Author: Delphine Hirasuna

Posters

The Medium Is the Message

By Delphine Hirasuna |

A project by Happiness Brussels designed by Anthony Burrill in London, this limited edition poster was made to benefit the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. The poster’s message is simple and direct, but it takes on an emotional resonance when viewers learn that it was silk-screened using oil collected off of Louisiana beaches after the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the years some artists and artisans have let the choice of material imbue their creation with symbolic significance – e.g., guns melted down to make a peace sculpture; pottery made from the volcanic ash of the Mount St. Helens eruption; objects that incorporate pieces of the Berlin Wall, etc. It adds another dimension of meaning to the object and makes you think.

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Design Quizzes

Quiz: The Face of a Brand

By Delphine Hirasuna |

About 12 years ago, we posted a quiz, called “The Human Touch,” in @Issue, challenging readers to name the face in the trademark. We are updating it here because back then, there were too many to fit on a spread, so some favorites had to be left out. Also, in the ensuing decade, new brand “people” have emerged and some have been given much-needed facelifts. The reason why companies give their brand a face hasn’t changed, however. Faces are often more memorable than an abstract mark. The right face can humanize a product and give it personality. It can imply the endorsement of an expert. Or it can just make the brand seem more likeable and fun. See if you can connect the face with the brand. The answers are on the next page.

The Face of the Bran Quiz
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Product Design

Philatelic Pursuits

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Whether the trend is being driven by improved automated postal sorting machines or the insatiable demand of stamp collectors for ever-more novel designs is unclear, but lately more nations are issuing commemorative stamps that arouse the urge to lick, sniff and touch.

Austria has been a pioneer in this area. In addition to joining forces with Austria’s famed Swarovski Crystal to create a swan stamp imbedded with bits of real glass crystal, the Austrian post office honored the UEFA European Championship by creating a soccer ball stamp out of a synthetic mix of rubbery polyurethane. To immortalize Andi Herzog’s winning soccer goal in the 1998 World Cup, it put a three-second moving image of the goal on a postage stamp, and to honor simultaneously a native craft and national flora, Austria issued embroidered stamps featuring its Edelweiss and Clusius flowers.

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Viral Marketing

Moleskine’s Viral Strategy

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Moleskine is a product that you are unlikely to see advertised on television or in print, but If you do a search for Moleskine on YouTube and Vimeo, lots of videos will pop up. That’s the way Moleskine customers like it. Moleskine has a cultlike following among designers, artists and writers enchanted with the idea of preserving their sketches, profound thoughts and poetic musing in the same kind of little black notebook used by Van Gogh, Matisse, Hemingway and Chatwin. No spiral-bound steno pads for them. No perfed sheets only good for writing down meeting minutes and grocery lists. These oil-cloth-covered black journals are meant to capture inspiration at its birth. If you believe the fans, Moleskine isn’t just a notebook or a bound sheaf of papers, it is a blank canvas for the creative mind. So, naturally this mystique lends itself to a viral marketing strategy, with new products launched on YouTube and spread through fan blogs and tweets. A Moleskine site called Detour gives viewers a voyeur’s peek into the personal Moleskine journals of well-known designers and artists, an inspiration in itself. Recently Moleskine celebrated the 30th anniversary of Pac Man with a limited edition notebook and a clever YouTube video. All of this gets linked and forwarded (as it is here), giving customers a sense of discovery and being part of a select artsy circle. Mass advertising on TV or marketing Moleskine as you would reams of copy paper and pencils would diminish its cachet. Viral marketing isn’t a strategy that works for all products, but it is right for Moleskine.

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Information Graphics

A Map That Anyone Can Read

By Delphine Hirasuna |

What do cartographers do for fun? They make typographic maps.

At Axis Maps in Hewitt, Texas, what started out as a clever little typographic map party announcement for a gathering of geographers in Boston grew into a full-blown typographic map of the city. Andy Woodruff, one of the principals of Axis Maps, says that he started the project because he was intrigued with the idea of expanding the style of the party invitation into a full city map of Boston. His off-hours project caught the attention of his Axis cohorts, Ben Sheesley and Mark Harrower, who decided to make both a color and black-and-white typographic map of Chicago. The maps occupied them off and on for nearly two years.

“There was nothing automatic about making these maps, unless you count copying and pasting,” says Woodruff on the Axis Maps blog. “Everything was laid out manually, from tracing streets over an OpenStreetMap image, to nudging curved water text, to selectively erasing text to create a woven street pattern.”

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