Why is it only in the small hours that designers really produce their best work...? There are the obvious reasons, the phones are not going off, no-one is sending you emails (apart from the phishers and scammers of course), there's no lunch to be eaten, no comedy virals to be forwarded, no proofs to check, no meetings to attend, no rubber bands to flick, no paperwork to be filed, no 'pesky' clients asking questions...
...so there's just you, your sketchbook, the mighty mouse, a trusty Apple Mac and of course iTunes loaded up with all your best music that can be played (and sung along too) at the volume of your choosing and, of course, your ideas which at 11.39pm are just itching to get out!
563 emails. That was the total number that awaited me when I returned from my holiday. I'm sure people get more than me, but it still took me three days before I managed to get through them all. All I can say is thank goodness I didn't go away for two weeks.
The new Guinness 'domino' advert that premiered tonight in the UK on ITV (and now on YouTube) felt like a bit of an anti-climax to me.
I also think the domino idea was done better by Honda:
Though that itself is said to have 'borrowed' the idea from Peter Fischili and David Weiss "The Way Things Go" art / film performance:
I preferred the Sony Bunnies over the Guinness advert even if that was also a bit of a rip-off. I guess at least they animated a static picture and thus brought something new to the original works.
...well, you don't have fly to Bali to talk about it. You could just go here to learn what to do www.thesolutionissimple.org and maybe a video conference would be as effective...?
Walking to to the Tate Modern in London last month from Tower Bridge, my daughter and I passed the Millenium Courtyard at Southwark Cathedral. This had a protective cordon of concrete posts with two reflectors in each. My daughter noticed they had all been given a unique 'mouth' so each had its own 'personality'. Now, I know this is not in the same league as Banksy, and arguably this is a crime, but it does make a change to see a bit of humour in graffiti instead of pointless tagging.
Recently I've had a pleasant email exchange with a chap called Dan who is the Head of Creative at our favourite drinks company, Innocent. We were discussing our Patently Obvious "clean without compromise" range. So we sent them a few samples and in return we received some boxes of smoothies this morning. Thanks Dan, it was a lovely surprise and it was good to see the KMI team all enjoying a chilled smoothie!
...it's raining. And the forecast does not look good. But I'm still optimistically packing my tent into my hired white van along with bikes, inflatable boat, gas cooker etc, and I'm heading off with my daughter for a well earned few days break at our favourite campsite near Studland, in Dorset. The only thing that's going to spoil my time off is the fact that some of our friends have hired a rather gorgeous VW camper. So not only will they (probably) remain dry, they'll also look very trendy.
After the efforts of Tap in the UK to persuade us that purchasing bottled water is not only daft considering the generally very high quality of UK tap water (and indeed water in the 'western' world), and the huge environmental impact of shipping water around the globe, not to mention the 'carbon footprint' from bottling water and then throwing the bottles into land fill, and last (but not least) the fact the direct cost to you (I read that bottled water is actually more expensive than petrol) it was interesting to read that a New York company, TapdNY, has started selling local NYC purified tap water. I do like the design, bold city influenced graphics, with a great tag lines such as "no glaciers were harmed making this water".
However I think Tap in the UK is environmentally better, selling empty containers and stickers to encourage you to use water in your own home (the NYC version still has to be shipped in trucks at somepoint).
I read an interesting article on this subject in The Guardian. You can read it here.
At KMI we are concerned about the fact the many products are mainly comprised of water and that we are all paying to ship a lot of water based 'stuff' around the UK and the world. We are actively investigating ways around this... stay tuned for more news... but until then I was reminded that our first product, a 15ml Shave Oil first produced 15 years ago and still going strong today, is arguably one of the most environmentally friendly ways to shave. Despite it's compact size, you can get around 60+ shaves from just one bottle. It's light weight means a much reduced carbon footprint both in terms of manufacturing as well as shipping. The packaging is also made from (at least) 75% recycled plastics (like old fizzy drink bottles) and it is, of course, all fully recyclable.
Microsoft's advertising campaign in the US has now moved on from the surreal Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates adverts buying shoes and living in an 'ordinary' household (which I quite like but then I was a Seinfeld fan) to ones which seem to take on Apple's "Hello, I'm a Mac" adverts head on.
Although showing the wide use of PCs, and the adverts also feature email addresses for all of the 'real' people shown in them, to me it has missed the point.
Microsoft does not make PCs. It makes operating systems and programs that run on a PC. And increasingly PCs are used to run other operating systems including Linux - and are even being hacked to run Apple's OS X. So they are spending a lot of money advertising something they don't sell. Doh.
It transpires even the adverts were created on Apple Macintosh computers. Read about that here.
The Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld adverts (arguably about 'nothing' just like the Seinfeld TV shows):
And some of the original "Hello I'm a Mac" adverts can be seen below. Not that they are to be held up as great advertising, they can be slightly irritating, but they do get their points across. And they are definitely advertising Apple products.
Having been forced to use Adobe Illustrator for a couple of projects I have just had a taste of the 'other side'. To paraphrase Michael Johnson (of London design consultancy Johnson Banks), "My name is Simon Watson and I have a confession, I still use Macromedia Freehand".
In the beginning, when I first used a vector based illustration package on my Apple Macintosh SE, there was quite a wide choice. But the two main packages were Adobe Illustrator 88 and Aldus Freehand 2. I chose Freehand because it allowed you to work in preview mode so you could see exactly what you were doing. In Illustrator 88 you had to work in outline mode (where everything was shown as 'wireframes') and then switch to preview to see what the heck you had done, then switch back to outline to continue working. Madness.
So I stuck with Freehand. Freehand was purchased by Macromedia but they still developed some really cool features like multiple pages of different sizes in one document, simple colour management and replacement, it was a program that 'just worked' and allowed you to 'think on-screen', not worry about your tools, you could just get on with designing and artworking.
Then Adobe, maker of Freehand's only real competition, Illustrator purchased Macromedia. And I knew that was it. Why bother developing Freehand? And they didn't. The last version was 'MX' (essentially version 11), and that was built in 2003. It still works though, even under Snow Leopard, there are a couple of font quirks, but I can work around that. However I live in dread of a system update breaking Freehand for good. It's not that Illustrator is a bad program, but IMHO it lacks the ease of use, and several features (still!) of Freehand. And in the spirit of competition I think Adobe should sell the code to Freehand, or make it open source so that Freehand could be developed. Remember we are supposed to be living in the free world, where competition is good. So how about it Adobe?
The Winter Olympics opening ceremony is this evening and we just wanted to say "good luck" to our Bob Skeleton slider Shelley Rudman (and to her fiancé Kristan Bromley who we also used to sponsor).
...and of course I want one. I doubted it at first but the more I thought about the iPad the more I could see a use for it in my household where three of us 'fight' for the one laptop. Another device to do email, the web and Facebook 'where-ever' in the house would be great but I certainly don't want to fork out for another laptop (and the programs that would be required). However I will be waiting until version 2 of the iPad is released, ideally with two cameras (one front facing, one pointing at you) so I can use it for video chat.
Until then I have had to content myself with reading all about the iPad in depth here.
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to KING OF SHAVES DESIGN BLOG in the Personal Observation category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
