This tops doing wheelies on ice. Happiness advertising agency in Brussels, Belgium, got “Pleaseletmedesign” typehouse and a pro race car driver to create a font by choreographing the movements of the tiny Toyota iQ. The custom software was designed by interactive artist Zachery Lieberman. Do not try to duplicate this on the freeway.
When nations consider their exportable resources, design is often far down the list, but a 2008 study conducted by the Victoria government in Australia revealed that over $300 million in state revenue can be directly attributed to design-related exports. The state ’s design sector, centered in Melbourne, contributes $7 billion annually to the economy and employs more than 76,000 Victorians – this in a country with a population of just 21.5 million people. The study made apparent that design talent is a highly desirable and exportable commodity. The Australian creative industry could be as marketable abroad as iron ore and manufactured goods.
Australian designers have skills sought in many parts of the world, particularly in rapidly industrializing areas like neighboring Southeast Asia. In fact, the vast geographic size of Australia actually makes the flying distance from Melbourne to Singapore or Indonesia shorter than from Melbourne to Perth. As it is, many studios in Singapore are heavily staffed by Australian designers.
In this prolonged down economy, consumers are deciding that they don’t need to dine at the fanciest restaurant, buy a new wardrobe for every season, or even wash with the top-of-the-line laundry detergent. This trend was duly noted by Procter & Gamble, maker of the premium-priced Tide. With the Tide brand experiencing some of the steepest sales declines in its 62-year history, P&G looked for a way to compete with cheaper private label soaps by issuing a no-frills version of Tide. Instead of its continuous promise of “New and Improved,” P&G opted to remove some of the pricier cleaning additives from its Tide formulation in order to slash the cost by more than 20%.
Attaching the Tide name to this down-market soap, however, was fraught with peril. How do you make sure that Tide “loyalists” remain faithful to the higher-priced “true” Tide, while implying to thrift-conscious shoppers that this version — although not as good — had Tide qualities that made it superior to budget generics?
Augmented reality, or AR. If you don’t know of it, you should. If you haven’t used it yet, you will. What used to dwell in the realm of science fiction and extreme geekdom is finding practical application in all kinds of areas, including marketing, packaging, exhibits, sales demonstrations, technical training, maps, architecture and entertainment. The possibilities are just beginning to be recognized. Augmented reality lets the user see the world around him with superimposed computer graphics that appear in 3-D animation, visible from every angle and following the sight-path of the viewer. In its simplest version, the user can print out a high-contrast black-and-white pattern of squares and point it at a computer webcam. The webcam reads it like a laser bar code and sends a fully formed image back that appears to come alive right on the paper in the user’s hand.
Man, nature and machine have been brought together in the new “Harmony” advertising campaign for the third-generation Prius hybrid. Your eyes are not deceiving you if you think the landscape is alive with people. It is. Two hundred costumed extras were filmed and then computer cloned to create a surreal landscape made to look like over a million people. Evocative of photographer Ann Geddes’s pictures of babies fancifully dressed like fairies, flowers and bunnies, the Prius cast was costumed to represent blades of grass, puffy clouds, flowers and leaves. Conceived by Saatchi & Saatchi, Los Angeles, with Mike McKay as executive creative director, the Prius commercial was filmed in New Zealand. Hideaki Hosono –better known as Mr. Hide (pronounced hee-day) — represented by The Sweet Shop production company, directed the human sequences. Nine different nature costumes were designed for the shoot, with 150 people forming the grass and water, 22 people for the tree trunks, 20 for the stones, 30 for the leaves, 20 for the clouds, 10 for the sun, 8 for the flowers, 8 for the butterflies and 23 for the autumn leaves.