Here's One I Made Earlier

Ever fancied making your own Damien Hirst from a plastic skull and 8,601 crystal beads or using a Banksy stencil and spray paint kit to give your walls a million dollar makeover?

Well you can with a DIY contemporary art set from iArtist.

You could even go for a blood bag (and plasters) with which to make your own sensational Marc Quinn-esque frozen head or get all the materials to recreate Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept with 1963-1995.

All available by e-mail order from shop@iartistlondon.com. To see styles, go to iartistlondon.com.

Pretty Loaded

Pretty Cool is an archive of preloaders that preload other preloaders:

www.prettyloaded.com

Twitterature

Is there no end to Twittermania? Last week we saw the social networking tool Twitter deployed on the streets of Tehran. This week, moving seamlessly from the sublime to the ridiculous, it is being used to aid the digestion of the world's greatest literature.

Fans of the classics will either be delighted or appalled to learn that the New York-branch of Penguin books has commissioned a new volume that will put great works through the Twitter mangle. The volume has a working title that will make the nerve ends of purists jangle: Twitterature.

In it, the authors will squish the jewels of world literature - they mention Dante, Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce and JK Rowling - into 20 tweets or less - that is 20 sentences each with fewer than 140 characters.

The book is the brainchild of two 19-year-old first-year students at the University of Chicago who claim to be starting a cultural revolution from their college dormitory. Bashing their heads together one evening in their university digs, Emmett Rensin and Alex Aciman asked themselves what defined the grandest ventures of their generation, and best expressed the souls of 21st century Americans?

Pretentious, maybe. Precocious, certainly. The answer they came up with was double-headed. They identified high literature as a crucial pillar for any generation.

But they also latched on to Twitter, the website where users compress all of human experience into 140 characters. Twitter, they thought to themselves, epitomised the short attention span and info-deluge that defined the contemporary age.

So what if you put the two together? If great literature and Twitter were combined into one new form - Twitterature. "We have embarked on an attempt to bring the two pillars of our generation together, once and for all," the students said.

In the blurb for the new book the authors give a clue to their incentives for writing it, which are not entirely ethereal. Aciman and Rensin, from New York and Los Angeles respectively, both harbour ambitions to become writers and both clearly also hanker after cash.

They say they are aiming for a book that has the literary merit to wow the blogosphere, as well as the "pure-money genius to take the market by storm".

Whether they are right and fulfil their dreams depends on the appetite for reading Dante's Divine Comedy reduced from its 512 pages in Penguin's own Classics edition to 20 short sentences. Or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the last in the JK Rowling series, rendered in 2,800 characters down from 784 pages.

All should become clear in the autumn, when Twitterature is scheduled for publication.

From Media Guardian

iPhone 3G S launch day

Post-It stop motion

What a fabulous animation from Savannah College of Art student Bang-yao Liu

American family's web photo ends up as Czech advertisement

When the Smiths of Missouri – an all-American family with the regulation two blond children – posed for their Christmas photo, little did they know they would end up on a billboard thousands of miles away in the Czech Republic.

Just under a fortnight ago, a family friend of Jeff and Danielle Smith was travelling in Prague when he spotted some familiar faces beaming out of a poster advertising a grocery store's home delivery service.

He took a photograph and emailed it to his friends in St Louis – kindly translating the caption that promises "we will prepare and deliver your requests in two business days".

The picture was indeed of the admirably white-toothed Smiths and their two smiling children. Danielle had been so proud of the image taken by a photographer friend, Gina Kelly, that she had not only sent it out as a Christmas card to family and friends, but also posted it on her blog and other social networking sites, including Momlogic where she identifies her children as "sweet and sassy Delaney" and "loveable and crazy Cooper".

Danielle has expressed her surprise at the news of their international fame: "Interesting. Bizarre. Flattering, I suppose. But quite creepy."

The shop owner was equally shocked. Mario Bertuccio, who runs the Grazie store in Prague, said he found the image on the internet and thought it was computer-generated. He has promised to remove it and email an apology to the Smiths – and said if they lived nearer he would send them "a bottle of good wine".

In her blog on the Extraordinary Mommy site, Smith reflects: "So this is the price we pay for indulging in social media, I guess."

She had no idea the image could be used, she said, and would not have given her permission, but admits she was naive in putting up a high-resolution version on the website. She won't be doing that again – but said she would continue to post images of her family.

The smiley Smiths have now gone global. The site has registered 180,000 hits but Danielle writes that she is blocking the small percentage "who are commenting only to say that a member of my family (or all of us) are ugly".

From MediaGuardian

Harvey Nichols 'gordon brownie'

This cute campaign, by Mr H has been engineered to boost awareness of Harvey Nichol's food markets at stores nationwide using witty and relevant images.

The full line-up is below.

Cards of Change - a novel idea

Here's a great idea: www.cardsofchange.com .

This website's mission is to collect as many business cards and stories of positive change of people who have recently been made redundant and connect them with new opportunities from potential employers, business partners and people who make the effort to look on the bright side of life.

Recycle and rethink those old cards!

So exclusive, even you can have one

Here's an ad for the super-exclusive new Visa black card. "It's not just another piece of plastic. Made with carbon, it's the ultimate buying tool."

Amazingly, it's limited to just 3,000,000 people and advertised with full page ads.

When mass marketers try to market exclusivity, the paradox always catches up with them...

Google 'falling behind Twitter'

Google's co-founder, Larry Page, admitted today that the company has been losing out to Twitter in the race to meet web user's demand for real-time information.

Instead, the search engine's chairman and chief executive, Eric Schmidt, hinted that it could become a partner of the micro-blogging site. Twitter has come from nowhere to become the third most visited social networking site in the US in just three years by allowing its users to broadcast their thoughts, actions and news instantly.

Google's search engine, in contrast, can take hours or even days to update. While this is usually not a problem as accuracy of results is more important than speed of updating, as the internet community comes to demand ever faster information Twitter has left Google in its wake.

"People really want to do stuff real time and I think they [Twitter] have done a great job about it," Page said in a closing address at Google's Zeitgeist conference . "I think we have done a relatively poor job of creating things that work on a per-second basis."

He told the audience about the impact of technology on the world and that he has been asking his research teams to get faster. "Now I think they understand that," he said. "I think we will do a better job of some of those things."

But he admitted that there is a trade-off between making information instantly available and ensuring its accuracy.

The rise of Twitter has sparked speculation that the cash-rich Google could buy the business. Speaking after the event, Schmidt refused to comment on that speculation but admitted "they have done a very good job of 'what am I doing right now' – their tagline – it is very impressive."

He stressed that because of the way that Twitter is built, which allows any developer to take its stream of real-time messages, or tweets, and build applications around them, Google does not need to buy the business to get involved in the indexing of real-time information generated by Twitterers.

"There is a presumption that somehow you cannot have multiple solutions that co-exist," he said. "We can talk to them ... there is all sorts of stuff we can do. We do not have to buy everybody to work with them, the whole principle of the web is people can talk to each other."

Earlier in the day, Page was forced to defend Google's Street View service. "Putting someone's house on Street View is not the same as putting it in a newspaper," he said. "It's radically different."

From Media Guardian

Secure website authentication questions

By Joel Gunz

- What is your mother's maiden name?

- What is your older sister's favorite Monopoly game piece?

- Who did your paternal grandfather vote for in the 1956 presidential election?

- Why did you choose a liberal-arts degree when your entire family urged you to go into finance?

- In what year did you begin working on your novel?

- How many weeks away was graduation when you dropped out of college?

- What was your score on the civil-service employment exam?

- Where were you sitting when your girlfriend told you she was pregnant?

- Where did you never end up going for your honeymoon?

- In what year did you begin working for the post office?

- What is the name of the hedge-fund manager your ex-wife married?

- How many hours did it take you to drink that bottle of Jack Daniel's yesterday?

- What time was it when, in a drunken rage, you threw your novel into the fire?

- If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?

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.