The Next Digital Generation

If you think tex­ting while walk­ing is dan­ger­ous, just wait until every­one starts wear­ing Google’s futur­is­tic, internet-connected glasses.

  Direc­tions to your des­ti­na­tion appear lit­er­ally before your eyes. You can talk to friends over video chat, take a photo or even buy a few things online as you walk around.  The glasses will be able to do any­thing a smart­phone or tablet com­puter does now — and then some.  Google gave a glimpse of “Project Glass” in a video and blog post last week. Still in an early pro­to­type stage, the glasses open up end­less pos­si­bil­i­ties — as well as chal­lenges to safety, pri­vacy and fash­ion sen­si­bil­ity. The pro­to­types have a sleek wrap-around look and appear noth­ing like clunky 3-D glasses. But if Google isn’t care­ful, they could be dis­missed as a kind of Blue­tooth ear­piece of the future, a fash­ion faux-pas where bulky looks out­weigh mar­ginal utility.

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A Home Builder Branding Revolution — IKEA launches a US$86,500 flat-pack home — they even build it for you

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Where do you go when you own the home fur­nish­ings mar­ket?
The Swedish brand famous for its afford­able fur­ni­ture and acces­sories has come up with a gen­uine game changer — an IKEA house in which you can put all that IKEA fur­ni­ture. An archi­tec­tural firm in Ore­gon has col­lab­o­rated with fur­ni­ture giant IKEA to come up with a flat-pack home cost­ing just US$86,500.

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Everyone is a Brand Designer

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Saw this photo on Flickr — it goes to show; when it comes to brand, some get it and some just don’t.

Lucie and Simon’s Silent World

Pho­tog­ra­phers Lucie & Simon have pro­duced these beau­ti­ful images of how some of the worlds busiest places would look with­out peo­ple and cars. It cre­ates a sur­real world that is both calm­ing and unset­tling, but most inter­est­ingly this pho­tog­ra­phy series shifts the focus. The land­scapes depict places that thou­sands of eyes has graced over and stopped ‘see­ing’. As design­ers we remind our­selves to really ‘see’ our envi­ron­ment, the mun­dane of the morn­ing bus trip is filled with design­ers inspi­ra­tion gold. These pho­tos are a great reminder of the hap­haz­ard beauty of out sur­round­ings. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Easter!

So it’s that time of the year again where the Easter bunny vis­its us with moun­tains of choco­late delights. The choco­late eggs and bun­nies have been lin­ing the super­mar­ket shelves since Santa’s last visit and choco­latiéres have been push­ing to offer some­thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. How­ever one brand doing it like no other I’ve seen is Sweet Brazil Choco­lates. With a brand belief that “Life has more taste when we feed our eyes before we delight the palate,” the prod­uct range is absolutely stunning.

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Betta Milk, a Tassie brand that truly is ‘a local’

In a world where just about every com­pany seems des­per­ate to be global, it is refresh­ing to still find great local brands that are proud of who they are and where they come from.

An avid reader of our blog from down south, has put me on to Betta Milk, a Tas­man­ian brand that has stirred up Tassie pride to fight off com­pe­ti­tion and enter­tain The Apple Isle.

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Jucy Rentals — Social Media Saavy Branding

branding agency

Not all Brands are Born Equal
’Not all brands are born equal’ — a state­ment worth mak­ing before I launch into a review of this crank­ing New Zealand brand who’s tak­ing on the world. In our world as brand strate­gists and iden­tity design­ers we work with brands of almost every descrip­tion; retail brands, wine brands, FMCG brands, pro­fes­sional ser­vices brands — you name it, we’ve got a pretty good fix on what makes it tick. One thing we know is some brands get a free hit from social media, they are just more suited to this method of brand com­mu­ni­ca­tions and more attrac­tive and sticky to the peo­ple who most often fre­quent these new chan­nels of con­nec­tion. But before you dis­miss this arti­cle as not rel­e­vant for your busi­ness, I implore you to take pause, read and con­sider where the oppor­tu­ni­ties may lie for your busi­ness as social media takes hold of the way we inter­act in the way email did fif­teen years before it.

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When Twitter is More Important Than Lunch

social media branding agencyFirst pub­lished in National Times
A Guest post by Melbourne-based writer James Schlo­ef­fel

Pic­ture this. You are the mar­ket­ing exec­u­tive for a large multi­na­tional sta­tionery com­pany; you come back from your lunch break and dis­cover you’ve got 100 missed calls, 1000 unan­swered emails and a cor­po­rate dis­as­ter rapidly unfold­ing at your desk. What do you do?

This may have been the sce­nario fac­ing one or sev­eral unlucky employ­ees at Paper­chase — one of Britain’s largest sta­tionery retail­ers — last Thursday.

Within the space of a cou­ple of hours — lit­tle more than the length of an extended lunch break — the com­pany had become the sub­ject of a global Twit­ter onslaught that may well dam­age it beyond repair. The attack was in response to the alle­ga­tion that Paper­chase had pla­gia­rised an inde­pen­dent British artist’s draw­ings for use on a range of its products.

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Date Night For Fonts

It’s time to tuck in your coun­ters, put a bit of prod­uct in those ser­ifs and get ready for the Type dat­ing game. Check out this great lit­tle site from Aura Seltzer, Type Con­nec­tion, A Typo­graphic Dat­ing Game. You get to pick the beau from a selec­tion of gen­eral font types (which includes Archer, one of my pet fonts) then try to match them up with an appro­pri­ate belle.

Type Connection, A Typographic Dating Game
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Just lovin’ these weird and whacky animated illustrations by Dain Fagerholm

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