Loving these travel posters - the graphic style by Steve Thomas reminds us here at Calm of LNER railway posters of the 30s and 50s that are still much cherished here in North Yorkshire (although the locales depicted here are somewhat more exotic)! - Pluto is my favourite.
Now this is clever and cool - furniture design at its best! It’s as if it was made for Calm Asylum (how do we get one?) This is a table from designer John Nouanesing. It’s called Paint or die but Love Me
Anyone that knows a (good) website designer or website developer will have observed that we are a picky lot. Accessibility, usability and good old ‘doing things the right way’ are top priorities in our lives (yes thats BEFORE love and money). This can be a difficult sometimes when you spend ages making sure your code meets W3C and WAI standards but knowing that there’s people out there that don’t care.
When I’m sat in Digital corner and I feel a little sad I like to read “19 Things NOT To Do When Building a Website” This article really makes me laugh because I agree with everything he says (although possibly not with so much anger) and everything on this list is very, very right.
Its well worth considering some of these points if you are getting a website or redeveloping one - so many times something that seems like a good idea and is attractive to you, can be very fustrating for your users and without users your website is a very expensive way to entertain yourself.
Their Art is “described as an instinctual stalking of fashion, architecture, performance and the body. They share a fascination with genetic manipulation and beauty expression. Unconsciously their work touches upon these themes, however it is not their intention to communicate this. They work in a primitive and limitless way creating future human shapes, blindly discovering low – tech prosthetic ways for human enhancement.” (Taken from Lucy& Bart Blog)
This blog post celebrates what we here at Calm Asylum like to think of as trick of the eyes… In a world where we are bombarded with marketing messages all day every day, images really need to catch your eye and make you look twice!
Superbrands have just announced the findings of there 2008 ‘Brand Survey”.
On the site you can view the UK’s Strongest Brands of 2008 and also the UK’s Strongest Business Brands of 2008.
They are still taking entries and votes for this years Coolest Brands, however you can see last years results.
Interestingly the industry version of these awards this year had no major winners in the graphic design category, but in the student awards nearly half of the work is. Does this mean graphic designers in the industry are past it or is D&AD out of touch?! The majority of response to Creative Review was that D&AD was past it, but we would say that wouldn’t we?
A brief is the most important piece of information issued by a client to an agency. It’s from the brief that everything else flows. Therefore it’s essential that every effort be taken to prepare the best possible documentation of what is required.
It’s in the nature of creative thinkers that giving them the tightest of parameters will often stimulate the most inventive of responses – and 79% of clients and agencies agreed that: “It is difficult to produce good creative work without a good brief”. Im sure the Calm creative team wholeheartedly agree!
The client brief can be considered the platform for a communications campaign. The better a company’s corporate or brand position is defined and the more thoughtfully its key business issues are described, the more likely it is that strategic and creative thinkers in agencies will be able to apply their specialist skills to produce great solutions.
“The whole idea is to stimulate the creative imagination, not to restrict it. Ultimately you are buying creative ideas. Procurement people can sometimes write briefs as though they were buying copper piping or paperclips. But selling is an art. It’s more like briefing an architect. We need agencies to feel inspired so they can do their best work.”
