Author: Delphine Hirasuna

Book Excerpt

Jonah Lehrer’s Five Tips for
Reaching Your Creative Potential

By Delphine Hirasuna |


From the bestselling author Jonah Lehrer comes “Imagine: How Creativity Works” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Lehrer explains that his latest book “is about our most important mental talent: the ability to imagine what has never existed. We take this talent for granted, but our lives are defined by it. There is the pop song on the radio and the gadget in your pocket, the art on the wall and the air conditioner in the window. There is the medicine in the bathroom and the chair you are sitting in…” He gives real world examples from Pixar and Second City to Bob Dylan and Yo-Yo Ma. He goes on to say that “creativity is not a gift possessed by a lucky few; it’s a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively.” Here he offers five tips from his book on how to increase your creative potential.

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Packaging

Packaging Good Food

By Delphine Hirasuna |

goodfood1

There’s nothing superfluous in the branding and packaging of Good Food, the frozen food line made in Monterrey, Mexico. Designed by Face in Mexico, the graphics are minimal and clean. Sans-serif logotype. Silhouettes to show whether it contains beef, chicken or pork. A few descriptive words – “tasty,” “spicy,” “quick.” Simple and bold, the packaging graphics don’t over-promise, but just give shoppers the impression that what they’ll get is good, honest, undisguised flavors.

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Packaging

Swedish Food Packaging That Delivers

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Middagsfrid — a service that delivers wholesome fresh foods, menu plans and recipes to subscriber homes in Stockholm — has launched a line of its own branded products. Stockholm-based agency, Bold, designed the packaging in collaboration with illustrator Peter Herrman. To create a sense of an ideal world filled with preservative-free, farm-to-table ingredients, Herrman sketched a fanciful landscape with a giant cheese grater and mixing bowl tucked among the houses, along with grazing cows and other livestock, horse-drawn cart, fruit-bearing trees and flowers. The idyllic scene is printed on newsprint-like stock to mirror the humble way locally grown goods are wrapped and affixed with a simple red label. The look suggests quality and craftsmanship.

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Typography

Mapping the Alphabet Topographically

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Is it an intriguing sculpture or three-dimensional infographics? As a personal project, New York-based designers Caspar Lam and YuJune Park of Synoptic Office created a topographic map of the English alphabet based on how frequently each letterform was used in words. In an interview with Colossal, Park says that their reference for word frequency was the University of Cambridge Computer Lab. From there, they modeled each letter in Rhino and exported sections of each letter to AutoCad. They set a total variable of six inches from the most often used letter (E) to the least used (Z), arriving at a height difference of .23 inches. Laser cut in sections on architectural butter board, each letter sits in a 6×6 inch square, allowing for any combination of letters to run seamlessly both horizontally and vertically. Park says the work wasn’t done for any client, but purely “from a desire to explore the idea of language landscapes – visualizing language and the ebb and flow of spoken English.”

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Viral Marketing

Mercedes-Benz Made You Look

By Delphine Hirasuna |

You read about VW’s transparent factory (below); now take a look at Mercedes’s invisible car. Mercedes-Benz’s new zero-emission F-Cell car is being marketed as a vehicle that is virtually invisible to the environment. The reason is because it runs on hydrogen fuel cells that convert compressed hydrogen into electricity to power the motor. The only emission is water vapor. To promote this fact in a memorable way, Mercedes blanketed one side of the car with LEDs and mounted a Canon 5D Mark II camera on the other side. The LEDs displayed whatever the camera filmed, causing passersby to stop and gawk at the “invisible” car.