Thursday 31 July 2014

News nuggets


A cut above the rest

As part of our work with Better Bankside, we've produced an invitation for an exclusive reception and private view of Matisse's exhibition the 'Cut-Outs' showing at the Tate Modern. We used a fancy paper technique called duplexing (which bonds two or more sheets of paper together) to show a play on the exhibition title through the design.

James joins

James has joined the tothepoint throng as our new Head of Digital. He moved from the distant plains of Yorkshire to London back in 1998, having graduated in Graphic Design at Nottingham Trent University. Digital has always been James’ focus and passion, and his strong foundation in both designing and producing digital projects means he is equally happy conceiving killer concepts and enhancing UX as he is coding. From HTML, CSS, through to actionscript, Javascript and PHP, James is the man to both liaise with development teams as well as demystify their dark arts for the client.

Quick response

Responsive websites are a common thing in today’s multi-device world. However the effect that they have on logos leads us to question if responsive logos should also exist. There’s nothing worse than squishing your identity to accommodate a smartphone layout, why not adapt it to maintain its lovely logo-ness when on a small scale? Just drag your browser in to see it in action.



Here a cat, there a cat…

You know we can’t resist anything with fur (we say “we”, we mean Katie), however this is a data experiment masquerading as fun. The University of Florida use the co-ordinates embedded in the data of images posted to social media, combined with the search term “Cat” (duh) to plot the felines “homes” on a map. As an exercise on what you can do with data that’s freely available online, it does highlight the amount of personal information we have out there in the ether. On a shallow level, it could have looked prettier…. Feline curious?

Hot off the press

A copy of Design Genius by Gavin Ambrose has just landed on our desks, the reason we bring it up is because we feature in it, or more specifically an interview with Simon regarding our Yahoo! and Newsprinters work. Our pieces focus on the business of design and also using tone of voice within creative. The book is of course full of plenty of other great work, and well worth a read....FYI pages 72 and 206 are of course the best. Available in all good book stores soon.

Something in the air

The recent Airbnb rebrand has created somewhat of a stir, and has faced both praise and backlash through the “empowering” channel of social media. Certainly division of opinion is nothing new where logos and brands are concerned, so is this now just amplified through social media in today’s world? We think many aspects of the brand are lovely. The Create platform not only allows users to create their own Airbnb logo for their profile, but also acts as a space for people to share their stories. The website also has some great features, with a really simple UI.

Making an exhibition of ourselves

As is the glory of living in London there is always something going on, and at present there are several somethings we just had to share! Firstly there is the Digital Revolution at the Barbican, an exciting exhibition that allows you to play in laser fields, visit old games and explore the digital world. There’s also the Quentin Blake show at House of Illustration, showing a mix of his work but don’t expect too much focus on Roald Dahl. The National Theatre has also launched Watch This Space, a mixture of live theatre, dance and performance spanning South London.

FYI grammar’s not dead

The Evening Standard recently posted an article by Lucy Tobin about grammar in email, and it got us thinking about how we use grammar today. Although we have been known to hunt down rogue apostrophes, we also find the evolution of our language fascinating, not so long ago words like critic and gossip were invented and language played by a whole different set of rules. So although Lucy makes some valid points we think we shouldn’t get so hung up on rules that might be outdated.



3D CMYK

3D printing for the mass market as been on the cards for some time now. However with beta apps and stores being launched by Ebay and Amazon this month, it seems the day may be closer than we think. Don’t get carried away though, we’re still some way off printing whatever our heart desires – unless that happens to be a Bobble Head?

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