Typography

Nike Bats a Home Run

By Delphine Hirasuna | September 7, 2015

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The beauty of Old World craftsmanship is expressed in this Home Run King bat trophy commissioned by Nike. Featuring the exquisite lettering and design of Salt Lake City-based Kevin Cantrell and New York-based Juan Carlos Pagan, the trophy is designed with a typographic treatment that circles the entire circumference of the bat. Richmond, Virginia-based firm, Big Secret, handled production, engineering the artwork to be laser-etched around the bat’s circumference in a seamless finish.
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Advertising

Chocolates For Adults Only

By Delphine Hirasuna | September 3, 2015January 16, 2018

This Israeli TV commercial by BBR Saatchi & Saatchi starts by showing the candid reaction of the type of consumers who find their product disgusting and yucky. Then it shows the sublime contentment of a target customer. The message is clear: Strauss Group’s Splendid bitter dark chocolate is meant to appeal to worldly sophisticated palates, and adults don’t have to worry that kids will raid their candy stash.

Advertising

Scrabble Word Play Advertising

By Delphine Hirasuna | August 24, 2015

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These are ads that assume viewers have a certain familiarity with how the word game, Scrabble, is played, and enjoy the intellectual pursuit of deciphering connections. Created by ad agency, Twiga, in Kiev, Ukraine, and design firm Tough Slate Design, these print ads are treated as visual anagrams that challenge viewers to combine two disparate things to make a new word – e.g., pen-guin, crow-bar, car-rot, cat-epillar. It’s amusing to imagine combinations of your own.

In Spain, ad agency Lola Madrid and film director Rodrigo Saavedra created a video commercial for Scrabble that turned real words into anagrams, weaving them all together into a fanciful love story. Some of the anagram connections were a bit of a stretch, but not so much that you weren’t charmed by the story line – and creative effort.

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Viral Marketing

Forever 21 Thread Screen

By Delphine Hirasuna | August 19, 2015

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Trendy fashion retailer, Forever 21, recently mounted an Instagram-assisted event and invited millennials to see what they’d look like in thread. A monumental undertaking, hardware maker Breakfast New York spent a year-and-a-half building the 2,000 pound “Thread Screen,” made up of 200,000 components that manipulated 6,400 mechanical spools of multicolored threaded fabric. Each spool held 5 ½ feet of fabric, divided into 36 colors that transitioned every inch and a half.

Forever 21 then invited fans to post their photo on Instagram using the “#21ThreadScreen” hashtag. The machine “read” the submitted photos and instructed the spools to travel along a conveyor-like device until it hit the right hue, displaying the thread-assembled portrait at an 80×80 screen resolution. Forever 21 and Breakfast live streamed the photos turning into thread, and sent each participant an edited version of their own personal thread portrait. It was like totally awesome!
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Brand Logos

Symbolism Behind the Logos

By Delphine Hirasuna | August 12, 2015August 14, 2015

Tokyo, the host city for the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics, unveiled its logos for the games recently. Designed by Tokyo-based Kenjiro Sano, founder of Mr. Design Inc., the logos are not merely pleasing graphics; according to the Olympics press release, they were intended to convey a deeper meaning. The Olympic mark has a large black and gold “T”, which we are told represent “Tokyo, Tomorrow and Team.” The red circle, which looks like the red sun on the Japanese national flag, is described instead as a symbol of “inclusiveness and the power of a beating heart.” The same graphic elements are used for the Paralympic games, but the gold and silver shapes are placed within parallel bars to form the universal symbol of equality. The “beating red heart” is placed within one of the bars. The meaning attributed to the graphic elements is poetic, but not immediately apparent to anyone seeing the logos for the first time. The fact that the symbolism has to be explained to be understood makes it seem contrived by a public relations committee, trying to read more into a nice-looking logo than is actually there. That’s totally unnecessary. The logos are graphically compelling on their own.
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