Fashion

Haute Fashion Touchdown

You won’t catch any of the Super Bowl XLIII players butting heads with these helmuts on this weekend, but you can still bid on one and help the NFL Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the health and safety of sports and youth football.

Bloomingdale’s in New York collaborated with the Council of Fashion Designers of America to invite some of the world’s leading fashion designers to bring their own personal flair to football helmuts. The collection of 48 fanciful and impractical headgear has been on display in the window of Bloomingdale’s 59th Street store in Manhattan and can be viewed online as well. The helmuts are being auctioned off to support the NFL Foundation, and the public has been invited to submit their own design with a chance to win a Bloomie’s gift card and a mini 3-D printed version of their submitted design. Even football helmut design is a participatory sport.

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Posters

Maribor Theatre Festival in Slovenia

The Maribor Theatre Festival is the oldest and most prominent theatre festival in Slovenia. In recent years, it has evolved into an international event with symposia, and foreign guests, producers and performances. The festival has been the scene of exciting arguments, thought-provoking insights, unexpected reversals, and controversy. If the bold graphic identity designed by Nenad Cizl for the 48th Maribor Festival is any indication, attendees can anticipate works of equal originality and drama. Cizl explains that the visual theme for his art is intended “to address the attitude of Slovene politicians toward culture.”

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Typography

Type in the City

Show Us Your Type is a design project created by Neue, a thrice-yearly online magazine that focuses on two things that the Neue founders say they “adore” – typography and cities. Each issue is about a different capital city, and designers are invited to submit their interpretation of the chosen city through posters that are primarily typographic. It is interesting to note what each artist sees as iconic of the culture. To look at a broader selection, go to showusyourtype.com.

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Humor

The Marketers’ Anthem

Dedicated to “consumer whisperers, mother targeters and brand guardians,” this video by Toronto-based Open Creative Company satirically celebrates the feats of advertising marketers. It was made as a call for entries appeal for Strategy magazine’s Marketer of the Year. The words and sentiments in “The Marketers’ Anthem” are all too true, but the male voiceover, dripping with tongue-in-cheek gravitas, pokes good natured fun at the achievements of men and women who “moved us to vote, follow, share, pin, tweet, retweet and like” everything from underarm deodorant, cookies, toilet paper and shampoo. The video taps into the bipolar reality of marketing people who are both proud and a bit embarrassed by what they do. On the one hand, they know their marketing campaigns are the engines that drive the economy. On the other hand, they know that their days, months, years are spent debating how to express the exceptional softness of a brand of toilet paper, or the virtues of one floor mop over another, or the desirability of frozen pop-tarts. No one has yet won a Nobel Prize for market advertising, so it is good that the industry hosts its own awards. Only a jury of your peers can really appreciate the monumental accomplishment of making a cleaning product stylish and exciting. Bravo.