Scrabble-tastic

A blog post specially for Marie over at Woman Who Talked Too Much... I came across these fantastic designs for a set of interactive beer mats and posters to promote the World Scrabble Championship. The beer mats are perforated so each printed Scrabble piece can be ripped off individually and played with.

I like. I want!

The Evening Standard says sorry, or perhaps it's Sony?

In anticipation of its relaunch next week, The Evening Standard has launched this surprising new campaign (by McCann Erickson), which aims to firmly distance itself from the newspaper’s previous incarnation.

The London newspaper, which was bought by Alexander Lebedev from the Daily Mail earlier this year, has had a reputation for having a somewhat negative take on life in the UK capital. This poster campaign seeks to signal the changes on the way by apologising for various perceived sins, including complacency, predictability and the afore-mentioned negativity. None of the posters mention the newspaper by name, but simply carry its Eros logo.

In my opinion the typography's not great. No power. The Economist would have handled the campaign much more intelligently, and if the Daily Mail were to do something similar, how could it possibly apologise enough?....

Breathtaking real time Earth simulation

Watch population and greenhouse gas emissions grow on this fascinating website that provides CO2 emissions, birth and death rates by country, simulated real time. Worth checking out:

www.breathingearth.net

Balls and Bottoms give way to Wangs in the Surname Game

The number of people in Britain with surnames like Cockshott, Balls, Death and Shufflebottom has declined by up to 75 percent in the last century.

A study found the number of people with the name Cock shrank to 785 last year from 3,211 in 1881, those called Balls fell to 1,299 from 2,904 and the number of Deaths were reduced to 605 from 1,133.

People named Smellie decreased by 70 percent, Dafts by 51 percent, Gotobeds by 42 percent, Shufflebottoms by 40 percent, and Cockshotts by 34 percent, said Richard Webber, visiting professor of geography at King's College, London.

"If you find the (absolute) number goes down, it's either because they changed their names or they emigrated," Webber, author of the study, told Reuters on Wednesday.

He said that in many cases, people probably changed their surnames as they came to be regarded as in bad taste. "It's because the meaning of words can change. Take the name Daft -- that as a term for a stupid is a relatively recent innovation."

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Daft meant "mild" or "meek" in Old English, whereas it means "foolish" today.

Webber also discovered that the most popular names in Britain have not changed over the past 127 years. Last year, Smith, Jones, Williams, Brown, Taylor and Davies held the top five spots, in exactly the same order as they did a century ago.

Webber also found that between 1996 and 2008, the names Zhang, Wang, and Yang and experienced the fastest growth. Zhang rose by 4719 percent, while Wang grew by 2225 percent.

Faceless Watch - nice design

Remember when technology was this simple?

Career evolution: Advertising

Jesus appears in Kit Kat bar

First it was images of the Virgin Mary appearing in a grilled cheese sandwich. Now Jesus Christ himself has apparently turned up in a Kit Kat bar.

Dutch website NU.nl has published a picture of the Christlike confectionary submitted by a reader, saying it welcomed Jesus apparitions on Good Friday.

The reader reported: "I took a bite of a chocolate bar and then I saw a face in the bar."

While he found religious apparitions of recent years "all rather far-fetched", the reader said two work colleagues also could see the iconic image.

However another reader of NU.nl suggested the face looked more like Star Wars character Darth Vader.

Joel Bauer’s American Psycho-style analysis of the intricacies of the business card left me intrigued.... and somewhat scared.

Joel Bauer, ‘Author, Mentor and Infotainer’, tells us why his business card, which took 25 years to design, is oh so much better than yours.

Ginger kid girating

This small ginger child - and another I assume to be his sister - are cutting shapes, shimmying hips and pulling dance moves which would really be more appropriate if they were ten years older. I can only wonder: where were the parents? Behind the camera?

It *is* funny as hell though...

Button injured in horrific F1 accident

Juice boxes

Enticing, eh?

Microsoft attack ad criticised by Apple Mac bloggers

Microsoft has launched another US ad attacking Apple Macs, featuring a student trying to find the best value computer for $1,500.

The TV spot shows the "technically savvy" student, Giampaolo, handed the cash with the promise that he can keep whatever he buys.

Surveying computers in a large store, he rejects a Mac because he thinks they are "more about aesthetics than computing power".

Outrageous!

In the end, he plumps for a HP PC (poor guy).

The ads have struck a nerve on the internet, with pro-Mac bloggers outraged by the new ad.

Tom Reestman, writing on the Apple Blog, said: "The star of the new ad, Giampaolo, claims to be technically savvy, and then spends the rest of ad proving he’s not."

Prince McLean, writing on Apple Insider, said: "The strangest point of this ad is that Giampaolo didn't get the portability, battery life, and power he was looking for, he just ended up with a cheap-appearing machine that obscured its real technical limitations under a flashy layer of misleading, specification-oriented marketing, the very thing he thought he was avoiding with HP: buying a brand rather than a computer."

The ad is the second in the "laptop hunter" series by Crispin Porter & Bogusky.

Blast from the past: Levi's 'laundrette' by Bartle Bogle Hegarty

The year is 1985, and the Levi's brand is perceived as old fashioned and, at a time of much anti-American feeling, uncool.

The launderette commercial, promoting Levi’s classic 501s, was the breakthrough.

John Hegarty and the writer Barbara Nokes recreated an image of 50s Americana that presented 501s as alternative to punk’s scruffiness.

The spot wasn’t only beautifully shot but had humour and sex appeal in the form of teen idol Nick Kamen.

It was also an early example of successful integrated marketing. Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine soundtrack was re-released with the Levi’s logo on the record sleeve and shot into the charts.

As for Levi’s sales, they had soared by 800 per cent within a year of the 501s re-launch.

Cruising with Andrew Bush

By attaching a camera to the passenger side window of his car, LA photographer Andrew Bush took photos of his subjects whilst driving (often travelling at 60mph) beside them in and around LA, a city famous for it's car culture. He named the series Vector portraits and from this published a book entitiled Andrew Bush - Drive . For more of this and some of his other work visit www.andrewbush.net

Swedish ad students use Twitter and blog to 'pitch' for global Adidas brief

The Swedish ad agency Volontaire has challenged three of its interns to achieve the impossible: win the Adidas worldwide creative account within three weeks.

The agency has challenged the three students to develop ideas for a pitch presentation to Adidas and to blog progress of their ideas at www.theimpossiblepitch.com.

Volontaire is asking the students to adopt the Adidas approach of "impossible is nothing" in a bid to illustrate some of the agency's core beliefs, including that great ideas can come from anywhere and that companies no longer have the power to control their brands.

The students, who all attend Berghs School of Communication in Sweden, will reveal their full presentation on the website on Friday.

They have also been posting their thoughts and ideas on Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube.

Apple shows off iPhone improvements – including cut, copy and paste + MMS messaging

It might not sound much, but to the 17 million owners of Apple iPhones worldwide, it's a big thing: the next version of its software, to be released this summer, will allow users to cut, copy and paste content between pages.

As well as cut and paste, the next version of the software – which will be free to iPhone owners, but cost iPod Touch owners $9.95 – will let them do system-wide searching, record voice memos, play games or interact wirelessly with nearby iPhone or iPod Touches, subscribe to online calendars, and possibly – depending on the mobile networks' agreement – use their phones as wireless broadband modems.

Owners of the 3G iPhone, released last July, will be able to send picture messages – a standard phone function that has been missing previously. Owners of the older version, first sold in June 2007, will not benefit because it does not contain the necessary radio hardware, Apple said.

Other additions include "push" notification, so that instant messaging programs can in effect run in the background and alert the user when a new message arrives.

Not everyone will be satisfied. Video recording has not been enabled via the iPhone's camera; nor have video calls. Apple's executives were evasive too about the possibility of being able to type onto the iPhone's screen via full-sized keyboards connected via the Bluetooth wireless system. That would enable truly mobile working - but it might not be allowed by the new system.

"Apple chose to implement well rather than do a lot," commented Ian Fogg of Jupiter Research about the update. "Right choice in my opinion. If we'd had all this earlier [it] would be less well executed."

Photo Manipulations: Erik Johansson

Erik Johansson, a young talented artist from Sweden, creates remarkable images by digitally modifying photographs that he takes himself. Here's a selection of his very impressive photo manipulations.

Kaleidoscope your site.

Turn your site (or anyone else’s for that matter) into a kaleidoscope by entering the URL and sitting back to watch all the JPG images from that page 'kaleidoscop-ed' for your viewing pleasure.

Here are some stills from this page of the Cinnamon Creative site. Try it for your site - you'll love the results!

Thanks to Holster for this excellent find.

The future of advertising

Click to enlarge.

99% Conference

The 99% conference looks great.

Confirmed speakers include Google Creative Director, Ji Lee, plus Michael Bierut, partner at the multi-disciplinary design studio Pentagram, and the guys that started Threadless, as well as marketing guru, Seth Godin.

Great line-up!

Days With My Father by Phil Toledano

Phil Toledano recently released a photo essay titled Days With My Father. A touching compilation of photos taken after the death of Toledano's mother, the images give an intimate look at the father-son relationship and serve as a time capsule of the period. Although very simple and sparse, the series captures huge emotion.

Created by Fashionbuddha, the elegant design and functionality of the site compliments the work by allowing the photos to stand on their own and speak for themselves. I found it to be inspiring and at times heart-wrenching.

www.dayswithmyfather.com

Layer Tennis

Layer Tennis is a series of live design events on Friday afternoons presented by Adobe Creative Suite 4.

Two competitors swap a file back and forth in real-time, adding to and embellishing the work. Each artist gets fifteen minutes to complete a "volley" and then we post that to the site live.

The players may be designers, animators, illustrators or pretty much anything else, and they can use any tool or application they like. The match progresses volley by volley.

A third participant, a writer, provides play-by-play commentary on the action as it happens.

The match lasts for ten volleys and when it's complete, opinioned Season Ticket Holders sound off and we declare a winner. Check Tennis HQ for more information and links to past matches.

www.layertennis.com

Pretty Funny

Grid-based design - two essential tools

Grid systems bring visual structure and balance to website design. As a tool grids are useful for organising and presenting information. Used properly, they can enhance the user experience by creating predictable patterns for users to follow. From designer’s point of view they allow for an organized methodology for planning systematic layouts.

www.grid.mindplay.dk is an amazingly useful website - it's a handy tool for dabbling around with grids and typography when starting a new website design.

GridFox is a Firefox extension which places a grid on top of any website. If you’ve started your design from a grid-based layout, you can now easily check to make sure everything is lining up the way you had planned.

How TV ads are taking the net by storm

Companies such as Cadburys are increasingly using TV spots to launch their ad campaigns online.

As a piece of entertainment, it runs the gamut from highbrow to lowbrow. The latest TV commercial from Cadbury, in which two schoolchildren's eyebrows "dance" along to a funky soundtrack, has been hailed as proof that - for advertisers - the internet, not television, is now king.

The one-minute film opens with a boy and girl sitting in a photographer's studio waiting to have their portrait taken. But the photographer leaves the shot when the boy starts an electro tune, "Don't Stop the Rock" by Freestyle, on his digital watch and the children break into a choreographed eyebrow dance in time to the music. The little girl - wearing a dress in trademark Cadbury purple - produces a balloon, which she uses as an unusual sound accompaniment.

The ad had its premiere during the final of Celebrity Big Brother on Channel 4 and has frequently been on TV since. But it is online that "Eyebrows" has gone "viral" and picked up unstoppable momentum. American rapper and producer Kanye West posted a link to the video on his blog, while celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton featured it with the comment: "The UK definitely seems to be doing them better! Click here to check out a super-cool new commercial." Actor and writer Stephen Fry gave it a further boost via his posts on the microblogging site Twitter.

Cadbury now estimates that the video has been watched more than four million times on YouTube and other sites - more than double the number racked up at the same stage by an earlier Cadbury cult hit, featuring a gorilla playing drums to Phil Collins's In the Air Tonight.

The company has struck a deal with Orange to give away the latest ad's soundtrack as a mobile phone ringtone, which was downloaded 125,000 times in the first 11 days.

"Eyebrows", created by the agency Fallon in a £3.7m campaign, has also spawned numerous parodies, from imitation eyebrow dancers including Lily Allen and Alan Carr, whose rendition on Channel 4's The Sunday Night Project has become a YouTube hit in its own right. Cadbury's website invites visitors to enter an eyebrow dancing competition called "Jivebrow 09", promising an audience of millions.

Lee Rolston, director of marketing for Cadbury Dairy Milk, said: "TV and online are morphing almost daily. We tend to put our first ads in big things such as the Big Brother final or the X Factor, then it's immediately online, which becomes a very fluid, organic process. People tend to interact with the films and make their own versions and their own music. We just let it go and see what people think of it.

"It's down to the quality of the film, and how it makes you feel, to how successful it is as a piece of online film. It should surprise and delight you so you want to pass it on, and the best medium for that is online."

From Media Guardian

Happy Valentine's

Kazunori Yamazaki, a 51-year-old Japanese farmer was astonished when a baby ox was born on his farm complete with a heart-shaped marking on its forehead.

The creatively-named 'Heart' was born 20 days ago at the Yamakun farm in Fujisawa, near Tokyo.

The paradox of PLEASE

This is great.

From the ever-educational Logic+Emotion.

New Cinnamon Creative Site

Cinnamon Creative has a fabulous new website! Have a look round and let us know what you think.

www.cinnamoncreative.com

Pimp that snack

If you’re stuck for ideas for that special someone on Valentine’s Day, check out Pimp That Snack. Many treasures to be found. Favourites are the toffee crisp, chocolate button, twix, creme egg and number one the party ring.

Thanks to It's Nice That.

How to make the most out of Snow Day

A huge group effort by random strangers on Hampstead Heath helped to produce an enormous snowball that was eventually pushed down the hill after much protestation from the safety police.

New website is the 'Google for Films'

For the first time the release dates for every film and DVD available in the UK, and where to watch or obtain them lawfully, has been put on a single website.

Seeing itself as the “Google for films”, the site from the UK Film Council lets visitors find out when, where and how a film is available, legally and on across all formats.

FindAnyFilm.com will be updated daily, but already offers more than 30,000 unique film records – the equivalent to seven years’ worth of film – for its users to search. Like most movie searches, the site lets users enter the genre of a film but it can also run keyword searches by mood, location or film preferences, like ‘fairytale ending.’

The thinking behind the site, beyond giving film addicts their fix, is to combat the piracy that costs British TV and film-makers a reported £485m a year in lost revenue.

London snow provides blank canvas for branding

An innovative and quick-thinking creative agency, took advantage of yesterday's blizzards to deliver a 'snow-tagging' campaign for sports channel, Extreme.

Curb, which provides branding and advertising solutions using only natural resources, stamped over 2000 Extreme logos onto 350 London locations.

Parked cars, post boxes, walls and central London’s shopping hub Oxford Street, were all branded with the logo, which was applied using a laser cut stencil.

Al Gosling, CEO of Extreme Group, said: "Extreme has a long history of both branding innovation and association with alpine adrenaline living, but it’s not very often we get to bring these both together onto the streets of London.

Review of 10 trends that will affect brands and business in 2009

Click here to read the 10 trends that will affect brands and business in 2009.

Photoshopped Ads Get Exposed in Berlin

Messing with ads in subways is becoming an artform, but this "Photoshopping" of ads in Berlin takes things to the next level by creating a Photoshop interface with stickers. Pitch-perfect adbusting.

More subway images here.

SketchSwap

Nice new site: SketchSwap is a web based drawing board where you can draw something on the screen and receive a random drawing back in return.

Make sure you have your wacom at the ready if you want to be top of the tree.

Obamicon Me

Yes you can!

(Obama-ize yourself that is). Make your own "Obamicon" (your image in a style inspired by Shepard Fairey's iconic poster) over on Obamicon.Me.

Thanks to Holster for the link.

Inspired Advertising

Fantastic Ad from T-Mobile

This is Saatchi & Saatchi's fantastic new T-mobile advert which was filmed at 11am on Thursday 15th January 2009 at London's Liverpool Street station, and aired on Channel 4 less than 48 hours later.

I love the random granny joining in and throwing in some shapes whilst holding her shopping.

Stamp of approval for British design classics

A set of first class stamps were issued today to commemorate ten icons of British design. The Royal Mail’s new series offers up a noticeably nostalgic look at some British Design Classics, largely from the 1930s and 1960s.

RJ Mitchell’s Spitfire, George Carwardine’s angelpoise lamp, Harry Beck’s map of the London Underground network and Edward Young’s designs for Penguin all originate from the 1930s.



The series of ten also includes Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s 1962 telephone box and Robin Day’s polypropylene chair for Hille Seating from 1963.



Classic designs like the Routemaster bus (manufactured between 1954 and 1968) and Concorde (1969-2003) have been retired relatively recently, but the 1965 mini skirt is still a classic of contemporary fashion, and the Mini (originally launched in 1959) has moved with the times and is actually the most popular British designed and built car ever. Not only that but its stylish design made it a hit with the trend setters of the swinging sixties with everyone from John Lennon and Marianne Faithfull to Peter Sellers and Steve McQueen owning one.

Wobbly web

Stylish and clever advertising for the iPod Touch on Yahoo's website.

From Richard Holt's fabulous blog

Jewish Book Week 2009: complete branding

For the 5th successive year, Cinnamon Creative has created the complete branding programme for London’s largest literary festival - JBW - including the 64pp programme, signage, posters and nationwide advertising.

To book for sessions at Jewish Book Week, visit www.jewishbookweek.com

Type assault

When bad tracking and bad naming collide the results really can be bad.

Almost as good as this URL…

From Richard Holt's fabulous blog

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard: the MacBook Wheel

Apple employee fired for thinking different!

This is funny, poor guy... shame on you for being so innovative.