The Blog

Interesting designs for existing products from wishlist.nu

In this months Creative Review Monograph is the work of Richard Sweeney.

He manipulates material such as paper into amazing sculptures which are photographed against a plain background to remove any sense of scale and create ambiguity.

The sculptural qualities of teh curves in the above design remind me very much of this staircase created by Thomas Heatherwick.

Sweeney lets the material dictate the form instead of forcing it and the resulting curves, cut out areas and regions of light and shadow reveal amazingly tactile surfaces that have so much intrigue around their creation and scale.

I posted these as I like the style they have been created in and the message is more personal that other washing machine ads that state how clean they can get your clothes, as most people have clothes they prefer wearing on diferent occasions so I imagine most people will identify with the campaign, which identifies with men, women, and people/families with children.

The Economist has just launched a new series of ads in replace of their “I never read The Economist” series, which is probably the right thing to do as although the campaign had been successful it had been long running.

But I’m not sure how I feel about these new adverts. They were created by six different illustrators who were simply given to copy to work from, but were told not to be too stylistic so that the campaign had a sense of coherence, which I think is greatly aided by the limited colour palette. I like some more than others, for example the world revolves around the sun one and the curiosity as they give the sense of The Economist being a worldwide inquisitive publication, but the advert that reads “You can’t know everything about everything. But you can give it a good go,” comes across to me as quite arrogant.

In my opinion the previous campaign was perfect as it gave people who read the Economist a sense of superiority and it encouraged people who didn’t, to read it by giving them something to aspire to, and for me this one appears to be less effective (this maybe because I am comparing it to the previous campaign, which itself may not be a bad thing). But the idea behind it is apparently to broaden the appeal of the previous Economist idea of exclusivity to a wider, younger audience, which it appears the campaign could do as it is less exclusive, less of the puzzle is contained in the copy and coupled with the illustrations they are more visual and instantaneous.

These designs are planted in rice fields and apparently use different types of rice to create the different colours. The results are quite interesting. They remind me of crop circles, but the rice fields have the extra dynamic of colour/contrast and they have a more visually artistic as opposed to geometric design.

Here are some of the other designs…

Here’s a nice business card that has been personalised to the company, and that gives the client/reciever an added benefit in the fact it contains grass seeds. The design would probably incur little extra cost, but its interesting things like this personal touch that would probably win you a job over another company.

Like the Sao Paulo sewer drains these images show how functional objects around a city can be enhanced creatively forming a kind of street decoration, but these covers as opposed to the drains have a more sculptured quality that would probably appear to more people.

I just found these images of some street art created in Sao Paulo, and it made me think why not? It’d be great to see these ideas hidden down different streets around Leeds just so long as it wasn’t every single sewer drain, as the idea would lose its novelty.

see the rest here…

This project is an initiative of a Dutch artist working with school children in an area of the city referred to as ’satellite city.’ They may not be the best paintings ever created but they certainly brighten up what would otherwise be a dull landscape.

I have just come acroos these pieces by Joseph Bellows who takes images from books, cuts them out and uses them to make ‘3D’ images. I think the pieces work really well and remind me of pop-up books, except these images have a much greater sense of depth.

http://www.josephbellows.com/