Archive for October 2006

If, in the age of YouTube, blogs, podcasting and BitTorrent, we accept the argument that brands and brand strategies are molecular and that brands should assume a media budget of zero then where do TV spots fit in?

Ed Cotton over at Influx Insights has investigated this further and looked into how Innocent Drinks have attempted to add TV advertising into their communications mix. Ed argues that the TV spot is too limiting.

“The ad does a valiant job of trying to capture the personality, values and texture of the brand, but can’t quite do it justice within the allotted time.

“The problem with TV spots is that they have a “frame”. A set of expectations of what TV ads should be like and what they should feel like. They fit tightly into “pods” and are dispensed out into the world as interuptions to our programing. If you remove the constraints of interuption, pods and time limitations, there’s suddenly a lot more freedom and a lot more territory than can be explored.”

Tokyo Design week is one of the most hotly anticipated events in the design world’s calendar.

This year design blog, Mocoloco, are covering it so that the rest of the world can see what we will be using in the next few years. The first item that they’ve featured is the INFOBAR2 mobile phone from KIDDI Design Studio. Mocoloco say:

“Designed by Naoto Fukasawa. It’s still officially a prototype, but you just know that this thing will go retail.”

Mocoloco

In an attempt to reach a younger market for their LeBron range, Nike has looked for new ways to connect with its audience. The activity includes a pop-up store and a DVD that details the making of the shoe. The NY Times says:

NIKE has been no slouch when it comes to using nontraditional media to help sell shoes and athletic apparel. Now, the company is expanding those efforts to introduce the next version of its successful line of sneakers endorsed by the basketball star LeBron James.

The sneakers — formally known as the Nike Air Zoom LeBron IV — are receiving a sendoff that will include the first episode of “Sports-Center” on ESPN to be sponsored by a single advertiser, scheduled for 6 p.m. tomorrow; the distribution of 400,000 copies of DVDs about the making of the shoe and the ad campaign; saturation advertising on espn.com and mtv.com; a so-called pop-up retail store in Manhattan; video clips appearing as short programs on the MTV2 cable network; and a retro-chic neon billboard near Madison Square Garden that will show a continuously dunking Mr. James.

The campaign also features traditional elements like television commercials and print advertisements. They include Mr. James as “the LeBrons,” characters who represent four sides of his personality and who first appeared last year in ads for the Nike Air Zoom LeBron III shoe.

Nike Reaches Deeper Into New Media to Find Young Buyers - New York Times

Tech site, Gizmodo has some interesting pics of the LRG co-branded T-Mobile sidekick phone. The take you through the unpacking of the phone from the box: shows a lot of care and attention on the part of T-Mobile

Gizmodo, The Gadget Guide:

For all those women who’ve spent hours getting ‘the look’ just right only to see it ruined by a sudden cloud burst, help is at hand. On the hair front anyway.

A couple of entrepreneurs have built a hair straightening vending machine and installed it in over 500 UK locations. The Beautiful Vending Company installs the Straight Up Vending machine’s coin operated units which have built in hair straightening irons for women to fix their frizzy hair. For three quid you can use the hair irons for 90 seconds.

Via Retail Design Diva

Apparently 95% of all the information on the Internet is written language and yet when we think of good web design we normally focus on layout and images.

Over at Information Architects there is a great article on why web design is actually all about typography.

‘Back in 1969, Emil Ruder, a famous Swiss typographer, wrote on behalf of his contemporary print materials what we could easily say about our contemporary websites:
“Today we are inundated with such an immense flood of printed matter that the value of the individual work has depreciated, for our harassed contemporaries simply cannot take everything that is printed today. It is the typographer’s task to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him.”‘

Information Architects argue that it is the job of the IA to “divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to him” in the digital era. They believe that good use of typography is the answer to that.

Via Nosiy Decent Graphics

Here are the latest events on The Purple List (oh yeah, the RSS wasn’t quite fixed up last week - here’s the latest feed):

Photographs from the New World
2006111 NYC : An exhibition of new photographs from
Second Life

C86 Celebration
Oct 27 London : Celebration of the birth of Indie music

Pause Talk
Nov 06 Tokyo : A monthly forum for Tokyo-based creatives

Core 77’s Design 2.0
Nov 15 Boston : Panel discussion on design, technology, and the future

Future Trends
Nov 06 Miami : Miami hosts major insights conference.

Fake News & Real Profits
Nov 07 NYC : A conversation w/ Sean Mills, Pres. of The ONION

Velázquez Exhibition
Oct 18 London : Velázquez exhibit at the National Gallery

Ypulse NYC Teen Media Mashup
Nov 08 NYC : Discussion about the future of teen magazines

Phatgnat Seminar #1
Nov 06 London : Providing insights, trends, recommendations and spotlights on youth-focused developments

For inspiration: Here’s a superb video that looks at modern architecture built in London thirty to forty years ago. The juxtaposition of the architecture with the cars of the time really help us see how visionary some of the projects were.

Light pen art has taken off in a big way in Japan and the films are starting to hit the web.

PikaPika have some fantastic examples of this beautiful and moody film technique. Over at the Staufenberger Repository they describe it as:

“basically light pen based long exposure stop-frame animation (shot in the low light of course). Nothing more to say except that it delivers amazing results. There has been quiet a bit of of excitement about this for a while now so it shouldn’t be too long before we see it put to use in an ad if it hasn’t been already.”

Read the rest of this entry »