The Influencers

Influencers - How Trends and Creativity Become Contagious is a nice little film exploring the art of influencing society and taking a concept from a small kernel of passion and exposing it to the world. Beautifully crafted the 13 minute online docu is a Poloraid snapshot, and shows New York creatives talking about those who are shaping todays pop culture. Inspiring. You can see it in it's entirety here.

Gabriel Moreno

Just a quick post regarding some beautiful work by Gabriel Moreno. An Illustrator, engraver and painter based in Madrid. His work is glorious and definitely worth a look here.

Projeqt: A Creative Storytelling Platform

Responding to the creative, advertising and marketing community mantra to tell better and more engaging stories, TBWA has launched Projeqt , a “creative storytelling platform.” Projeqt provides users (currently only TBWA employees) with a multi-media and social media-driven vehicle in which to capture and tell their complete story. The site was built in HTML5 and is device-agnostic, allowing for mobile phone access.

While Projeqt is currently available primarily to TBWA employees, the wider creative community can sign up for a beta account. Beyond being an interesting Content Management System (CMS) – it also powers the relaunched TBWA Worldwide website. Projeqt is also a step towards helping the advertising and marketing world better tell their own stories to the industry by showcasing not only the imprint it has made on behalf of its brands across the web (and off), but the creative talent that resides in their offices – whom are capable of creating their own stories. Projeqt aims to provide the technology and tools by which to more seamlessly do that.

One of the projects posted on Projeqt is called "Love Letters from New Orleans" which was created by one of my favorite designers here in Los Angeles, Nessim Higson. He is a master of typography, his work is beautifully designed and always carries with it a proprietary illustrative quality. Pack a lunch and hold your calls as there is a plethora of great work to admire here .

F Bomber

Recently, I have been working on a wine label design for a hot, fresh Napa Valley wine group (headed up by wine genius, James Harder) called The Dirty Pure Project. The idea was to create a wine so ridiculously good that the drinker of the wine would be dropping F Bombs (Tourette syndrome?) all over the place declaring what a truly delicious find it was. The very talented and great illustrator of our time, Tavis Coburn brought to life the idea and this is the result. An intoxicating image to shake up the wine crowd and spark a heady conversation regarding the product.

Typography Great Wins

Exciting news for all type-geeks everywhere! Today, typography legend Matthew Carter won a $500k Genius Grant. The MacArthur Foundation honors a graphic design legend, who created Verdana, Georgia, and dozens of other fonts we have used many times over the years. “Matthew Carter is a master type designer who crafts letterforms of unequaled elegance and precision for a seemingly limitless range of applications and media,” the MacArthur Foundation’s Web site says. “Throughout his career, which spans the migration of text from the printed page to the computer screen, he has pursued typographic solutions for the rapidly changing landscape of text-based communications.” A true craftsman and founder of Bitstream (a powerhouse type foundry), the 72 year old has been a prolific designer unassumingly crafting hundreds of faces that succeed precisely because you don't notice them. From early projects like AT&T's Bell Centennial typeface, to more recent work adapting to digital media with screen-friendly typefaces like Verdana and Georgia, his style is characterized by simplicity and readability. He has produced type for a raft of publications. Among them: Time, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Wired, and Newsweek. The New York Times’s headline typefaces were designed by Carter. "Matthew Carter is often described as the most widely read man in the world," the New Yorker wrote in a 2005 profile

Miller High Life, Tasty!

Earlier this year, Miller High Life introduced a whole new look for all of its packaging and graphics designed by the San Francisco office of Landor, with illustration assistance by Chris Mitchell.

First brewed in the mid nineteenth century by Frederick Miller in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Miller High Life is one of most well known American beer brands and (coming from the midwest) I have a long standing relationship with the product and am quite a fan. I really love what Landor has done as far as updating the entire product offering as well as all visual touch points. Everything has been handled quite nicely from the revised logo to the packaging and illustrated Miller "Moon Girl". This is one of those dream projects and you can tell whoever had an opportunity to work on it really enjoyed the process.

Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity

At Arizona State, I had an instructor named Rob Roy Kelly who was heavily influenced by many of his instructors at Yale, one of whom was Joseph Albers who was an instructor at the Dessau Bauhaus campus. It was evident that Rob carried with him that connection and it made a deep impression on me early on, though it took years for me to fully understand that impact.

Hello Design (a fantastic interactive agency here in LA) has created a beautiful site for MOMA - Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, highlighting over 400 works by some 100 teachers and students of the Baushaus that reflect the extraordinary broad range of the school's output. Additionally, it gives a historical overview of the school, it's workshop and faculty.

Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity is on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York from November 8, 2009 through January 25, 2010. It will not travel so catch in person if you can.