New Google Chrome logo unveiled

A redesign of the Google Chrome logo has just been unveiled.



I think the removal of the previous logo’s tacky 3D effects is a step in the right direction. Another good move towards simplification.

The old Google Chrome logo is pictured below.



Source: Logobird

Nice work for Richard House by The Partners

The Partners have created a great fundraising website for children's hospice Richard House in London. The site allows visitors to create a unique 'exquisite corpse' print using drawings by 120 of the UK's top illustrators...

There are 64,000 possible combinations of heads, bodies and legs to choose from on the site, and users can scroll through them online until they are happy with a selection. For only £60, they can then buy a print of their creation, with all proceeds raised on the site going to Richard House. Act fast though - only one of each combination will be produced as a print, so get in quick to get the one you want.

www.goinggoinggone-red.org



Source: Creative Review

Nike tattoo eyebrows.

The thin line between brand advocacy and being a moron...




Source: Digital Prescriptions

Freelancer of the Year Awards

Karen Cinnamon has been shortlisted for the upcoming Freelancer of the Year Awards 2011, in two categories: Digital Excellence and Advertising & Design.

The winners will be announced at an Awards ceremony in central London on 31st March 2011.

Circle of no life

via The Cool Hunter

iPad 2 to be launched next week on Wednesday 2nd March

The rumours have been floating around the web for the last week or so that Apple will be holding a press event on March 2nd to announce details of the iPad 2. Well today Apple have gone and confirmed those rumours and have sent out invites for the official press event entitled ” Come see what 2011 will be the year of”

It’s fairly obvious to assume from the picture that it will be an iPad that’s going to be the focus of the event. It's not clear as to whether or not the iPad will actually be available on March 2nd or not, but one things for certain we will at last find out whats going to be in the iPad 2. It will be interesting to see if its any smaller in size as rumours have suggested and Apple will almost certainly want to be putting at least one if not two cameras in there if they want to keep up with the competition.

All will be revealed next Wednesday… the event will be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco at 10:00am where Apple have launched products before.

An app for instant idea evaluation

Creatives always have the same problem: is an idea any good? With this app we can apparently get an instant evaluation. You record your idea into your iPhone and then hold the phone over your head. After a few seconds of "processing" you either get a bright lit light bulb (a good idea) or an unlit lightbulb (a bad idea).

More of a fun app then a serious one methinks...

Download it here.

Very clever livery idea for FedEx (Always first)

The concept was created by an Ad School graduate.

New Old Spice

How far are they going to take this? Very, very far I hope.

The colours of the Top 100 web brands

In the world of brand design, choice of colour provides the potential for a wealth of carefully crafted and powerfully communicated messages about your brand.What is the most popular and dominant colour online?

Creative community blog COLOURlovers researched the brand colours of the world's top 100 sites and discovered that the web landscape is dominated by a large number of blue brands, however red does occupy a large amount of space. What’s driving this? You would expect that companies organise extensive branding research and market tests to select the colour/s that project the correct message to entice the consumer to the brand. Unfortunately many of the brands that have grown to be global web powerhouses started as small web startups, while large corporate giants with branding departments spend quite a lot on market research, branding, etc.



Lots of the sites listed above got started with brands created by the founders themselves with little to no research into the impact their color choice would have.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook was once asked why he chose blue for his site design… “I’m colour blind, it’s the only colour I can see.” …and now 500 million people around the world stare at his mostly blue website for hours each week. (COLOURlovers)

While the initial rationale for the brand colours may be trivial, the impact that these dominant brands now have in the web landscape will no doubt influence smaller companies wishing to share the positive colour associations they created. Therefore blue and red will most likely continue to dominate, but we can hope that new brands entering the market take a different perspective and decide to push the colour boundaries of their brand.

Source: Truly Deeply

Good gift for graphic designers

No it's not Photoshopped - you can buy it here.

Source: The Cool Hunter

Google Art Project has launched with 17 museums, including MoMA and Tate, bringing "street view" inside the museums

Even the director of the Tate was unaware that if, with patience, you look really close up at Pieter Bruegel's world-famous 16th century painting The Harvesters, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum, then you will see a family enjoying a jolly Shrove Tuesday game of throwing sticks at the tied-up goose.

"I didn't know about this rather cruel game, no," said Sir Nicholas Serota. "Next time I'm in New York I shall take a closer look."

Serota was speaking at the launch today of a significant new art project by Google. The reason we can now examine Bruegel's painting in such astonishing detail – every tiny scene, every brushstroke, every hairline crack can be seen – is because it has been captured using super-high resolution, or gigapixel photo-capturing technology.

The project, unveiled at Tate Britain in London is an extension of Google Street View in which real views of streets from across the world are captured and displayed on screen.

With the Google Art Project, anyone with access to a computer can take a virtual 360 degree tour of galleries in 17 major museums across the world, without queuing and without other people getting in the way – and look in superb detail at one work from each.

The museums include the National Gallery and Tate Britain in London; the Met, MoMa and Frick in New York; the Uffizi in Florence, the Hermitage in St Petersburg, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and Reina Sofia in Madrid. They have all signed up to the unique project developed over the past 18 months, which allows unprecedented access to 385 rooms and about 1,000 artworks.

Serota called the project "another great step forward. It gives people an unrivalled opportunity to come really close to great works of art."

The galleries are already digitising their collections and offering whizzy websites, but Google's project offers something new, Serota said. "This is a second generation view of the way museums will use the internet. Ten years ago museums were obsessed with getting thousands of objects on the screen, now we're interested in getting depth of understanding of the works."

Nelson Mattos, Google's vice-president for engineering, said the Google Art Project had started off as one of the company's "20% projects" which allows employees to take a fifth of their time away from their regular day job, to work on innovations. "What has been accomplished is fantastic, really amazing. We hope it will provide a very different and new way to interact with and explore art," Serota added.

Other tricks on the website, include the ability to save artworks such as Rembrandt's Night Watch or Van Gogh's The Starry Night, then create your own collection and email it to friends.

Among the 17 paintings captured using technology that is 1,000 times more powerful than an average digital camera, are Manet's In the Conservatory, Bellini's St Francis in the Desert and Holbein's The Ambassadors, from the National Gallery.

Tate Britain's choice – Chris Ofili's No Woman, No Cry – is the only one by a living artist. One reason for its inclusion is the large, hidden ultraviolet message the website reveals (RIP Stephen Lawrence), which can only be seen in the dark.

Google and the museums believe the website will prove popular, as well as provide encouragement and inspiration for people to travel to the galleries and see the paintings up close in person.

The plan is to keep expanding the project, paid for by Google, with new museums, galleries and paintings.

At the launch at Tate Britain the absence of institutions such as the Louvre and the Prado were noted. But project leader Amit Sood, said Google wanted to get the scheme up and running, so included the 17 museums who signed up straight away.

Source: The Guardian

Brighten up your smile

The Americans may have white teeth, but the Japanese now have blue, green, red and yellow…say hello to LED teeth.

There’s a great video of a guy testing it, the only thing I’m not sure about is the freaky sound.

You can read a small article on them here.



Source: The Partners

The Photoshop Etiquette Manifesto for Web Designers

The Photoshop Etiquette Manifesto for Web Designers is a great site and a neat site design to boot.

It's is a list of helpful and subtle suggestions to organise Photoshop Documents, making the transfer of them less painful.

Shooting the MGM logo (1924)

Source: The Cool Hunter

Infographic: These passwords are going to get your accounts hacked

Surprise, surprise. The most common password is not 'password.'

Following a survey conducted by ZoneAlarm, the company has compiled the statistics into an interesting infographic below.

Cute pantone chip cookies

I love the Pantone craze, but this is a little extreme... I do love the thought and attention that's gone into them though. Inspired by a Pantone tin, freelance designer and illustrator, Kim Neill. created these cookies using her collection of Pantone chips and worked with Royal icing to create the exact colours, even using luster dust to create metallic “chip” cookies. Once the icing set, she used an edible marker to add the Pantone numbers and Bob's your uncle! These would make lovely client gifts.

The Retro Pencil Stylus

This is an easy-to-hold faux writing apparatus (£7.50) that works on all touch-screen devices. Brilliant for glove-wearing / fingerprint-phobic iPaddies and iPhoners. Smudgy fingerprints are no more. Buy it here.

The new HTML 5 logo.

I'm afraid that people will get confused between HTML5 and The Jackson 5.

Facebook in (quite astonishing) numbers, as of January 2011

- The UK has 13.5m active Facebook users, second only to the US.

- Starbucks is the 'most-liked' brand on Facebook with 6.2m fans.

- The average user becomes a fan of four pages a month.

- 1.5m local businesses have active pages on Facebook.

- 50% of active users log on to Facebook every day.

Source: Facebook

An Exhibition for Hipstamatics

'Hipstamatics' is the first European showcase of snapshots taken using the popular iPhone app that allows mobile phones to mimic antique analog cameras (it was actually awarded ‘App of the year’ by Apple in 2010).



When: 14 January– 31 January 2011. Mon.-Fri., 11 a.m.-5 p.m. 

Where: Orange Dot Gallery, 54 Tavistock Pl., WC1H 9RG.

Hipstamatic Facts:
- The original Hipstamatic analog camera was launched In 1982 by brothers Bruce and Winston Dorbowski.
- By the end of 1984 the group had manufactured and sold 157 units.
- The two brothers were tragically killed in a road accident that very same year, meaning that Hipstamatic never became mass produced.
- Now the Hipstamatic iPhone App has sought to recreate the magic of the original Hipstamatic analog cameras. It's got high-res output and gives anyone the ability to hand pick which film, flash and lense is best for a shot. I for one am a fan.

CopyPasteCharacter.com

How do I type the copyright symbol? Or the Apple icon? Or that little cloverleaf on the command key? For the quick answer, bookmark this webpage:

www.copypastecharacter.com

Call it the poor man's PopChar. Pull up the web page, copy the character you need, and paste it right into your document. Try it. It really works.

Source: Creative Techs

Karen Cinnamon in the Hospital Club Magazine (January 2011)

Karen Cinnamon interviewed for the latest issue of the Hospital Club magazine (Issue 25, January 2011). Click here to read the article (PDF Format).

Steve Jobs vs. Dragons' Den

Nice idea for a spoof but there are some classic Dragon's Den quotes and this could have been even funnier! Still worth a watch...

Didn't think anyone loved Apple more than me... I'm wrong

There's a lot of Apple stickers on car bumpers, but this Apple fan covered his entire vehicle in them!




Photos: Taxi Lady Joann

Apple opens doors to Mac App Store

Apple has today (6 January) launched the Mac App Store, which offers more than 1,000 paid and free apps for Mac computers, as it looks to replicate the success of its original iPhone outlet.

The new store, which has rolled out across 90 countries, is similar to the app store for the iPhone and iPad and requiries an iTunes account to make purchases.

It contains more than 1,000 apps at launch, and Apple has also created apps for popular, existing software, such as iPhoto and GarageBand.

Now Amazon is planning to launch its own app store for Android apps. Earlier this week, the online retailer rolled out its ‘Appstore Developer Portal,’ which allows developers to submit android apps ahead of the Amazon Appstore's launch.

Source: Brand Republic

Penguin Classics team up with (RED) for typographic covers

These book covers from Penguin are simply stunning - they work well as a set, yet retain their own identities and I love the way the designs creep out onto the lower banner.

It's a collaboration between Penguin and AIDS awareness fund (RED) and a team of designers to produce new covers for eight Penguin Classics. Each cover replaces the usual black band with red, employing a quote from the text of the book as the visual hit.

Wonderful work as ever from Penguin.

I shot the serif, I did not shoot the Sans Serif iPhone App launched

This game and app should come with a warning, as anyone with a healthy interest in type will be hooked in a few seconds - no clients will get work and the creative industry will be on it's knees within weeks.

Be careful, but give it a go.

Not to be played without supervision of at least one other type aware adult, preferably not the one that pays your wages.

Enjoy!

Try it on their site, or search the app store.

Beautiful branding

Love this delicious logo and branding for Womens Weekend by Alexey Novoselov. Gorgeous.

Great idea for a digital Christmas Card

A Starry Night from Torchbox on Vimeo.

Wills and Kate memorial plates

I'm no royalist but these are brilliant. Love the designs, colours, typography and illustration and ideas. They'll be available to purchase from KK Outlet from January 15th.












Source: Creative Review