German

Illustration

Lufthansa Makes Advertising a Game

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Lufthansa_Tour_1

Lufthansa Airlines came up with a fun way to get consumers to pay really close attention to their online “Passengers on Tour” promotional campaign. It turned each advertisement into a “Where’s Waldo” – like game, inviting viewers to find the Lufthansa tourist(s) in each picture for the chance to be entered into a raffle for daily and grand prizes. Lufthansa’s Munich-based online marketing agency, Plan Net, commissioned 14 illustrators from around the world to capture the attractions and excitement of 14 specific destinations that the airline serves. With so much to see and so much going on, each picture begs to be explored from edge to edge. The campaign took its inspiration from German “wimmelbilder” (hidden object) books, children’s picture books teeming with details, people, animals, and things. Each image features dozens of vignettes of everyday scenes that are connected by the shared environment. The Lufthansa ads took the meaning of hidden objects literally by inviting viewers to click on the Lufthansa tourist in the picture. Choose right and you’re in the daily raffle. The more often you play, the greater your chances in the grand raffle – incentive to keep coming back to look at all 14 ads.

Read More »

Advertising

Mercedes-Benz’s Poultry in Motion

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz demonstrated how its amazing Magic Body Control suspension system offers passengers a smooth ride through the use of placid chickens funky dancing to Diana Ross’s “Upside Down” disco tune. For those of you who have never met a chicken that wasn’t already baked, grilled or fried, you should know that live chickens have the natural ability to keep their heads perfectly still even when their bodies are moving. For German ad agency Jung von Matt/Neckar Stuttgart, this chicken analogy seemed like a much more memorable and fun way to explain how Mercedes’s suspension system offers awesome motion stability. Daniel Warwick directed the dance number. No CGI was used in the making of this video; the chickens did it all with a few helpful hands.

Technology

iPad Magic Convergence

By Delphine Hirasuna |

German magician Simon Pierro reviews the iPad iOS, demonstrating feats through sleight-of-hand and digital illusions. Aside from the fact that Pierro is an awesome performance artist, you have to admire his code-writing genius. He had to have spent hours designing apps and editing video and then working out split-second timing to have the image on the screen materialize seamlessly as a real object in hand. It used to be that magicians worked with smoke and mirrors, now the act is man and machine. Although this is entertainment masquerading as product demo, it is a clever sales pitch for iPad engineering – color clarity, speed, multi-screen patterns, instantaneous rotation of images so they can enter screen right and exit screen left or the other way around. At a trade show, Pierro’s act is sure to stop passersby in their tracks, and leave people marveling not only over what a great magician can do, but the iPad too.

Motion Graphics

CCTV Ad Makes Ink Painting in Liquid Animation

By Delphine Hirasuna |

For a Central China Television (CCTV) promotional commercial, Chinese ad agency, MMIA, undertook to retrace the history of China in an animated version of a traditional Chinese ink-and-wash landscape painting. Ink-and-wash is an art style that developed thousands of years ago and is noted for brush strokes that range from bold forms to faint ink washes that render scenes in a dreamlike mist. To simulate this liquid effect, MMIA turned to Troublemakers.tv, a production company based in Paris, and German director Niko Tziopanos of weareflink. The result is mesmerizing, a merging of design, computer graphics, visual effects and live action blending seamlessly together to appear that an ancient ink painting has come to life.

Read More »

Industrial Design

Reconsidering Time

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Clocks have come in analog, digital, sundial, atomic, round face with hands that point to hours and minutes, and numbers that flip forward with each advancing minute. The Qlocktwo Touch, made by German design company Biegert & Funk, is the only clock that I can think of to declare the time typographically in a complete sentence. It’s perfect for dyslexics.

Read More »