Filed under: Madness
I saw this for sale today, in a shop underneath Barclays headquarters at Canary Wharf, obviously hoping some grossly overpaid futures analyst would snap it up with the loose change in their pockets. It is an original Rolf Harris! I reckon I even saw him knock this up on TV back in 1981, either that or all Rolf Harris work looks the same. I wonder as he was lobbing paint all over a big bit of paper (yes paper, not canvas) he knew that one day in the future it would be touted at £35,000!!!
Don’t get me wrong, I love Rolf Harris, I loved Cartoon Time, between Rolf, and Tony Hart on the art, Jonny Ball on the science, John Craven on the current affairs, and of course the daddy of them all, Big Dave on the nature, I didn’t even need school! Although that argument never did very well with Mum.
But £35,000 for a bit of paper? People will be selling grafitti for hundreds of thousands next!
My CD at my agency blurted out in a meeting with all his senior creative staff “Trident Gum website, discuss.” It had a mixed response, but for my part I disliked it and gave up on the site after a few minutes. Why? Because it was a 10minute advert, and I didn’t want to watch a 10 minute advert, there are better things to do on the internet as far as I am concerned.
However, this Axe site is also a 10 minute advert, but I liked this, so what is the difference? Well Axe gives the control over to the user, online marketing succeeds when it is interactive, and those little touch points where it asks ‘Don’t continue’ and ‘Let the game continue’ letting the user control the destination of the movie makes the difference, and it is a huge difference. So that is in my opinion, why it works, well that and chicks in light bulb bikini tops anyway.
Filed under: Design
2 bits of design that stopped me in my tracks this week, above is the inside of a CD sleeve for Global Underground designed by Geordie agency MAAD Ltd. I am feeling the simple primary colours and the bold layout. I have opened up this CD sleeve and stuck it in front of quite a few people and said, ‘check that out!’only my illustrious colleagues have agreed with me so far, mention it to anyone outside the Dare building, and they just look at me in pity. There is also a TV advert likely done in After Effects, I am not as enamoured with that though, it just doesn’t seem quite as bold.
The other thing that struck me was this poster for The Southbank Centre that was down the tubes. Maybe it was after seeing Wim Crouwel the previous week that did it, but I loved the deconstruction, and re-construction of the Southbank Centre logo to make a cloud, and it is on a blue that reminded me of Crouwel’s work.
Filed under: Internet
Will someone please let me know sooner whenever there is a riot?! I bloody love a good riot. Hang on, I am not so sure this one would have given me too much satisfaction, it was the first ever ‘internet riot’, it was at digg.com. Sounds a bit lame really, it managed to ‘crash the site’ under the weight of the ‘attack’. So no flaming missiles, Ultras or riot police then?
The ‘riot’ was caused as digg.com pussied out twice, first to a cease and desist letter from the digital rights management body, where they were told to remove a post that revealed a secret code that would have stopped piracy of HD DVD’s. The ‘riot’ then came as users rebelled, telling digg.com to reinstate the post and not buckle to authority, which they did.
Actually, if this sort of ‘riot’ does rear it’s head again, maybe best if you didn’t bother me, I think I would rather be watching Thomas the Tank Engine at home with my 2yr old, it’s more exciting.
Filed under: Design
So Dare took it’s creatives on a school outing to the D&AD seminar by type legend Wim Crouwell. 79yrs old and still producing relevant work, but not so much with type anymore. I loved listening to him, so passionate about type, ‘I love the Helevetica’ and all of his work, from the mid 50’s still looks as if it was done this morning, it is timeless.
What did I learn? Blue. Asked about colour, Wim said ‘If I do not know what to use, I use blue. Of course this has changed over the years,in the 70’s, I used a Peacock Blue, but in the 80’s I used a more reddish blue, but blue, nearly everything I do is blue.’
The next thing I design is going to be blue. Unless it is for Vodafone, I had better stick to red if it is for them. Or maybe they won’t notice….
Filed under: Design
Massive Les Paul Gibson guitars painted by massive Les Paul Gibson guitar players, exhibited in London, then flogged off for charity. That’s the Gibson Guitar London Exhibition. Huge guitar heros, Slash, Paul Weller, Noel Gallagher, Brian May and get this, Sir Cliff Richard! oh yeah, that one’s the real coup, as he is dead (isn’t he?).
They will all be unleashing their artistic talents on 15ft fibre glass Les Pauls, until they look like this, (done by Yanky Brain Tull in the Yanky version of the same exhibition)
Well, when I say they will be unleashing thier artistic talents, they actually won’t, they will be teaming up with some visual artists that are going to do all the hard work for them, including pop artist Sir Peter Blake doing Paul Weller, and the one that I am looking forward to is Gerald Scarfe doing a Slash!
I studied design and advertising at university, and we were taught to never to use a pun in an ad, it was considered a form of weak writing and served only to self congratulate the writer on how clever he/she is for thinking of it. So why did I like this line so much?
A well-crafted headline, like a well-titled book, catches the eye and draws you into a story. A pun can, too, but it’s more likely to mischaracterize a story’s seriousness. Of course there is a time and a place for a pun, such as on the back pages of the daily toilet papers, I particular like one’s like ‘Blue it!’ when Chelsea couldn’t close the gap on the Man Utd last weekend, and then this weekend, although I didn’t get the Sunday red tops, I am sure ‘Where Eagles Dare’ would have appeared somewhere. (as a young Utd’s Chris Eagles put pay to any chance of the current champions ever winning 3 in a row.)
So I must like this pun because ‘Tourqe of the Devil’ on this ad is the right time and the right place. The art direction works well with the line, the line doesn’t do all the work as the car sure looks like a devilish automobile. And then the line has a message, it screams out to young petrol heads about power. As the ad isn’t of a serious ilk, and the pun is such a blinder, then maybe my old uni tutors would even agree it ticks all the boxes to allow this sort of ‘route one’ wordsmith.
This pun is an even better one though ‘A dyslexic man walks into a bra….’
