stampkit

Yep, that’s Photoshop CS4 all right.

Interesting idea and thoughtful execution for Software-Asli.com, which I gather is a software reseller website. Agency credits go to Bates141, Jakarta.

1 comment

What do we need the skin of a car for, anyway?

Good question.

BMW gives us a compelling answer in the form of GINA, a truly revolutionary vision for what the future of automobiles – or at least their skins – may be.

GINA stands for Geometry and Function in (infinite) Adaptations. Figure that one out.

Simply stated, it’s a way of looking at car construction that brings into question more than 100 years of dogma and tradition. It’s light. It’s flexible. And it elicits an emotional reaction that your everyday Turtle Wax won’t buff out.

Oh, and it winks.

1 comment

What sucked about my first half-marathon.

Have you ever been stabbed with a spear just below and slightly behind your left kneecap?

If so, you might have some appreciation for how I felt somewhere between mile number ten and mile number eleven of my first half-marathon.

I’ve since learned that the injury was probably an ITB flareup, caused from an over-aggravated iliotibial band. I’ve also since learned that ITB stands for iliotibial band. But at the time, all I could wrap my head around was the pain – which forced me to stop on the side of the road for my own private little moment of dispair. Getting back into the race wasn’t a question. But doing so would be slow and limpy, as I would have to favor my previously undiscovered ITB.

But here’s the thing. The moment I remember most from my first half-marathon wasn’t when the ITB thing happened. It was after – when an anonymous runner whisked by and slowed herself down just long enough to say, “Keep it up. You’re doing great.”

I don’t know who she was. I didn’t see her face. In fact, I really didn’t see much more than the sides of her running shoes as she passed. But those six simple words stuck with me. They kept me going for the final 3 miles, and helped me cross the finish.

And that part, as I recall, didn’t suck.

4 comments

Where the ordinary is extraordinary and nothing is what it seems.

That’s a line that Sarajo uses to describe her urban habitat in Los Angeles, which “borders Thai Town, Little Armenia and Koreatown, with Guatemalan and Salvadoran bakeries nearby.”

Sounds like a great place from which to draw inspiration. Or to get lost within.

The same can be said of her work, which is at once whimsical and dreamlike – with a tactile presence that draws you in and tangles you up. Her sense of color and line quality (in both paint and thread) is just delightful.

And Sarajo Frieden’s commercial illustrations are just as compelling as her personal work. I just love this poster series for Old Navy. And this endearing little alphabet.

Still curious? There’s this too.

No comments

Defy gravity.

It’s a law of nature. If you don’t continually protect the integrity of your work at every stage of the process, it will slowly but surely trend downward.

In small, seemingly insignificant ways – and in sweeping wholesale ways – your work will tumble. More experienced peers may discourage your idea, brushing it off as “already been tried.” Hand-wringing account teams will put on their client hats and challenge every aspect of the idea, even before it’s seen the light of day. And clients will swat at it and run willy-nilly, as though it were a bee in their face.

Business objectives will change halfway through the project. Things will be tacked on in the eleventh hour. Partners and vendors will drop the ball. These things will happen.

But it’s your idea. Pick it up and carry it.

2 comments

I recently visited Orlando on business.

I was there for fourteen hours.

I slept there. I ate breakfast there. And I was driven from the airport to my hotel room and back again there. The rest of my time was unceremoniously reserved for business.

If you do the simple math – the math that I failed to consider before booking my travel – you’ll quickly realize that fourteen hours in Orlando might as well be fourteen hours in Omaha, with the oh-so-subtle addition of palm trees, higher humidity and a shuttle bus driver who happily points to a road sign and reminds you that your hotel is only two miles away from Disney World.

2 comments

Because the world needs better ideas.

Every September, Barkley hosts what we call The Creativity Symposium. It’s a two-day event designed to embrace creativity in all of its forms, and to collectively assemble as an entire agency to celebrate it.

Speakers are brought in from around the country and from a variety of disciplines. The annual agenda has included writers, designers, artists, musicians, game developers, advertising icons, interactive mavericks and the occasional square peg. Case in point: this year’s Symposium kicked off with a marching band, which blared its way through every nook and cranny of the historic Uptown Theatre at 8:30 in the morning. And oddly enough, it seemed perfectly appropriate.

I worked on some of the internal marketing materials alongside Tom Demetriou, who was my partner for the project. Tom had what I thought was an incredibly simple idea, which he conveyed to me in an email while we were both in separate cities. I knew it was golden the moment I saw it. The rest was just a matter of knocking it out.

Here is the line+logo lockup that we created for the 2008 Creativity Symposium:

And here’s the poster series that brought it to life:

Of course, the work would be empty without the great photos. Special thanks to ambergris, 2010designs and Cynner_SF for giving us permission to use their photos, and for having the rare sense of humor necessary to snap them in the first place.

Now go to Flickr and do your own search for “bad ideas.” Then you tell me, was the pizza-box toboggan really that bad after all?

No comments

Every step counts

That’s one of the lines that has been used in the past to promote the Helen Gold 5k run in Kansas City which benefits Parkinson’s research. But I think it works just as well to describe any worthy endeavor – including this piece of stop-motion video that I helped to create.

The initial idea came out of discussions with Tom Demetriou (a fellow CD here at Barkley) as we worked on the account. We had an idea about doing some sidewalk art to promote the event. But our challenge was to find an interesting way to leverage it against a far greater (mass) audience than would normally experience it on the sidewalk.

Tom had written some great lines of copy. Our plan was to lay the copy down in a footstep pattern (word after word) with yellow sidewalk paint. Some of Tom’s lines were short. Some were long. And some were just right to fit squarely within a 30-second TV spot. So that became our vehicle.

Here’s a look at what we came up with.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.
How we did it

First we found a vendor who could cut the stencils for us. Then we started testing paint.

It turns out that sidewalk paint straight out of the jug is neither thin enough to spray through an atomizer, nor thick enough to apply with a roller through a stencil (as our interns famously discovered). We needed the paint to be bright and opaque, so thinning it wasn’t an option. It would have to go thicker.

I found some recipes for homemade sidewalk paint online that included corn starch as a thickening agent. So we picked some up. And it worked.

In the meantime, I was doing multiple walk-throughs of the actual spot in order to nail down timing and technique. Here’s a rough cut from one of the test runs. It was shot on the roof of our parking garage with a digital still camera and edited quickly in Flash as a series of frames on a timeline.

Get the Flash Player to see this player. Fun project all around, and hats off to everyone who pitched in and helped along the way. We couldn’t have done it without you.

4 comments

Muscles, mayhem & (ahem) Mexican food.

Is badassedness a word?

If so, it might just be enough to describe this hard-boiled rip-rolling ride from two good buddies of mine.

Brian Winkeler writes. Dave Curd draws. And Bastard Road delivers.

It reads like a pulpy comic book with a mean left hook. But I have it from dependable sources that Bastard and his meaty fists are poised to punch into bigger things real soon.

Consider yourself warned.

3 comments

Latvian vintage.

Juana Gaita translates roughly as “the new course.” It’s the title of a Latvian periodical that was first published in 1955, and is still being produced today.

Take a tour of the wonderfully abstract covers from the the official Juana Gaita archives.

Credit for some of the finest in the collection go to Ilmārs Rumpēters, who served as art director for JG during the magazine’s most formative years.

Found via Grain Edit.

3 comments

Take it to the next level.

Check out this fantastic 2-minute spot from 72andSunny for Nike Football. There’s also a :60, but what’s not to love about a full ‘nuther minute? Extra credit to anyone who can name all the international cameos.

Makes me want to go out and kick something.

No comments