Interesting, fun project from creative team Darren Urquhart and Thomas Smith who teamed up with photographer George Logan to recreate notorious footballing incidents with kids playing the role of Gazza, Maradona, Cantona, Zidane, Di Canio, Suarez, Balotelli et al.
Here's a selection of our favourites. There's more on Daz and Tom's site over here along with the originals.
Shame they didn't have a go at doing this one. Maybe they couldn't get any kids willing to volunteer to play Gazza's part (or parts, so to speak).
The nights may be drawing in but it's not all doom and gloom. There's some great exhibitions on in London over the coming months to lift the spirits. We've picked out a selection we're really looking forward to starting M.C. Escher.
The exhibition has been organised by the Scottish National Gallery
of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and showcases nearly 100 works from the
collection of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in the Netherlands.
14 October 2015 — 17 January 2016
Dulwich Picture Gallery
Pop art but not as you know it. Tate Modern presents an exhibition of Pop Art from all over the world avowing how different cultures and countries responded to the movement. The exhibition will reveal how pop was never just a celebration of western consumer culture, but was often a subversive international language of protest – a language that is more relevant today than ever.
Goya: The Portraits’ traces the artist’s development, from his first commissions to more intimate later works painted during his ‘self-imposed exile’ in France in the 1820s – a career that spanned revolution and restoration, war with France, and the cultural upheaval of the Spanish Enlightenment. The exhbition presents around 70 of the artist’s most outstanding works from public and private collections around the world, including paintings, drawings, and miniatures never-before-seen in London. 7 October 2015 – 10 January 2016 National Portrait Gallery
This extensive new exhibition surveys the careers and extraordinary work of Charles and Ray Eames at the Eames Office. The Office was a ‘laboratory’, active for over four decades, where the Eameses and their collaborators and staff produced an array of pioneering designs. The exhibition presents the world of Charles and Ray Eames through objects and projects produced during their lifetime including film, multi-channel slideshows, photography, furniture, products, drawings, sculpture, painting, graphic design, models, props, and exhibition and installation artefacts. 21 October 2015 — 14 February 2016 Barbican Centre
Curated in collaboration with Ai Weiwei from his studio in Beijing, the exhibition presents some of his most important works from the time he returned to China from the US in 1993 right up to present day. Among new works created specifically for our galleries and courtyard are a number of large-scale installations, as well as works showcasing everything from marble and steel to tea and glass. With typical boldness, the chosen works explore a multitude of challenging themes, drawing on his own experience to comment on creative freedom, censorship and human rights, as well as examining contemporary Chinese art and society. 19 September — 13 December 2015 Royal Academy of Arts
If there's any must-see exhibtions we've missed please add them in the comments below.
Let's start the week with some damn fine ads for eBay from GS&P from across the pond.
A great idea to juxtapose song lyrics with various items for sale on eBay is supported by a cracking piece of craft and a fantastic use of music.
I've included my favourite three ads here but all five launch executions are top notch and contain lots of nice little touches that reward repeat viewing. I'm sure there's plenty more where that came from - this campaign has the potential to run and run and run.
In a world full of pompous and pretentious, manifesto me-too 'purpose' propaganda it's also a breath of fresh air to see something so stripped back and powerful that just wants to entertain people rather than change the world.
On the face of it, a brief to highlight the overwhelming breadth and diversity of the eBay offering isn't the most interesting and exciting but the agency have managed to knock it out of the park with these commercials.
By reminding people that eBay is a treasure trove for the random and the rare, this campaign should hopefully give people the stimulus to go back and have a rummage around for something they might want to buy.
About time for another post in our random and infrequent You Be The Judge series.
It's the turn of the launch commercial in the new Johnnie Walker campaign to be subjected to your erudite and incisive opinions (or thrown to the wolves, some might say).
It's Anomaly's first work for the global megabrand since they won the account from BBH and it's looks like they've spent gazillions on this 90" extravaganza.
Is it any good, though?
Were they right to drop "Keep Walking?" Were they right to keep Jude Law?
Is Plastic Bertrand's 'Ca Plane Pour Moi' an inspired choice for the soundtrack?
Does this no holds barred, in your face, espousal of the power of JOY fill you with joy?
And will this ad genuinely "accelerate Johnnie Walker's momentum in culture" as the accompanying trade press release claims?
As always all thoughts, comments and views welcome. Don't be shy now. Let us know what you really think of this work.
That talented photographer chappie, Alan Powdrill, kindly got in touch to share his latest project, 'Soapbox Racers'.
It's jolly good so we thought we'd share a taster with you, dear readers.
Looks like a hell of a lot of work went into these crazy machines and accompanying outfits.
If you'd like to see more of these wonderful and wacky creations, head on over to Alan's site here where they're parked in all their resplendent glory.
Adrian Frutiger, typographic legend, sadly passed away on Saturday at the ripe old age of 87.
He leaves behind a design legacy that will live on for generations. You can find out more about Fruitger the man and his life's work by reading Linotype's excellent obituary here.
Yet another example in a long, laborious line of companies falling over themselves to publicly shout about the good they are doing in the world today.
Now, I'm not knocking sustainability in any shape or form here. It's undoubtedly a good thing that benefits society and communities when done with proper commitment and sincerity.
However, this trend is all currently a bit too Smashie and Nicey for my palate - "I do a lodda work for charidee but don't like to talk about it".
Big multinationals are currently making a hell of a lot of noise about their good corporate citizenship actions and behaviour. How much it really has to do with a company's genuine values and how much it's a bolt-on, knee-jerk commercial strategy will obviously vary from business to business but I can't help thinking there's a lot of boardroom bandwagon-jumping that's going on that doesn't necessarily put consumers interests first.
Anyway, more specifically, my beef with this piece of communication surrounds the extent of Unilever's ambition and the rather vague claim that they "are on its way to sourcing all its vegetable oil sustainably".
Is that the best they could really do?
The latter statement is so wafer-thin that it actually makes me more suspicious that Unilever hasn't actually got its act together on this front and just wants to be seen to be doing something about the issue.
It would have been at least credible if they had identified a current figure and given some indication of when they expect it to be fully sourced that way [e.g 80% of all Hellmans sold today uses sustainably sourced vegetable oil and we expect that to be a 100% by 2017].
Surely, Unilever's sustainability policy is a bit more far reaching and bigger picture than just ensuring Hellman's Mayonnaise is made with free range eggs (I kind of already expected this) and that some jars might even be made with vegetable oil that actually is sustainably sourced.
Now, it might be that this execution is part of a bigger campaign that goes on to inform people what Unilever are doing, brand by brand. However, if that's the case, this feels too piecemeal and consumers are unlikely to be able to be bothered enough to pay attention to join up the dots.
Overall this ad seems very "small beans" about such an important issue. It all feels low key, low budget and almost apologetic about the subject matter. It's also massive ask to expect people to click to the link at the end of the ad to find out more about what they're doing. People have other and much better things to do with their time
I'm not a fan of grandiose, trumpet-blowing, corporate chest-beating ads but, in this instance, if Unilever are genuinely doing something powerful and meaningful in this area then it would have been worthy of an ad that lives up to their vision.
Saul Bass introduces a new logo and identity system for Bell Systems in 1969. A wonderful bit of design history from AT&T's archives and fascinating insight into the design process of Bass. The video is an interesting piece in itself, for something that was produced nearly 50 years ago it feels remarkably modern.
Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990,
by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about
6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles)
"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
"The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
