@issue

Viral Marketing

Post – Christmas Guerrilla Ad Campaign

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Passersby in Amsterdam did a double-take as they walked by post-holiday curbside trash heaped high with the usual plastic garbage bags, assorted discards and… a Mini Cooper cardboard packing box with a red ribbon still dangling off the side. The brainchild of Ubachswisbrun/JWT agency, the Mini Cooper guerrilla “advertisements” were strategically placed throughout the city. It left people to wonder if the popular tiny hatchback was really small enough to be shipped in a box and possibly even fit under a Christmas tree. The white stick-on label on the side of the box provided the sales message – a 99 euro a month finance deal. Except for the black outline drawing of the Mini on all sides of the box, the actual product was nowhere to be seen.

Mini
Mini

Photography

Photographer as Entrepreneur:
The End for Rodney Smith

By Delphine Hirasuna |

The End

There are assigned projects and self-generated projects that you do for the love and joy of it. Ten years in the making, The End (Is Just the Beginning) by photographer Rodney Smith is pure passion, wit and style …a total delight. The pleasure Smith took in producing this book comes through on every page. The 16×20 inch, 15 pound tome is hardbound on imported linen with a hand-printed silver gelatin photograph on its slipcase. The design by David Meredith and text by Walter Thomas beautifully mirror and play off the whimsy and elegance of Smith’s black-and-white photographs. Smith, whose editorial and commercial clients range from the New York Times to GQ, Starbucks to Visa, documents a surreal world with a photojournalist’s eye. The End was published by Smith in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, with each signed copy priced at $750.

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Illustration

Stamps to Help Kids Learn

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Every year since 1924, the Dutch Postal Service has worked together with the Stichting Kinderpostzegels Nederland (SKN), or the Foundation for Children’s Welfare Stamps Netherland, to produce a series of stamps to help disadvantaged children both in and outside the Netherlands. The last campaign raised more than 9.3m euros to fund educational programs. The special edition stamps, which cost a little more than regular stamps, have been sold door-to-door by Dutch school children since 1948. Art director Christian Borstlap from Kessels Kramer Creative Collective designed this year’s playful worm-like creatures, which were featured both on the stamp series and on postcards. The little worm people were turned into an animated commercial by Paul Postma Motion Design.

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Posters

Geometry and Art Intersect in Outer Space

By Delphine Hirasuna |

page

Geometry, the mathematical study of shapes and their relative positions in space, lies at the heart of design and typography and the physical order of the universe. These posters by UK-based applied mathematician Simon C. Page for the International Year of Astronomy ’09 (IYA) depict the wonders of the universe through the use of simple geometric lines and circles. Page, a self-trained graphic designer, had originally created these images for a self-promotion piece, but the math-inspired art caught the attention of the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO, which asked to turn them into posters to promote the International Year of Astronomy’09, a global effort to raise awareness of astronomy. Retro in feel, Page’s posters aptly capture the beauty, dynamism, and mysterious orderliness of objects in space. They are available for sale from simoncpage.co.uk.

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Illustration

iPhone Art Comes of Age

By Delphine Hirasuna |

NYT iPhone Cover

The days of artists conspicuously sketching and painting on drawing pads or at an easel may be over. All the tools that one needs are available in a palm-sized iPhone; passersby don’t know if the person is text messaging or creating a digital masterpiece.

Artist Jorge Colombo, who used the Brushes app to create the first iPhone-illustrated cover for The New Yorker’s June 1 issue has done it again with the Manhattan skyline at night on its November 16 cover. Although Colombo arguably can be called “the father of iPhone art,” he has owned an iPhone only since February 2009 and started “finger painting” using the Brushes app after that. Thanks to Colombo and a few other pioneers, what just was a cool Internet Café “parlor trick” to amuse geeky friends a few months ago has become a serious art medium. This week’s Huffington Post is even featuring iPhone drawings submitted by readers. The variety of styles, nuances of colors, level of detail and sophistication are amazing to behold.

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