SKAGGS

One of the best things I’ve noticed recently about drawing and cartooning blogs is the growing phenomenon of “discovering” artists and illustrators who might otherwise have slipped into anonymity.

Mystery stories! All of us have an old children’s annual, record sleeve or illustrated cookbook tucked away at the back of the shelf. Did you ever wonder who the illustrator was, and where you might find more work by them? There are some dedicated sleuths out there, and plenty of real-life mysteries waiting to be solved…
Read the rest of this entry »

At the beginning of the year we were approached by TOTO USA to conceptualize, create and execute their green campaign. TOTO are no strangers to sustainability having practiced sustainable manufacturing processes for over 40 years and pioneered some of the most eco-efficient products available today. With many companies also advertising their sustainability and social responsibility, we knew that the messaging for the campaign was no walk in the park.
Read the rest of this entry »

With their decadent confetti made of diced dollar bills (totaling a hundred dollars) to their S*** From Paris (a company dedicated in collecting, recycling and selling Parisian dog defections), it’s kind of difficult to describe what they do. I guess you could say that French duo Ivan Duval and Jean Sebastien Ides are in the business of ideas. They create/invent wonderfully quirky but well designed products, some of which is available to buy on their site. A good resource for off beat gifts methinks.

If you have a good hour to spare, you could do worse than click through Kariann Burleson’s collection of superb business card designs on Flickr. Of course, none of them are a patch on ours…

I see the business card, calling card, and name card as tiny works of art, or even poems, as they express a brief visual narrative of something so much more. They are an introduction - an affectionate piece of evidence, a receipt of a connection, a meeting, a moment. It’s this nature of the business card or calling card that enchants.

With all of the recession talk, tightening of belts and general decline of the dollar, talk of currency and finance can be depressing. The Royal Mint positively brightened my day with the announcement of the newly designed UK currency. Who knew 50p could look so good!?

The Shield of the Royal Arms has been given a contemporary treatment and its whole has been cleverly split among all six denominations from the 1p to the 50p, with the £1 coin displaying the heraldic element in its entirety. This is the first time that a single design has been used across a range of United Kingdom coins.

The best thing about all of this is that competition was held and a relatively unknown creative designed the coins.

The new designs have been chosen via an open competition which was widely publicised in the national media in August 2005 and attracted 4,000 entries. The winning designer is 26-year-old Matthew Dent, originally from Bangor who now lives and works in London as a graphic designer.

Congrats Matthew!

A very interesting (and clever) idea is on how to make a simple change to plastic water bottles which would allow them to easily be filled with a material and turned into an instant building material. The Van Alen Institute in NYC is sponsoring the exhibition UNITED_BOTTLE Participate! which will run from March 28th through April 25, 2008.

Hebel and Stollmann’s project, UNITED_BOTTLE, proposes a new form of plastic bottle designed to function as instant building material. The project’s working hypothesis is that design should think beyond the product and consider the waste for future use. The intersection of local and global distribution and recycling circuits forms the basis of UNITED_BOTTLE – the form of newly designed PET/PP bottles can efficiently fit into standardized shipping boxes, and can be filled with found materials to be used as prefabricated building units for the construction of both temporary and permanent structures.

Water bottles have become quite the thing around SKAGGS lately. Stay tuned and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

…is a liar.

It’s oblique.

Everyone has a morning routine when they arrive at work: check email, voicemail, news, etc. Part of my morning routine is checking out what is going on in the design world (and yes every word is a link).

If anything catches my eye I’ll take a look, but most of the time its a click here and there for a bit without anything interesting.

This site almost always does though. I’m not sure what it is though; is it my underlying obsession with critiquing(bashing) work, my interest in what else is going on, or being witness to the death passing of great logos. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes there are great redesigns done, but a vast majority just disappoint.

Yeah, I’m a little late to the Xerox redesign bashing party, but honestly, this is a travesty. I died a little inside when I saw this.

It’s becoming more and more apparent that corporations feel that they can discard the equity they’ve built in their identity for something new and shiny… very shiny, and bulbous too. As you scroll down the site you’ll see more and more that Identities are being redone for the sake of being redone.

It’s a shame.

A detailed look at the design process behind the creation of the ubiquitous Google logo.

You can only imagine my joy when I saw this article in Business Week. I still remember the day I got my first LEGO’s. It was a simple LEGO set of a house with a working garage door, operable doors and window, a nice red slate roof and a cool little car for the garage complete with the LEGO man. I still have that set, however, its now mixed in with the other 100 or so sets of LEGO’s I acquired as child. Minus the ones that were sucked up by the vacuum cleaner or got lost around the house I grew up in, I still have all my LEGO’s and attribute my interest in design and to study architecture to the colorful little blocks.
Read the rest of this entry »