Notting Hill Carnival

For most Londoners, August bank holiday means one thing - Notting Hill Carnival. People come from all over the world to experience this 2 day street festival so it always shocks me when someone who actually lives in, or around London, admits they haven't been there.

Europe's largest street festival with over one million people coming to experience the sounds and tastes of the Caribbean, it's the kind of event that you just can't imagine unless you've been there. Trucks with hundreds of speakers drive along the roads, followed by processions of brightly costumed dancers of all ages. Having never been to the actual Caribbean, this carnival makes you almost feel like you're there.

The one thing that stands out for me the most are the costumes. Some of them are so intricately designed that they must have taken months to create, whilst some are so large that they get caught up in the trees as they walk along the road. Colours that normally would clash work together in this setting and watching the procession is definitely the highlight of the carnival in my opinion.

Spinalonga

Sorry for the lame attempt at the 'I went on holiday and saw this...' post, but in all honesty although I did go to Crete during the summer it wasn't on this trip that I visited Spinalonga.

Spinalonga is the old leper colony of Crete,  a small island on the Eastern coast of the country. I went to visit it when I was about 10, and only recently remembered whilst having a chat with our holiday rep about places to visit in Crete.

Since 1962 the island has no longer been in action, however you can get a boat over for a tour of the island to see the old derelict buildings, fortress and graveyards. It's an incredibly moving experience, and really makes you think about the way that medicine and sociable acceptance has progressed over the past few centuries. The island was a vast improvement to the leper colony as before they had been banished to the area's caves to keep them away from civilization. On this island however, they received food and medical care.

A far cry from the crazy Malia nightlife on the other side of the island!

I Wish I Worked There!

I always feel a bit guilty for liking picture books but this one is pretty fun. 'I Wish I Worked There!' by Kursty Groves shows the world's most inspiring and creative places to work by looking into the offices of 20 global brands including Google, Dyson and Dreamworks. The underlying message behind the book is the idea that having an innovative work place can lead to innovative ideas, and some of the world's most successful brands. 

In the Lego offices in Denmark they facilitate team building through table football on giant lego shapes, with the aim of encouraging employees to relax and socialise with one another. I wish I worked there...

Peter Saville's New England Shirt Design

Peter Saville has designed a new England shirt that will be worn on the teams home match against Bulgaria on September 3rd. The shirt will be available to the public for £49.99. The makers, Umbro, state that the design is inspired by the more formal classic shirts of England's footballing past.

Not being a great fan of football I have noticed little difference in the new design. Saville has had very little input by only adding a number of different coloured crosses on the shoulders of the shirt, which is meant to be 'evocative of stitches synonymous with bespoke tailoring'. They also aim to represent the diverse nature of modern English society.

Coming from a design aspect I have no clue how this is meant to represent our society in anyway. Possibly the colours to replicate the different ethnic groups? I do however know that England fans will not be impressed with having to pay such a large amount of money for a shirt that has very little difference to it's predecessors.

Os Gemeos and Futura

Next time you're walking around the Chelsea neighbourhood in New York (as you do), look out for this 80ft high mural on the wall of a school.

Artistic duo, Os Gemeos, and graffiti artist Futura, completed the design in 8 days, and were supported by Nike and a number of New York design agencies, including AKANYC. The overall theme for the design is unity, with flags from all over the world being painted in non-standard colours, with no borders or separation.

As random as the design looks against an otherwise dark backdrop in New York, I like the way that a usually taboo form of art, in that of graffiti, has been used to create something that sends across a message to so many people. With the sponsorship of Nike, I can imagine that lots of people would travel to visit this piece of art.

Design Museum : Urban Africa

I'm very lucky to live close to London so it's easy for me to pop over to the Design Museum near London Bridge to have a ganders at their current exhibitions. I love the way that one week it can be focused on fashion, and the next the attention can be turned to photography. It's ever changing.

Following on from my last post concerning the photography project of George Logan, where he put African wildlife into unexpected settings, 'Urban Africa', a photographic exhibition by David Adjaye currently being shown at the Design Museum until 5th September, follows on a similar African theme.

Architect David Adjaye has taken photographs of African cities as part of an ongoing project to study new patterns of urbanism. The idea behind the images is to show Africa in a different limelight. Although usually considered to be a very underdeveloped country, Adjaye has used his architect's eye to create images that argue with this preconception.

Similar to my last post this exhibition stood out to me as I liked the way it portrays the unexpected. We make assumptions about where things should be placed, or how they should look, and when someone changes these it makes an interesting piece of work.

Give Peas a Chance

Every time I drive northbound up the M25 (usually on the way to Leeds) I see this piece of graffiti across a bridge between J16 and J17. It was done by a graffiti artist who posts this phrase all over London. Encouraging healthy eating maybe?

It began to make me think about roadside advertising and the potential for advertising on certain parts of the  motorway. You regularly get random old vans in the middle of fields promoting a gadget website or 'use this space', however maybe larger brands could look into using this as a potential advertising space. 

I think the only reason people would be skeptical about it would be that it would distract drivers who were driving at a high speed, and could cause accidents. However, this could be a possible design issue that could be overcome in some way. If you imagine how many people travel on the motorway everyday, it seems like too good a chance to miss! 

A New Way to Market Yourself

It's not just design students who have 'online portfolios'.

Employkyle.com is a website by a business student who has created a campaign to get himself employed for a graduate job. Although he didn't design it himself I really liked the way that he has gone that one step further to create a website that shows that he is committed to finding a job, especially as he isn't even a design student! He points out that 70 people apply for each graduate job, so this really is a good way to stand out against the rest.

There is even a bidding section where companies can bid for him. He's had 9 bids so far, including a job in New York which doesn't seem too bad...

Translocation

 This photography project that took Scottish photographer George Logan five years to create, puts African wildlife in quite different backdrops and has been published as a book with all proceeds going to the Born Free Foundation.

The backdrops of the images are mainly taken in Cornwall and Scotland, whilst Logan travelled all around Africa to get the shots of the wildlife in their natural habitat.

Although most of the images have quite obviously been superimposed; the detail can be a bit too precise, or some of the images have been edited so much they look like computer created graphics, I think the idea behind the project is ingenious. The idea of taking something and putting it somewhere else unexpected is really interesting, and I can understand why people would want to buy the book, whether it was for charity or not.

Innocent Smoothies for Kids

Innocent have always been known as an exciting and innovative brand. Bright, friendly and simple, the packaging of their food and drinks, as well as the lifestyle that it promotes, attracts the audience easily. Their feel good packaging even made it’s way into my A Level English Language exam, where we had to write an hour-long essay on the design… so it must be pretty good.

Targeting many different audiences through their different product ranges, Innocent have recently redesigned the cartons for their Smoothies for Kids range along with the help of design agency New Future Graphic. The new designs feature 12 activities where you can re-use the cartons, including turning the packaging into a bird feeder, or a false nose.

Not only does the product now become more enticing to children, who may need a bit of encouraging to drink a ‘healthy’ smoothie, but it also shows how even an old drinks carton can be recycled into something fun and different. I really liked the designs, and feel that New Future Graphic have managed to capture the essence and style of the brand perfectly.

The Orphanage

Directed by Juan Antonio Bayona, The Orphanage (2007) is probably the scariest film I have seen to date. The first time I saw it was in a small old cinema in Leeds called Hyde Park Picture House, which definitely added to the spookiness of the film.

The plot behind the film is that a woman brings her husband and young son back to her childhood home, an old orphanage, where she plans to reopen it as an orphanage for handicapped children. Before long her son Simon begins to say he has 5 invisible friends, of which his mother thinks have just sprung from his imagination. However, at the opening of the new orphanage Simon asks his mother to come see his new 'invisible' friend Tomas' secret cabin, of which she refuses, leaving him to run off in a mood...

If I go any further I would spoil the plot, however I would highly recommend this film to anyone who likes a good scare. Presented in Spanish with subtitles, some people may be in two minds about watching it, however having to focus that much more on the words seems to make the film even more effective. If the film had been translated into English I don't think it would have been as interesting. This way you get the original effects that were intended for the film, as well as being able to understand what they are talking about. This is something that is incredibly important when considering your audience through film. What may make sense in one language, may differ in another. The cultural ideas behind the film are also important, as something may be only relevant to a certain region. It's definitely something that needs to be considered through all aspects of design when thinking about the bigger picture to your audience.


Here is the trailer  -

Cold as Ice!

I found this architectural project by photographer Gregory Holm and architect Matthew Radune, mentioned on the Creative Review blog a few months ago. As much about raising money and bringing to light an area where change is needed, as it was about creating an amazing installation – the Ice House Detroit. This project saw one of the city’s 20,000+ abandoned houses covered completely in ice. Once the project is over the house will be disassembled rather than demolished so parts can be reused and recycled.

I've enjoyed looking at the blog of this project over the past few months as it has shown the progress of how the house was covered in ice through installation processes, as well as fundraising for the project. It also brings to light the problems that detroit has with the immense number of abandoned house in the city, many of which are demolished meaning that the materials can't be reused.

To see more this is the projects blog http://icehousedetroit.blogspot.com/

We Are Hunted

Having spent the past year working within an online marketing team, I've learnt the importance of tagging, tracking and all the kinds of methods used to find out about user's activities, information and web usage. Basically I've learnt how to be nosey through the internet.

We Are Hunted is a site that uses all of these methods to track the online 99 most popular music tracks of the day by measuring popularity on blogs, forums, Spotify and other social media. Different to that of other online music charts this doesn't include music downloads, but focuses on the more sporatic side of music popularity, through forms of social media that can effect the charts by even the smallest keyword.

It's an online marketer's music heaven. The only thing I would change would be to make the interface a bit more user friendly. Although it initially looks slick and well designed, these factors actually made it quite hard for me to navigate around and actually find the top 99 tracks past number 9.

Kin's Channel

This online campaign is a brilliant example of what we would consider to be a friend now that so many people use social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. Microsoft has created a set of short episodes displayed on a YouTube channel to promote its ‘Kin’ social networking phone.

The idea behind the campaign is that the star of the films, Rosa, who has over 800 friends on Facebook, has to go and visit each one separately, no matter where they are in the world, and see whether or not they are actually her friends.  Meetings include the person she’s never met, the one who got away and an old school friend.

What I think most of us can relate to is that even she has a number of ‘friends’ on Facebook who she’s only briefly met, or hasn’t spoken to for a long time. I often find myself looking through my friends and wondering who people are…. maybe the campaign is encouraging us to cut our friends lists down?!

I think in itself it’s a brilliant concept, although I’m not too sure how it would encourage me to buy the phone, especially when the majority of all phones now support social networking apps. I don’t think I’ll be changing my iPhone anytime soon.

In fact now I’ve researched further into this since I saw it a couple of months ago it turns out that Microsoft have axed their Kin phone. Even a good advertising campaign can't sell an average product.

Telemegaphone

Ever felt like you're not being heard?

A couple of weeks ago I globe trotted over to Norway to visit a friend who was doing an industrial design placement at a design centre in the middle of the Norwegian mountains in a remote village called Dale.

Norway is well known for its innovative design ideas and Dale is no exception. On the first day of our trip we decided to attempt to climb one of the many mountains surrounding the village to check out an art installation at the top.

The Telemegaphone is an art project by design studio ‘Unsworn’, and broadcasts incoming phone calls across Dale and the fjord beside it. The idea supposedly came about when one of the creators behind the sculpture was climbing to the top of the mountain and broke his leg. Because of how high up the mountain he was it was almost impossible for help to get to him, contributing towards the idea of creating something to make communication easier in such a remote location.

Unfortunately, when we tried to phone the Telemegaphone it was closed for the season, but the idea of having something like this in England seems ridiculous. Even if it were allowed, it would no doubt have to be censored or turned off after a short period. The creators of this definitely chose the best location, and it seems there are ideas of trying the project out in other countries.

No excuses for not contacting your Mum to say you will be late for dinner then.

As well as making us address our preconceptions of what makes a place ‘remote’, the Telemegaphone has also given Dale the opportunity to interact with people around the world through modern technologies.