The Big Picture

Hervé Descottes; an architect working today on the contemporary New York skyline.The principal lighting designer and president of L’Observatoire International, Descottes has been charged with illuminating major landmark sites around the city from Columbus Circle to the newly renovated High Line.

“Lighting can have an incredible visible or invisible power,” says Descottes, one of whose first projects as a lighting designer, back in 1991, was to light the Mona Lisa after it was reinstalled in the Louvre. Here, he is testing his handiwork at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Brooklyn, which was designed by Greeley and Hansen, Hazen and Sawyer and Malcolm Pirnie, in association with Polshek Partnership Architects, and will include a sculptural visitors’ center by the artist Vito Acconci and a waterfront nature walk by George Trakas.

This is a project that began a decade ago and will probably finished by 2015. The plant, with its 50-plus-acre site and eight massive sludge tanks operating 24/7, was hardly a subtle addition to the urban landscape (glowing right next to the Queens-Midtown Tunnel); the challenge, for the architects and also for Descottes, was to remain sensitive to the surrounding residential neighborhood.

In other words, Descottes says, “we didn’t want it to look like a refinery.” This is usually the kind of industrial institution that requires only functional lighting, says Descottes, who ultimately enveloped the site in a veil of blue light. (Blue, he explains, has a sense of purity and cleanness.) L’Observatoire works on some 25 projects all over the world at any given moment — from Frank Gerhy’s Louis Vuitton Foundation, under construction in the Bois de Boulogne, to a residential building to be built in Kuala Lumpur by Jean Nouvel. Still, the wastewater plant, he insists, is definitely one of the most glamorous. “Sometimes it doesn’t smell so good,” he says. “But at least it doesn’t look so bad.”

Your brand is not your logo

Looking at the above picture we could say that smart marketers definitely understood that a new logo can't increase market share. Also that the cheap logo can't be defeated by the expensive one. Thy also realize that the logo is like a first name, it's an identifier.

So, when Pepsi and BestBuy start 'testing' logos, and proclaiming that a new logo might change their market share, that definitely not going to work. Logo is the first identity. It's like a name. It obviously depends on how the new change has been done. Our eyes are so use to looking at the old things that may be we don't want to see something that is just changed little bit here and there. It's a visual perception that's set. Unless its changed in very expressive way that's going to surprise people or gonna get WOW effect in front of their eyes than yeah I think it would work.

But looking at the image above its going to go all in vain.
The punchline is: take the time and money and effort you'd put into an expensive logo and put them into creating a product and experience and story that people remember instead.

Link: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/10/your-brand-is-n.html

Return of Mac

Above picture: A screen grab from the latest Apple ad.

Apple has just fired off this, a second shot in the direction of Microsoft’s I’m A PC commercial…
Stop the bickering, enough already.
"Hello, I'm a PC and I've been made into a stereotype," says a Microsoft engineer in one of the ads.

The second new ad from Apple shows PC brandishing a buzzer, beeping out the word "Vista" whenever it is mentioned by the Mac character, played by actor Justin Long.

"We don't say the V word any more. It doesn't sit well with frustrated PC users. From now on we're going to use a word with a lot less baggage: Windows," PC says in the ad, which appears to be a dig at Microsoft's strategy of not mentioning the word "Vista" in its ads.
While Microsoft's entire campaign seeks to convey the message that many of the earlier problems plaguing Vista have since been fixed through software updates, Apple's new ads ignore this and continue to portray Vista as a broken operating system.

Apple appears to be winning the public perception war.
The Apple ad also showed that if a vista consumer wants to switch to Mac all thy have to do is go to Apple store where they'll easily transfer their data.

Apple is surely leading.

Link: http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

Storyboard: Toys that take on human-like responsibility...

Storyboard - Upload a Document to Scribd

Toys that take on Human-Like Responsibility

The Banks Have Some Explaining To Do

After monumental errors, nosediving share prices and the humiliation of nationalisation, the banking world has changed forever. So will their corporate identities and advertising adapt to fit the new realities?

It might seem that logos, commercials and colour schemes should be the last thing to occupy the banks right now, what with global financial meltdown and all, but surely campaigns and brands developed for a very different time (ie last week) can no longer be appropriate? Ever since the early 90s, banks have been attempting to project a friendlier, less formal image. Heraldic devices and serif type were steadily ditched in favour of rounded edges and updated typography. Everything became shinier, more colourful, less forbidding. It was all about innovation and modernity as banks started to project themselves as dynamic global brands, reflecting a shift in their management style and business aims – the upshot of which we are now experiencing.



Link: http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/the-banks-have-some-explaining-to-do/

Do You Speak Pompey?

Jodie Silsby, a recent graphic design graduate of the University of Portsmouth and D&AD New Blood winner, has mapped her beloved city by its slang, renaming each street in the Pompey dialect…

The map, entitled Portsmouth Vernacular, is the result of a research project looking at the origins and use of slang. “My family goes back four generations in Portsmouth,” says Silsby. “I’m proud that the city has its own phrases and dialect and the map should be seen as a celebration of that.”

Silsby’s map was created for a national project called Doin’ My Nut In that invited students to investigate slang through typography. “I knew students from all over the country would be answering this brief but that I was the only one from Portsmouth,” Silsby explains.

The Portsmouth Vernacular map is now available to buy from Silsby’s website, jodie-silsby.com, in black, cyan or fluorescent coral ink.

Apparently Silsby is now working on an even more ambitious project; to map London slang. When we get more details of that undertaking, we’ll be sure to post them on the blog.

I think its something different for sure and also something that could be put at practical use.