Ok, like any other designer, I’ve always shivered whenever I’d run into one of those “will do your logo for $100″ websites. Design is about craftsmanship, unique solution for each specific client, and so on.
But I have to hand to the AppArt guys: the addLib app generates random design pieces based on pictures you’ve taken; the result is beautiful. They’ll kill me for saying random because allegedly “addLib mixes the Grid System, a fractal theory, the golden ratio and the Facial Recognition System, and then creates graphic design.”
So recapping. Design is about craftsmanship, only now we can store all the hard work in a few lines of code and let people enjoy it instantaneously. Btw, found it via the cool website by Jason Fields, app.itize.us.
Interesting list compiled by the magazine Technology Review. Apart from the usual suspects (such as real-time search and cloud programming), some interesting new trends showed up. The ugly duckling is probably Social TV that, even though not as hyped as other networks, comes to show how TV is still up for a fight. Similar praising words appear this week on The Economist’s special report on television, affirming that it “is adapting better to technological change than any other media business.” Maybe McLuhan was wrong, and TV is a hot media after all.
I believe my favourite, nonetheless, is The Green Concrete (picture above). The current concrete production accounts for 5% of carbon dioxide emissions each year. Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, chief scientist at London-based startup Novacem, found a way to actually revert this all together. During his student days at Imperial College London, Vlasopoulos stumbled into an method that, by removing the commonly used Portland cement during the production process, he could actually trap carbon dioxide inside the concrete. Isn’t that amazing or isn’t that amazing?
A day in the life of New York City (makes me want to go there tomorrow). Breath taking work by Sam O’Hare, check an interview about it here. The soundtrack is another gem, by Human.
A week ago I was at the usual Friday pub when someone comes over and asks “Would you mind being a judge at the D&AD awards?” Hum, let me think… Hell yeah!
I remember buying the D&AD books throughout my design studies. There was one in particular: it had a metal sleeve and punctuated dotes all over the cover, representing the number of projects in the book. Some dots had a silver highlight, and I believe one or two a golden one. Those where the pencil winners. And now, having seen the process from inside, I can tell pencil winners can be canonized in the creative industry. Last night, talking to one of the organisers at the closing party, I was told that actually every work submitted get shown to the judges (I always thought there was a triage before that). For the TV advertising along there were 1200 works from all over the world. 1200!!!
Yumiko Tanaka and I represented Nokia as judges for the Interaction Design and Micro-site category, together with a bunch of other creative folks (some from the BBC and others from various agencies). Jake Smith did a brilliant job as the Foreman.
Looking forward for next year. Maybe with some work of our own.
The new packaging for Aquarius Fresh, recently released by Coca-Cola Brasil, generated a lot of comments on blogosphere as well as Twitter (good and bad, but that’s the point anyway). It also drove a lot of people to search the creators of its new brand identity. Well, here we are, trying to answer some questions about the process, details of the brief, how and why we came up with result:
CHALLENGE Aquarius Fresh must disrupt traditional graphic codification of flavour waters in Brazil, repositioning the brand as the main reference in brazilian market for the specific category.
PROBLEM ANALISYS As oppose to other brands, Aquarius Fresh has actually a colorized aspect. Hence, colour was the starting point for our strategy: a sensorial experience driving all the element of the visual identity system.
RESULT Aquarius Fresh’s consumer experience is amplified. It is not only about drinking, but also seeing, imagining colours and create associations with different colourful sensorial experiences. We created the Synesthesia concept, which claimed: drinking Aquarius Fresh is drinking colour! That was reflected on the way we’ve explored the coloured liquid itself, as well using colour as intense as possible both on label and bottle. We crafted how to bring enough luminosity and transparency onto the label to achieved the desired aesthetics effect. It was also fundamental to create an extremely simple graphic system; it had to be clean and iconographic. From that point, colours itself did the rest.
Gregory Berns is an acclaimed neuroscientist which has demonstrated scientifically that some people are able to perceive and understand the world differently from all others. These are the people who see nothing as impossible; people ready to break the rules and paradigms with their ideas. They are “The iconoclasts”, which Berns explains in the book with the homonymous name.
He demonstrates that brain has three natural obstacles to innovative thinking: inefficient perception, fear of failure and incapacity to persuade other people. His book exposes researches about how brain works and examples of famous iconoclasts, such as Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Martin Luther King among many others, and how their successful ideas change their disciplines forever. An amazing book to those who want to understand and archive creativity.
