Hung Like A Billboard

HBO’s show HUNG has now made its New Zealand debut on TVNZ’s Channel One.

Auckland-based ad agency Colenso BBDO was retained to promote the show and to generate some buzz. They have definitely created a buzz with their risqué billboard, recently erected on Victoria Street in central Auckland. Whether you like the billboard or not, and whether it draws you to watch the show or not, you must admit that the old, tried-and-true subjects – well-endowed female and male bodies – never seem to fail to draw attention...

From The Cool Hunter

Curiouser and curiouser...

As the designer of a fair few e-marketing newsletters, I'm always interested in the e-tail designs that drop into my inbox and today's Alice in Wonderland-themed offering from Selfridges.com was, I thought, jaw-droppingly beautiful (Verdana body-copy typeface aside).

As the Verdana text wasn't live, why oh why did they choose one of the world's ugliest typefaces (designed especially for Microsoft) for the body copy?

How nice is this? A sketch of a cat drawn from a single line.

Found on the homepage of the Design Museum's website.

Where to find London's best hot chocolate

Nothing to do with design, but so very important.

The best hot chocolate will banish all memories of milky bedtime cocoa - it's rich, complex and made with quality raw ingredients. London is starting to wake up to the idea of hot chocolate as a serious drink - here's Time Out's pick of some of the best purveyors in the city:

Artisan du Chocolat
89 Lower Sloane St, SW1W 8DA (0845 270 6996/www.artisanduchocolat.com)
The all-white ‘chocolateria’ at Artisan du Chocolat may be oddly reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick's milk bar in ‘A Clockwork Orange’, but thankfully the similarity ends there. You can pop in for hot chocolate to take away (£2) and if you drink in, the £3 includes your choice of three fresh, handmade truffles. The intense espresso hot chocolate will blast any cobwebs from the brain or you can go for the gentler matcha white hot chocolate made with Japanese green tea.

Carluccio’s Caffè
www.carluccios.com
The Italian caffè chain does hot chocolate better than most. Its specialites include bicerin, a concoction from Turin which lets the drinker mix their own preferred combination of espresso, Florentine chocolate and cream from little jugs. Branches throughout London.

Mélange
184 Bellenden Road, SE15 4BW (07722 650 711/www.themelange.com)
The hot chocolate served up by self-taught French chocolatiere Isabelle Alaya in her colourful little shop has become something of an obsession among posh Peckham-ites. The recipe is a secret, but it’s based on high-quality Belgian chocolate; rich and aromatic, it’s thick but not cloying, with a good balance of sweet and bitter flavours.

Melt
59 Ledbury Rd, W11 2AA (7727 5030/www.meltchocolates.com)
Chocolatier Chika Watanabe creates Melt’s hot chocolate with Madagascan vanilla-infused double cream and a drop of peppermint oil. The result is an intensely dark and rich drink enjoyed in tiny cups.

Paul A Young
33 Camden Passage, N1 8EA (7424 5750/www.paulayoung.co.uk). Branch at 20 Royal Exchange, Threadneedle St, EC3V 3LP
Former pastry chef Paul A Young makes different strengths of hot chocolate according to the weather forecast, and mixes it only with water to preserve the complex flavours of the beans. Slip into his tempting brown-and-cream basement atelier in Camden Passage and try the warming Aztec blend, made with Ancho chilli.

Princi
135 Wardour St, W1F 0UF (7478 8888/www.princi.co.uk)
This buzzing Soho bakery and caffè is a branch of a stylish Milanese coffee shop, and imports its chocolate from the house of Mussetti, which has been blending coffee and chocolate in Piacenza since 1934. Accompany your drink with one of the great Italian savouries or cakes and enjoy the buzz.

William Curley
198 Ebury St, SW1W 8UN (7730 5522/www.williamcurley.co.uk). Branch at 10 Paved Court, Richmond, TW9 1LZ
William Curley’s original shop is in Richmond. The second shop, in spacious new premises in swish Belgravia, opened late last year, giving the husband-and-wife team of William and Suzue more room to develop new ideas, including a breakfast and dessert bar, and a new teaching area/demonstration space downstairs. The hot chocolate tends to be light and frothy, rather than stand-a-spoon thick. The house blend is 70 per cent Amade, but there’s also Gianduja, with hazelnut praline and Aztec, which has a clean, clear flavour, with a spicy sting in its tail. Just try to resist the range of Viennoiserie and ‘fancies’ on offer, from raspberry delices to Bakewell tarts and yuzu cakes, flavoured with Japanese citrus, or the range of handmade truffles.

The Wolseley
160 Piccadilly, W1J 9EB (7699 6996/www.thewolseley.com)
Hot chocolate is considered to be a proper, grown-up drink on the Continent. Accordingly, this European brasserie serves a few types, including the espresso-sized fondant, versions with whipped cream, and a truly decadent rum version that’s scrumptious.

iPad Keynote in less than 180 Seconds: Incredible, Beautiful, Amazing

Apparently no scene has been repeated and everything was uttered as is on this keynote (with even a few 'amazing's taken out).

Thanks to my 'Mac buddy'. Avishay for this.

Google splashes out $5m on Super Bowl with a beautifully simple ad

Google's aversion to advertising its search engine on TV ended with a bang on Sunday night as the company paid an estimated $5m to run a commercial during the Super Bowl.

The minute-long spot marks the biggest venture into mainstream advertising for a company that has become notorious growing almost exclusively through word of mouth and online exposure.

Google's "Parisian Love" commercial, which featured a variety of plugs for the company's search engine played out as a virtual love story, was aired during the game's third quarter and lasted a full minute.

As one of the world's most-viewed TV events, the Super Bowl is a opportunity for advertisers to reach huge audiences in one swoop - and a notorious cash cow for the NFL. With companies charged around $2.5m for a 30 second spot last year's game, which lasted just over three and a half hours, made $213m from advertising alone.

While is not the first time that Google has ventured into mainstream ads – in recent months the company has promoted its web browser, Chrome and run an international campaign to publicise its web-based software - it has done little or no external marketing of its search engine for most of its life.

Indeed, such has been the antipathy towards promoting its basic products through traditional channels that senior executives have even launched attacks on the company's rivals for using advertising.

In an interview on Fox Business News last summer, Schmidt railed against Microsoft for trying to spend their way to a market-leading position.

"You don't buy it with ads," he said. "You earn it, and you earn it customer by customer, search for search, answer by answer."

According to advertising experts, Google's Super Bowl debut was a hit: Tim Calkins, a professor of marketing with the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Illinois, said Google's advert proved the most successful during this year's event, according to their tests.

"The Google spot laddered up to the emotion but maintained function," Calkins said.

Latest Work: branding for the new generation of kidswear for Marks & Spencer

Logo, branding and web site landing pages for 'Rock Royalty', the new generation of kidswear for Marks & Spencer.

See the branding live here and the design for 'Behind the Scenes at the photoshoot' here.

Brilliant stop motion: Oren Lavie Grammy Award nominated music video

JUST BRILLIANT: Oren Lavie, the Israeli singer, has just won a Grammy Award nomination in the Best Short Form Music Video category. His video is showing a girl in bed using stop motion technique. It was made of 2,096 still photographs, which you can now buy for $250 each. Is it worth it?

Nice envelope design

Great idea by Beste Miray. Design it, then post it from your exact location

What a great ad: Honda do it again with their latest 'Everything we do'

The TV spot was created to support the British-built Honda Civic launched on 17th December 09. The ad showcases the breadth of Honda's engineering experience; from ATVs, to marine engines, motorcycles, and the humanoid robot ASIMO.

Another winner from Wieden + Kennedy

Supermodels Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Lara Stone on eight separate covers for LOVE magazine

Condé Nast has produced eight different covers for the latest issue of its fashion and lifestyle magazine, Love, featuring naked cover stars including Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Lara Stone.

Each is photographed naked in an identical pose by photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggot and feature in a 40-page shoot.

The other models who will appear in the magazine, published on Monday next week, are Natalia Vodianova, Amber Valetta, Jeneil Williams, Kristen McMenamy and Daria Werbowy.

Katie Grand, the Love editor, said the magazine had chosen the women who are generally acknowledged to be the most beautiful in the world for the "fashion icons" issue of the bi-annual magazine.

"For this issue of Love, we took eight women who are generally acknowledged as the most beautiful in the world, got them to show off their bodies – widely regarded as the most perfect in the world – and photographed them in exactly the same position for the cover," Grand added.

Alas said: "It was interesting to study them naked, all in the same pose, as they are all so different, but all so powerful-looking."