Archive for January, 2009

  • Can Creativity Thrive During Hard Times?

    There’s no escaping it, times are rough and tough.  We’ve been bracing ourselves and tightening our belts to the point where we’re running out of notches. Green shoots of recovery? Yeah, right.
    Clients are shaking their heads as they ponder budgets for 2009. The IPA and other industry gurus will no doubt be knocking on their [...]

  • Posterboy - New York’s answer to the Shoreditch Decapitator…

    There’s something really appealing about the mash-up of broadcast and outdoor media for artistic/social commentary purposes - it often brings out some painful truths. From old-school audio-pirates like Douglas Kahn (who I was lucky enough to have as a lecturer at uni for a semester) and Negativeland to current street art, I love the way [...]

  • Microsoft Surface - a new computing revolution? #1

    A few of us have been playing with a Microsoft Surface today. It’s a much-hyped device, famous for it’s multi-touch interface and rather high price tag. Multi-touch is clearly becoming the brave new world for User Interface design but the revolution will probably come as an indirect consequence of it, not because of it.
    You see we’ve already [...]

  • Springing from the shoulders of giants

    I love it when people take direct inspiration from other people’s creativity and give it new life. It’s great to see people use sub-plots, objects or characters as the starting points in their own expressions. Borrowing from established cultural artefacts seems to make the idea all the more real and resonant. For example the idea [...]

  • Reading List update

    Envisioning Information
    Edward R. Tufte
    Experience Design, Graphic Design 

    Part of a series of beautifully produced Tufte publications that includes The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Visual Explanations, these books are essential reading for anyone planning to building something handsome, information rich and easy to use. 
    ——————————————
    Raster Systeme: Grid Systems in Graphic Design
    Josef Muller-Brockmann
    Graphic Design, Experience Design

    One of the best books on layout and grids [...]

  • The LBiQ Reading List

    The reading list is a new posting category here on the LBiQ blog. These are the ’set texts’, the most useful books directly relating to our profession. The reading list is sub categorised broadly as follows:
    Ideas (including ways of thinking creatively, workshopping…)
    Writing (inc. long copy, short copy, scriptwriting…)
    Graphic Design (inc. layout, typography…)
    Experience Design (inc. interaction design, service innovation…)
    Drawing (inc. storyboards, [...]

  • ‘Imagine there’s no heaven…’

    Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist the Movie has got plenty of us talking in the LBi creative studio. Is it an Anti Capitalist conspiracy theory, or a glimpse of what comes after the collapse of the monetary system in the Crunch… a geothermally powered Resourced Based Economy courtesy of the Venus Project?
    A wiser film maker may have steered clear [...]

  • Drawn this week at LBi London

    Green Man. Culled from Greyscale Obscurity.

     
     
     
    Oh yes we have skills, and we are not shy. This is Murray’s birthday card, drawn by JPT. Think of it as an antidote to Adobedom, pencil therapy, something to do with the importance of making stuff. Bring on Spring with birds, beards, ukuleles, neon feathers and leafy garlands.

  • 好哇! It’s the year of the Ox…

    The 26th of January is Chinese New Year and 2009 is the year of the Ox. Somehow I doubt I’m the only one to have spotted TFL’s lovely China in London posters. 
    The design echoes traditional Chinese red ink block prints and is unlike anything else on the underground right now. The China in London poster reminds me [...]

  • Living data

    The intersection of data and representation is an rich area soaked in wonderfully tactile, beautiful visual and visceral experimentation… but these data sculptures, based on the moods of the artist Martin Kim Luge’s online friends, just hit the sweet spot for me.

    Entitled Weeping Willow (l) and Rose of Jericho(r), they scrobble the mood tags on [...]

  • How Not to be a “Key Online Influencer”

    So you’re a “Key Online Influencer“, and you’re off to visit one of you biggest clients to talk about social media.  Upon landing in the client’s home town you fire off a Twitter post stating how much the client’s home town sucks.  Client is subscriber to your Twitter stream.  Client calls you out.  You’re an [...]

  • The First Digital President

    It was Roosevelt whose “fireside chats” made him the first President of the broadcast age, and later Kennedy with his good looks outmaneuvered an unshaven Nixon as TV came to the fore. With his masterful grasp of the digital age Obama first changed the business model of winning the presidency; by asking for micro-donations he [...]

  • Where have all the ideas gone?

    In our jaunt through LBiQ 4 and it’s exploration of ideas; big and small, traditional and new, it’s clear completely new ideas are increasingly hard to find – if they ever existed in the first place. “There’s nothing new under the sun”, after all, as some crusty old fool once said. (I think we can [...]

  • Obama’s Inauguration…in Lego

    Lego master craftsmen have been putting the finishing touches to a model White House, motorcade, and even queues to the porta-loos, as excitement surrounding the upcoming 56th inauguration of a US president reaches fever pitch.

  • “There’s a plane in the Hudson. I’m on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy.”

    A dramatic picture of the US Airways aircraft that crashed in the Hudson River appeared around the world within minutes after a bystander uploaded a photograph taken with his mobile telephone on to the website Twitter.

  • This is where we live

    This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

  • Curiouser and curiouser

    Well now, here’s an unexpected 2008 retrospective. Curious Expeditions, a website devoted to unearthing and documenting the wondrous, the macabre and the obscure from around the world.

  • Museum of hidden web goodness

    There’s a real groundswell of love for loaders at the moment - what with the Creative Circle Honours 2009 having a special one-year-only award category, and a build-up of online chatter about this more and more rarely seen craft. Now Big Spaceship have taken us into the next dimension with their brilliant loader museum - [...]

  • Revealed: The Times Made Up That Stuff About Google

    The Times claim each google search contributes 7 grams of CO2 to the atmosphere, google responds almost immediately, some else exposes The Times’ shoddy journalism (probably using google). I’d like to see them do an analysis of the total CO2 emissions generated during the production of a single issue of The Times.

  • Heavy Metal Band Name Flowchart

    If you’re ever wondering how to name your heavy metal band, here’s a wonderfully simple information design that should help you in the quest.

  • The connected world

    If there was one overarching theme from the Consumer Electronics Show last week, it was that absolutely every device in our lives is becoming a computer connected to the Internet. Well about bloody time.
    I remember back in the 90’s being promised I could order my milk directly from the fridge, control the temperature of [...]

  • Nasty Marketing

    Isn’t the whole point of digital marketing, that it takes the side of the consumer and gives people something valuable? Aren’t we stepping forward into a brave new world of empowered consumers and brands who know how to bring joy into people’s lives. A shame them that something like this is out there. Negative, culturally [...]