Author: Delphine Hirasuna

Advertising

Iconic True Colors by Farber-Castell

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Eggplant (aubergine) purple. Fire engine red. Shark-skin silver. Dachshund brown. Even if you aren’t shown the actual color, you can envision its exact shade in your mind. Some colors are inextricably linked to an object, plant or animal. This clever ad campaign for Farber-Castell, which has been producing fine art products, including colored pencils, for professional artists for the past 250 years, relies on the viewer to make that connection. It was created by the Serviceplan agency in Munich, Germany.

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Public Service Campaign

Split Screen, Parallel Worlds

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Lately several videos have passed our way telling a story by juxtaposing stock footage-type images on a split screen. They have no voiceovers or text, just music to set the mood. Some of the videos – such as this one issued by WWF — are quite compelling and poetic. Unfortunately, the WWF video had no production credits at the end, so we can’t tell you who made it. It does seem stylistically similar to “Symmetry” by Everynone, but that is just a guess.

Advertising

Nike Recycled for a Better World

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Made by Wieden + Kennedy from 100% recycled ad footage, the Nike “Better World” campaign features giants like Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong and exhilarating sports feats. The two-minute video’s message is that sports inspires hope, fights prejudice, combats disease and just makes the world a better place. The recycled angle is getting a lot of media play, but that part seems misleading and irrelevant. The film clips are classics. They weren’t recycled out of necessity; they were just too good to remain stashed away, gathering dust in the archive.

Packaging

Alfaro Packaging – Making Baroque Look Modern

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Alfaro is a tiny town in the renowned wine-producing La Rioja province in northern Spain. The region has been making wine since the days of the Phoenicians, with the earliest record of grape-growing dating to 873. This year to celebrate La Fiesta Barroca, Palacios Remondo created two commemorative wine collections that pay tribute to Alfaro, home to its winery. Palacios Remondo commissioned Estudio Dorian to design the packaging around a Baroque theme. The collection includes six labels for each wine, with the extravagantly Baroque ornamentation contained in the simple letterforms. The result is an understated elegance, clean and contemporary yet suggestive of a rich heritage.

Product Design

A Plug for a Plug — USB Wall Sockets

By Delphine Hirasuna |

A USB socket that doesn’t need an adapter? It’s about time!! Product designers and engineers have focused on extending the battery life of laptops, iPods, cell phones, digital cameras, wireless headphones and the like. That’s all well and good, but at some point, they still all need to be recharged. They still all require a clunky AC adapter to plug the device into the wall socket. Here’s a solution that approached the problem from another direction – not by redesigning the electronic gadget, but by redesigning the electrical outlet.

The U-Socket is a duplex AC receptable with built-in USB ports that can power any device that is capable of being charged via a 5V power adapter. Replacing the standard 3-prong AC wall socket with one that has two USB sockets alleviates users of the need to have an adapter. In addition to making consumers happy, it would seem that any portable electronics device-maker would welcome this change. Here’s the rub: You have to swap out your wall sockets if you want to live in an adapter-free world. The best place to start, in my opinion, is in hotel rooms. Not having to haul around a tangled mass of cords and adapters would free up space in your luggage and make it lighter to carry too. A USB socket would be a hotel guest amenity that beats having a piece of chocolate on your pillow at night.