producer: Peter Williams

Balloonacy
Entrant: Poke: Client: Orange. Creative Director: Iain Tait. Art Direction and Design: Nicky Gibson and Marc Davies. Designers: Andrew Zolty and Dickon Langdon. Programmers: Caroline Butterworth, Nilesh Ashra, Mattias Gunneras and Greg Reed. Technical Developers: Derek McKenna and Gabriel Bucknall. Technical Director: Igor Clark. Producer: Mike Pearson. Copy: David Cadji-Newby. Planner: Lise Lauritzen. 3D Animation: JS3D

The current issue of CR features The Annual, showcasing the best work of the past year. Nine projects have been chosen for our Best in Book section, the ultimate accolade. We will feature each of them in a series of posts this week with additional content to further explain each project. In this post, watch a making-of film for James Frost’s Radiohead video and see the responses of filmmakers to the release of its data via Google

The video for Radiohead’s House of Cards, directed by James Frost, is a technological first. Instead of using cameras, the promo was shot entirely by lasers and scanners, giving the images of a party, a street scene, and lead singer Thom Yorke an eerie and enigmatic effect.

The technique is explained in this making-of video:

As befitting the techie quality of the video, it was first released on Google.com. In addition, visitors to the site could also download the data and create their own visualisations, some of which are shown here.

Credits:
Director: James Frost of Zoo Film Productions.
Client: TBD Records.
Producer: Dawn Fanning

The current issue of CR features The Annual, showcasing the best work of the past year. Nine projects have been chosen for our Best in Book section, the ultimate accolade. We will feature each of them in a series of posts this week with additional content to further explain each project. In this post, R/GA’s viNe application for Nokia is explained in a neat video

Nokia viNe is an application developed by R/GA for the phone company’s Nseries devices, all of which have GPS technology built in. The idea is simple: viNe lets people know what you’re up to and where, by geographically tagging your media consumption. For example, if you choose to record a journey using viNe, everytime you listen to an MP3, watch a video or take a photo­graph using your phone, viNe records the media activity and uses GPS to tag each MP3 or photo to the exact location where it was listened to or taken.

It’s all explained in this video created for the project by Airside

London-based design studio Airside celebrates its tenth year of business this year by self-publishing Airside by Airside, a 296-page hardback tome choc full of images of the projects that have not only paid the bills at Airside HQ but have shaped the company.

This is not your typical studio monograph. Dip into the text on any given page and it becomes clear that the intention is not just to show off the work created since the company’s inception in 1999, but also to use the book as a means to contextualise the work within the story of the company’s development…

“When we first talked about doing a book I was very keen that it had something of worth in the narrative,” explains Fred Deakin, who, along with Nat Hunter and Alex Maclean originally set up the company back in 1999. “I was very conscious that I wanted to do something where the narrative would be as interesting as the images. I’ve got loads of design books where I haven’t actually got round to reading the text but if you chose to read ours, I felt really strongly that it needed to be something that would give an insight into why the work was produced and the context and the culture in which the work was produced.”

The book’s hard cover favours pattern over any informational text (rather like a Lemon Jelly record sleeve) – a removable sticker carries the info. Inside, the first thing you notice is that the text on each page is both in English and in Japanese. “It’s partly because of Lemon Jelly,” explains Deakin, referring to the band which he runs along­side the design studio. “The Japanese public are so design literate that, when we first went out there, almost more of them had heard of Airside than had heard of Lemon Jelly, which was quite a revelation. We’ve done a lot of work now in Japan and while I wouldn’t say we’re big there, we’ve got an aware­ness – we’ve done lectures and we’ve had exhibitions in Japan and we’ve all got a real love for the culture. Our Japanese agent suggested the dual narrative and I really like it, it looks really nice. I think it gives the book more weight, more traction.”

This dual narrative that runs throughout the book tells the story of Airside in detail.

“I guess we were trying to do three things with the book,” says Deakin. “We were trying to show off the work that we’re very proud of, but we also wanted to show people how Airside happened because it’s been quite an unusual process. We were very lucky and we took very firm decisions about certain things that we weren’t going to fuck with so I wanted to show that, to make that explicit because that is part of the work really. The values and processes that created each piece of work are crucial, I think, to giving the book that deeper insight which is what I was hoping the people that bought the book might want. The third reason would be that if you are about to set up your own design company then it’s very much a kind of case study, a ‘how to’. If you want to set up a company like Airside then this is exactly what we did, here are our mistakes, here are our successes, this is what we’re proud of, this is what we’re not proud of. We consciously tried to put in the bad stuff as well as the good stuff. I think we expose ourselves really extensively over the course of the narrative – that’s the intention anyway.”

Read the full version of this article in the current issue of CR. Airside by Airside, £35, is available now from airsideshop.com