London redefined

situation 9, 2007
Strip a city street of all its commercial clutter and is it still identifiable? This is one of the questions posed by a series of artworks by Austrian artist Gregor Graf, currently on show at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London.
Graf mixes old technology with new in his work, using medium format photography to take the initial shots of a city before removing, via Photoshop, all traces of language and signage from the images, including commercials signs, street signs, people and traffic. The cities become virtually unrecognisable as a result, and oddly sinister. Graf has previously photographed Linz and Warsaw in this style, and turned his attention to London when commissioned to create some works by the Visual Arts Platform at the Austrian Cultural Forum. Shown above is a blissfully quiet Oxford Street…

Swisscom gets Moving Brands treatment

London-based Moving Brands’ rebrand of Swiss telecom company Swisscom includes a three-dimensional graphic mark as well as a re-drawn wordmark…

Indaba live blog

OK, here we are at the Design Indaba in Cape Town attempting, internet connection willing, to blog live from the first session of the morning by Gert Dumbar and carrying on through the rest of the day

Roger Beckett

Everybody at Creative Review would like to wish Roger Beckett all the best as he leaves the magazine to pursue other interests.
Roger worked on the launch of Creative Review in 1980 and also on the launch of our sister title, Design Week, eventually becoming publisher of the latter. For the past few years he has been publishing director of both Creative Review and Design Week, helping us to launch The Annual and Monograph as well as overseeing our acquisition of the Creative Handbook.
“During my time at Centaur [publisher of CR] I have worked in many different markets but have always felt a great affinity to the creative sector. I have been fortunate enough to work alongside and do business with some fantastic people and hope that our paths will cross again in the future,” he says.
We will all miss Roger’s energy and enthusiasm as well as all the help he has given us in developing Creative Review and wish him every future success.

Design Indaba Day 1

Patrick Burgoyne will be blogging from the Design Indaba conference in Cape Town this week
Design Indaba has often been referred to as the best design conference in the world: it certainly attracts the big names, this year being no exception as the event kicked off with a presentation by (and I think for once this term is genuinely applicable) a living legend of graphic design, Ivan Chermayeff.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Just watch the first minute or so of the above clip, a Brits broadcast from online entertainment channel ITN On. As product placement goes, you might think that Will Ferrell’s new film, Semi-Pro, had lucked in what with the reporter’s clipboard proudly declaring its title to camera (0.33). But keep watching – Farrell’s only gone and innocuously got his film into another shot (from 1.12-1.30): this time the intrepid reporter’s standing next to a billboard advertising the movie and – hey – there’s its title again, on the side of the taxi she’s climbing into! Lucky coincidence?
Well, no. All of these references to Semi-Pro were actually added in to the broadcast digitally and, according to MirriAd who are behind the work, this is a first for “embedded advertising in showbiz content”. While the work is for an online commercial channel, targeting an audience who, potentially, would be interested in seeing the film, doesn’t this all just feel a little creepy?

Gap’s Sound of Color

Ryan Ebner’s film for Marié Digby’s track Paint Me In Your Sunshine, based on the colour yellow
What is the relationship between sound and colour? It’s a question pondered by psychologists and artists over the centuries, and now, finally, Gap clothing has also entered the debate with their latest project, The Sound of Color.
A branded content campaign which aims to launch Gap’s brightly-coloured Spring 2008 collection through non-traditional means, the Sound of Color saw the clothing company, in conjunction with San Francisco-based production company Rehab, approach five bands and ask them to write a song based on a specific colour. The Blakes, a Seattle-based Indie band, took blue; Dntel, a member of the band The Postal Service, took on red; hip-hop artist/producer Swizz Beats was given green, singer/songwriter Marié Digby yellow, and The Raveonettes opted for black and white.
Once the songs were complete, they were then given to five directors who were asked to create videos to accompany them. While they were requested to reflect the colour associated with each track in their films, the directors were otherwise given a free rein to create the films however they liked, without consultation with the musicians.

CR Redesigned

If you pick up a copy of the March issue of Creative Review, out this week, we hope you’ll notice something a bit different about it: We’ve had a redesign.

The Somnambulists

Princess Tolstoya, 1800-1873
Edinburgh-based photographer Joanna Kane’s latest book, The Somnambulists, is a series of rather unconventional portraits. While at first glance the images appear to be intimate studies of various sleeping figures they are, in fact, recent photographs of life and death masks that are between 150 and 200 years old.

The Shell Guides: a very British surrealism

Front cover of the Shell County Guide to Rutland by WG Hoskins, 1963
The Shell County Guides to England and Wales were, in their own unique way, part of the British avant garde. Dedicated to a subject matter that was quite the reverse, the Guides in fact became a platform for new forms of photographic expression and surrealism. A new exhibition that opens at the University of Middlesex’s Museum of Domestic Design and Architecture on March 4 aims to show just how supportive of the graphic arts these rather stuffy sounding guides to the jewels of the British countryside actually were.

Onitsuka: Product Makes Model, Makes Ads, Makes Art, Makes Product

More evidence of the “new” advertising: the centrepiece of Onitsuka Tiger’s marketing over the coming year will be a meter-long model of a trainer-shaped mini-city created using Rapid Prototyping technology. The model appears in a commercial and in print ads, but copies will also tour in an exhibition and be made into promotional merchandise. Plus – and here’s where it gets really Ad2.0 – Onitsuka is going to bring out a range of trainers based on the model later this year…

Release your inner sleeve designer

This “sleeve”, created as part of Flickr’s CD Cover meme, uses randomly generated data from Wikipedia,
quotationspage.com and Flickr to generate your own fantasy album cover. Type, setting: designer’s own
What’s this? A hot new cover for a band so cutting edge that you haven’t even read about them on Pitchfork yet? Or were The Languages… an unsung band from the Factory years, only to be eclipsed by the success of Joy Division? Well, OK, I admit it; it’s not a new band at all (though the name is fantastic), rather it’s my first attempt at creating a sleeve for Flickr’s CD Cover meme.

1 … 1,348 1,349 1,350 1,351 1,352 1,353 1,354 1,355 1,356 … 1,407

More from CR

How Guinness embraced social

By loosening its approach to advertising, and engaging with its audience directly, the drinks brand has transformed with the times and won a whole new set of fans

How Lego creates meaningful brand experiences

We speak to Lego’s VP of global brand development Alero Akuya about the brand’s rare ability to straddle the physical and virtual worlds with ease – whether through its immersive new art exhibition in Paris or collaborations with Epic Games and Nike