Archive for the 'Advertising' Category

Look out! Look out! Yr1 are about!

Published by Michael Dancer on March 26, 2012 in Advertising, Art, Communication, Creativity, Environment, Inspiration, Perception, Places, Society and Student Work. 2 Comments

Good weather, good humour and an ability to challenge assumptions, brought the Yr1 ComDes students out into the streets of Glasgow recently. Working in groups of five, the students took some risks to make places in Glasgow famous.

We had: commemorative plaques dedicated to singer songwriter Darius, sheltering walkers in Kelvingrove Park under a canopy made from a matrix of umbrellas, turning the Duke of Wellington statue into Dukearoo! (his equestrian pal had a unicorn horn) and a forgotten underpass near to SkyPark brought to life with an installation made from woolen thread (see below).

The group of Sarah Jones, Isaac Neviazsky, Chelsea Frew, Lois Langmead and Louisa Reyce gilded a crack in the pavement with Tunnock’s Tea Cake wrappers. The students approached our national institution and got permission to use the iconic design and make something beautiful. Enjoy…

Riots by Design: Blaming the London Olympics

Published by David Kerr on October 6, 2011 in Advertising, Architecture, Cities, Communication, Creativity, Critical Studies, Design, Environment and Inspiration. 0 Comments

An interesting article on the Design Altruism blog by Daniel Drenan on the role designers and design education could play in helping communities to resist Gentrification and the numerous negative affects Mega-events such as the Olympics and Commonwealth Games have on their host cities.

Amongst many interesting observations the article gives an account of a series of workshops that happened in a college in Beirut in which students were given four groups to research in terms of particular Olympic games cities and their communicated messages: The Olympic Committee itself, the host city government, the design firm responsible for the corporate identity, and any protesters they could find. The article then goes on to discuss the information gathered by the students research and the work that was created in response to it.

For up to date  information on the London Olympics the Gamesmonitor site is worth a visit.  I would also thoroughly recommend watching Five Ring Circus a film about the Vancouver Winter Olympics available to watch free online and Olympicfield a film found in the year 2015 near the London Olympics site.

in 2015 near the London Olympics site

I Don’t Know Where I’m Going

Published by Neil McGuire on January 4, 2011 in Advertising, Communication, Creativity, Design, Digital, Education, Events, Inter-discipline, Interaction, Sound, Talks and Technology. 0 Comments

Highlights symposium I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I Want To Be There from Graphic Design Museum on Vimeo.

I was planning to write up my trip to the ‘I don’t know where I’m going’ conference, but find myself in the strange, (but not unsurprising if I thought about it), situation where the whole thing has been recorded and documented online in great depth. Therefore what I think I’ll do is a personal travel diary, with some vimeo clips in the middle to represent the proceedings on the day. This may or may not work.

5.45am, Glasgow Airport: The plane boards, only 1/4 full as most flights back out of Schipol are cancelled due to yesterday’s snow. Wonder if I’ll make it back tomorrow, but I’m doing this for Vis Com, and plough on regardless.

A 45 minute delay to take off, they’re spraying de-icer on the wings. Worried, I wonder why the illuminated ‘no smoking’ and ‘seatbelts fastened’ signs look so similar from a distance. I wonder If anyone else wonders this.

Take off.

The strange but strangely enjoyable sandwiches (egg and cheese) are brought round with a cup of tea, a tiny spoon and a paper napkin faked up to look like a gingham tablecloth.

Mid-flight the guy next to me gets out to go to the toilet, stopping to do up his hiking boot laces. They were presumably unfastened to get them off going through security, but have inadvertently created a terrorism-related mise en scène, as he bends down in the aisle and starts fiddling about with his shoes, somewhere over the North Sea.

As we head east, the sun is coming up in front of us, more coffee and tiny spoons appear.

Amsterdam, a light southerly breeze, -5, snow.

We arrive slightly late at the conference, having completely misjudged the distance from the station to the venue. The talks proceed as follows, and you can pick up most you need to know from the following link.

Lunch, improbably long queue in bagel bar next door. In a moment of serendipity for any terminal name-dropper, we stand next to Danny van den Dungen from Experimental Jetset while we wait. Sure he’s written a similar post about how he stood next to me and Lizzie.

Afternoon highlight (for me) is Metahaven’s Wikileaks talk, and the ideas of ‘image economies’ (as relates to someone’s or something’s identity in a digital networked environment) and ‘agency’, doing only what needs to be done, and being prepared to do, or design, nothing.

Daniel van der Velden – Metahaven | Symposium I Don’t Know Where I’m Going But I Want To Be There from Graphic Design Museum on Vimeo.

Post-conference beers, shop/gallery opening, pizza, freezing, good deviating conversation. Hometime. Semi-drunk late-night check-in at a hotel where the room is approximate 30cm2 bigger than the bed that’s in it.

Return via Schipol airport. A modern Bosch-esque scene of travel infrastructure overload, make the gate with 5 minutes to spare, this is how I like to operate.

Descargar, Download

Published by Neil McGuire on November 28, 2010 in Advertising, Archives, Critical Studies, Design, Film, Magazines/Editorial, Music, Political and Society. 1 Comment

(This blog post should be read aloud whilst listening to this).

This weekend I was looking through the highly impressive Ubuweb and stumbled upon this film, Production of Meaning, by Adbusters. I’m interested in this because while I broadly agree with the sentiment, I was really struck by how outdated and simplistic the analysis seemed to be. I used to buy and read Adbusters and have been away from it for a while, but wonder whether post Naomi Klein and No Logo, the arguments need to be more subversive and more sophisticated in equal measure.

The second benefit of roaming Ubuweb was that I came across a link to this download of the entire Ken Nordine album ‘Colors’, which wholeheartedly satisfied my jazz/colour analysis needs.

Yellow Pencil

Published by Neil McGuire on July 12, 2010 in Advertising, Animation, Competitions and Film. 0 Comments

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Congratulations to Abdi Adam and Fang Zhou who won the coveted Student Yellow Pencil at the annual D&AD Student Awards in London’s Old Spitalfields Market. Abdi and Zhou won in the Animation category for their short film ‘Design Intervention’ (see below), in response to a brief set by the Design Council’s Alliance Against Crime. Their work will be published in the D&AD Student Awards Annual along with their fellow winners.

Our Hero!

Published by Brian Cairns on May 25, 2010 in Advertising, Interaction and Media. 0 Comments

Just picking up on Neil’s Augmented Reality theme.
Sorry foggy. You can create your own hero here. This promo is  for the Swedish Broadcaster RadioJånst to encourage the internet generation to pay their licence fee. You can view it full screen here.

The Zimbabwean Trillion Dollar Flyer

Published by Brian Cairns on May 22, 2010 in Advertising, Communication and Political. 0 Comments

trillion-dollar-wallpaper

TBWA created a campaign for The Zimbabwean Newspaper which had been forced out of the country for criticising Mugabe and enforced a 55% tax on the newspaper as a luxury tax. The campaign uses the currency as a symbol for regime’s policies bankrupting the country by printing the campaign on Zimbabwean Trillion Dollar notes. Flyers were also printed on the notes as below.zimbabwe-flyers

19th Century Trikewriter vs Nike Chalkbot

Published by Neil McGuire on April 18, 2010 in Advertising, Design, Printing, Technology and Typography. 0 Comments

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From a Bicycle as Outdoor Printing Press to tweeted and texted chalk road writing (and cringy promo video).

Rethink Scholarship

Published by Brian Cairns on February 16, 2010 in Advertising, Education and Technology. 0 Comments

Rethink Scholarship at Langara 2010 Call for Entries from Rory O’Sullivan and Simon Bruyn on Vimeo.
If you are interested there is a scholarship competition to study for 2 years at Langara college in Vancouver. It also includes a placement at Rethink Studio in Vancouver as well.
If you like the pop up book format of the video you might like this video by shit disco produced a few years ago by illustration grad Jan Lun Lee.

“Things that aren’t designed look all ramshackle…”

Published by Neil McGuire on January 21, 2010 in Advertising, Animation, Communication and Illustration. 0 Comments

Pringle is a new advertising video by GSA alumnus David Shrigley.

Thanks to Kate Hollands for the link.

Art & Copy

Published by Neil McGuire on November 28, 2009 in Advertising and Film. 0 Comments

Here’s a trailer for a new documentary about the glamourous/sinister world of advertising:

‘Best Crafted Commercial of the Year’

Published by Ruby Wight on November 3, 2009 in Advertising. 0 Comments Tags: .

sarah still - floor grimace

Bare Films – BTAA Craft Award Winners

Sarah\’s Story: Motor Neurone Disease Association

A Brand for London

Published by Neil McGuire on September 21, 2009 in Advertising, Brand, Design, Political and Web. 2 Comments

Causing a lot of furore over the past few weeks has been the pitching process for a new ‘brand’ for London. One of the most noticeable pitches (which didn’t get through) was A Brand for London by Moving Brands. Effectively throwing the doors of design open to the great british (and worldwide) general public, this could be seen as either a) a brave attempt to grapple with citizen design in a public project using the web, or b) a cynical attempt to appear ‘now’, ‘switched on’ and ‘web 2.0 savvy’ for a high profile public pitch. The language is suspect (“As this is a fully democratic pitch”…etc) where in reality there is little co-design or democracy happening, through debate or discussion — rather a lot of very mediocre/awful designs (see bus above) being pushed out into a big internet-shaped hole, and the ensuing single line criticism or praise that follows. A very in-depth and opinion-led analysis of the whole process can be found on the Johnson Banks blog.

The geeks shall inherit the earth

Published by Neil McGuire on August 22, 2009 in Advertising, Art, Technology and Web. 0 Comments

There’s something toe-curlingly geeky about this presentation of some of the latest augmented reality technology heading for a mobile device near you. But this technology in particular seems to be ripe for some imaginative and creative applications—see artvertiser project below.

The Artvertiser: Augmented Billboards. from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

Another advertising use can be found here and the source code and flash toolkit, should you want to start tampering with it, can be found here

Is a photo worth a thousand pounds?

Published by Neil McGuire on June 16, 2009 in Advertising and Photography. 0 Comments

At Design Assembly, Jamie Long asks; ‘is a photo worth a thousand words?’, and in the process looks at some of the interesting cross currents affecting photography now.

“Tea time is me time”

Published by Neil McGuire on June 5, 2009 in Advertising, Technology and Web. 3 Comments

As it’s friday;
It’s good to see ad agency BMB using the latest augmented reality technology to good effect in this obviously lighthearted but strangely attractive piece, furthering the cause of humanity by placing northern songster John Shuttleworth on your packet of Yorkshire Tea.

(Though as a long-time follower of Mr Shuttleworth, I thought he was from Lancashire, the binary opposite and dyed-in-the-wool natural enemy of Yorkshire).