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Email newsletterOK Go, of the famous treadmill music video have surpassed themselves by creating (in collaboration with James Frost and Syyn Labs) a masterpiece one shot video. If you think you've seen it before then you'd be (sort of) right, with the classic 'Cog' ad from Wiedens bearing comparison. A very satisfying ending bringing back memories of Mousetrap, by which the hardest soul will struggle not to raise a smile. It has awards written all over it.
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Saatchi & Saatchi have just released this World Cup specific Visa advert. Charting the journey of one fan from armchair to every fans dream - playing in the finals. Brilliant.
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In April 2008 University College Falmouth (UCF) merged with Dartington College of Arts. The merger will pave the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall in 2012. We created a piece of communication to celebrate academic excellence as well as looking at the personalities behind the success - the staff and successful ex students. We commissioned two student photographers from BA(Hons) Press Photography, Oliver Rudkin and Tom Dymond to shoot eight staff at the college from a variety of disciplines and art directed them to convey their personality in a visually interesting way. From a studio in the animation department to a mine at Carn Brea with a robot we wanted to push the boundaries of a portrait in a work related context. Shot in medium format on film (just to make life that little harder for ourselves) the personalities shone through. Tom and Olie came up with some great results and are names to keep an eye out for in the future.
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The Belgian's are revolting. Well, the advertising agencies at least with a virtual strike against the practice of creative pitching. A clever and bold way to get their message across. http://www.famous.be (Paul)
So after several hundred cups of tea, 32 pencils and 18 grey hairs later, the latest NMMC exhibition: Lighthouses: Life on the Rocks opened to the public. Jonathan Griffin opened the exhibition at the private view on Friday where it was great to meet some of the lighthouse keepers whose stories embody the exhibition. No knitted jumpers and pipes were spotted which was a slight disappointment but you can't have everything I suppose. It was an amazing journey of this:
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Positioning Cornwall as a great visitor destination is not a hard task on the face of it, stunning coastline, world class restaurants and bags of character - but stiff competition from cheap European flights, a long slow drive and the weather can make you think again.When we undertook the contract with Visit Cornwall (won for the sixth year) we decided to shake things up a bit. Our 2010 guides were the result of workshops with Cornish businesses, attractions and residents (we shared our secret spots!) to extract the best of our assets. The photography brief was to capture that sense of discovery you get from exploring Cornwall, and to reflect memories of your first visit for anyone returning. Unconventional writing and an editorial design approach deliver a more absorbing read and hopefully help you forget it's a 'brochure'.See the coverage in Drum for more detail. www.thedrum.co.uk/news
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Work is well underway on our latest NMMC exhibition "Life on the Rocks" celebrating the life of lighthouse keepers and the stunning buildings (and ships) they lived in. It's been a crazy few months with the design and now the installation for our biggest NMMC exhibition to date. We'll all be at the private view with a glass of wine in hand but probably not a beard, a pipe and a wooly jumper.
After creating the new brand styling and illustrations for Eden's Time of Gifts we were really excited to see the animations the team at Eden have created from our designs. The website features the skaters moving around the biomes amongst the falling snow. Visit Eden's website to see the animations and also to see their TV advert for A Time of Gifts.
I know, I know the whole country is talking about it and the news is full of snowmen and children making snow angels but it is quite unusual for Falmouth the get snow. So we did what any decent design agency would do and had a snowball fight. There were no winners but it's fair to say Jason lost!
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For those of you with browsers supporting the new Canvas element [Firefox, Safari, and Chrome], you might have noticed that it's now snowing on our blog! It's an in house project to test out the upcoming technology, whilst having a bit of seasonal fun. The snow will settle on images and video, and puff up in the air when you scroll the page. Enjoy!
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We love big letters and not the sort you read. This a photo collection of where Vegas' signs who have lost their neon go to die.http://www.flickr.com/
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The Time of Gifts branding has come to an end just as winter rears its head. Lovely work by Andrew Bannecker courtesy of CIA. The Eden design team are now rolling it out so look out for TV ads, posters and billboards appearing county wide. Clean up those skate boots and get knitting your winter hat.
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I came across these lovely covers from Esquire and wondered at which point did mens magazine titles abandon design and decide to feature scantly clad ladies. It would take a brave art director to revert to the innovation of these designs from the late 50's and 60's, interestingly Paul Rand worked as art director for Esquire from 1936-41 and cues from his exquisite style can be referenced in these designs by Robert Benton. See the whole collection on the Esquire site, along with a few ladies…
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We also love really really small things. Here is a great example of both!ClickMartin
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The Guardian bring us a wonderful solution to the problem of bicycle congestion in urban contexts.I'd be happy for this robot to eat my bike!Martin.
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Whilst blog-hopping I came across the fantastic posters created for the International Year of Astronomy by Simon Page. Love the feel of old Pelican book covers you get from the designs and they're so fitting of the subject. Simon's portfolio and blog can be found here...Paul
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No-one wants to think about Christmas yet, but when it involves ice skating, food markets and the odd ale or two we start becoming more festive by the minute. We're currently in the process of updating Eden's much loved campaign, A Time of Gifts featuring the lovely illustrations of Andrew Bannecker . Here's a sneak preview...Stay tuned for the finished campaign and a leaflet with some interesting print finishes.Diggory
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These are beautiful illustrations for the Unicef Tap Project by Christian Borstlap. Lovely to see illustration and photography brought together so elegantly.JL
Even the digital amongst us love paper modeling and we love seeing talented people and their paper masterpieces. The latest spotted on It's Nice That is Jen Stark. See more of her work at www.jenstark.com.
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A lovely collaboration between Blu and David Ellis creating an installation/animation which makes you want to pick up a pen (and a tub of paint) and get creative. Looped twice for some unknown reason. Cheers Shapes That Go.COMBO a collaborative animation by Blu and David Ellis (2 times loop) from blu on Vimeo.Diggory
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Service stations are a miserable place where you are forced to part with large sums of money with little return. So we were pleased to spot this design for a Romanian petroleum company Vitro, recently given a brand make-over by Saffron. A collaboration between architecture and graphic design makes for a modern, striking environment and the colour gradient (or disco) lighting is a pleasant change from the glare of florescent tubes. The principle is to make the driver as welcome as the car, great idea but I wonder if you can still buy an over chilled Ginsters meat slice? View the full brand story
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There's something about clock design which really appeals to us. We've got several time-based screensavers in the studio that think up ever more creative ways to tell the time so we liked stumbling upon Biegert & Funk's QLOCKTWO.
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Having our studio overlooking Falmouth harbour and working with Pendennis means we are always being made envious by the amazing Superyachts we see. However, when we spotted this on Corking Design's blog it blew our minds. Anyone fancy a 58m 'moving island' developed with the latest and most advanced sustainable technologies, trees in the atrium and its own 25m salt water swimming pool?
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As designers, we know that understanding the audience and their needs is crucial in achieving a successful piece of design. Design colleges teach students (or at least should) to design to a brief and not to their own fashions or likes. This empathy with an audience is a key difference between design and art, where a designer's hand is guided by a wholly different 'requiredness' from which informs paintings or a work of sculpture. Such is the importance that a design project often starts with a large phase dedicated to identifying the audience and defining their aims and objectives. This is especially true in the website design sector as there is a need to outline the criteria to measure whether the website was a success of not. Indeed a whole area of professionalism has developed to cater for this very need and you will now see a growing market for User Experience consultants (or UX consultants) within the design sector.So what have plants and bees have to do with design? On the surface of it the relationship between plants and bees is an easy one, and is taught in schools from a very early age. Many plants depend on bees and other flying insects to help pollinate by attracting them to their flower and letting it carry the pollen to the next plant and thus become an aid to its pollination. Insect pollination has many advantages over air pollination (where the plant launches its pollen into the wind in the hope of it landing on another one of its species) but still has the perils of the insect visiting various indiscriminate plants and wasting the pollen on non-related species. Where plants have really succeeded though is by evolving various mechanisms that constantly attract a particular insect to its lair, knowing that when it leaves carrying its precious cargo it is more likely to be attracted to one of its brethren rather than an alternative plant. Various such mechanisms have evolved for this very purpose and this is where the element of design comes in - natural design, of course. The process of natural selection is beyond this blog but if you're interested in the process the Richard Dawkins book, 'The Greatest Show on Earth - The Evidence for Evolution' describes the absolute beauty of Darwin's theorum†.So with the knowledge that many plants have evolved with the purpose of attracting particular insects for the purpose of helping them to pollinate we can look at the plant as the designer and the insect as the audience. In Dawkins' book he uses a particular example to show this, the evening primrose (Oenothera), and this is a rather good example to unpick how its design successfully attracts its particular audience, in this case a bee (although other insects such as certain moths also are attracted by the evening primrose). The evening primrose develops a bright yellow flower which acts as the enticer and landing strip that guides the bee down to the stamens where the pollen hitches a ride on the bee's hairy abdomen. But this is wrong, we're not yet thinking like the audience. Insects have very good colour vision but they differ from humans in that it is shifted over towards the ultraviolet end. Therefore as good designers we should try and look at the flower as the audience would. Taking the evening primrose flower and placing it under an ultraviolet filter shows an intricate pattern that is beyond the human range of vision. It is this nectar-guide design which has been created to please the audience, not the one that we see. Taking a little time to investigate the audience has led us to a successful explanation.Whilst we'll never have to design for bees there is a huge variation of how people interact with design and taking the time to research and consider them for each project is time that is never wasted. Inclusion and accessibility are important considerations in design and understanding that different people view things differently, use things differently and even do things differently at different times helps to create effective design. After all good design should always put its audience first.By Paul Davies* Of course you ay disagree with the definition of design versus art, and that could be a whole other area for discussion.† For those proof readers out there, this is not a mis-spelling but a term from Dawkins to note the difference between a theory which has yet to be proved and one which has moved into fact.
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