Are you in?

Currently freelancing in the charity sector, I’m seeing more and more great creative campaigns being produced for what has traditionally been a financially frugal market when it comes to campaigning.

This motion piece by Starbucks and their ‘Pledge 5 hours’ campaign is pretty cool. Promoting volunteer opportunities, it’s great to see not only some ethical change with corporate businesses, but a creative spin developed on par (albeit a bit cheesy). It’s yet another succession to the Pulp Fiction type in motion piece that did the rounds a while back. Although not an entirely new concept, it’s still a nice execution.

Fresh off the Frater

I know this one’s done the circuit but I just love the Frater video for Ladyhawke’s ‘My Delirium’. Watercolours by Sarah Larnach, direction by Frater and produced by the amazing Partizan Lab.

Joker’s Daughter

This video for music artist Joker’s Daughter is beautifully animated and directed by New York’s Hayley Morris.

The Trillion Dollar Campaign – “It’s cheaper to print this on money than on paper”

An award winner at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival last week, The Trillion Dollar Campaign, by South African agency TBWA/Hunt/Lascaris/Johannesburg is a real eye opener. An outdoor advertising campaign made entirely of worthless Zimbabwean bank notes has helped raise awareness and send a provocative message attacking Mugabe’s regime. Brilliant!

Flash Interactive for Tate

This is my latest work for Tate Galleries in the UK – an interactive flash site for Young Tate, to coincide with the Colour Chart exhibition now showing at Tate Liverpool. The site comprises colour theory tools and flash games to ‘Saturate’ the young-uns with all things colour. Concept, design, flash and actionscript executed by moi. Take a look…

A stylish screensaver

I’ve had this one on my mac for a while now, but with Pixel Breaker’s recent write up in February’s Wired magazine, and the addition of his app into the iPhone app store, this Polar Clock is well worth the word it is getting.

Amnesty International ‘Signature’ Campaign

This 2007 Amnesty campaign was animated by Magic Lab under Paris branch of TBWA, and won gold at the Cannes Lion Advertising Awards. An epic example of  message and media with strength, style and most definitely a lasting impression.
‘Your signature is more powerful than you think’.

Sounds like…

I first came across this site about five years ago and even today, with all the sophisticated action script and components out there, it is still one of my very favourite flash sites. The subject matter: the history of techno music. The execution: a timeline of beautifully designed and creatively tweened flash movies, dynamically loading into a creative shell. Sounds Like Techno, sounds like cool.

“Design is thinking made visual”

- spoken by American graphic designer, Saul Bass, motion graphics and title design was pushed into the mainstream as another moving art form. Famous for the title design for ‘The Man with the Golden Arm’ and ‘Vertigo’, Saul Bass paved the way in new and innovative methods of film title production. His legacy lives on as seen in the incredible opening sequence to ‘Casino Royale’, and more recently, ‘Mad Men’.

Back to basics: 1.618

The grid system was one of the first elements of design I was taught. Base your work on a grid layout, and harmony and unity will ensue. Following a grid as an aid, not an absolute, helps to free the design, and brings an underlying fluidity and rationality to your communication. The grid helps to lead the eye, create visual harmony and provide order to potential chaos.

The golden mean proportion of 1.618 provides the geometric relationship that is not only common in design but also musical tuning and provides an algorithm for the stockmarket. Beginning with 0 then 1, each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers. A perfect recipe for choosing typographic styles.

Of course much creativity can come from breaking the rules. One just needs to first understand those rules to effectively break them!