Although I'm not necessarily a fan of faux-documentary advertising (there's a lot of it out there), Rampenfest by BMW is entertaining enought not to be missed. It's shot beautifully and manages to entertain throughout. I enjoyed the event marketer and his spiral-bound presentation that initiated the very literal product launch.The film is chock-full of interesting characters and fun little details making it worth all of the absurdity. Link to video at the bottom of the post.



Here's the video.

Easily one of the coolest illustration projects ever, John Martz, aka Robot Johnny, took his mother's 1968 yearbook and redrew all the student portraits. The artist said this about the project, "Good cartooning, to me, is all about simplification, and this was a fun experiment in distilling each person’s likeness down to a simple cartoon version and learning to draw efficiently, with both speed and as few details as possible." You can view the entire contents on flickr or even buy the book from his online shop. Incidentally, Robot Johnny is the editor of the popular illustration blog Drawn!. I think this would be a great excercise for students in an illustration/design program.

 

Here is a pic to whet the ol' appetite:

 

Brand Managers sometimes need a reminder that we no longer live in the world of 1990. Today, we’re more connected to the rest of the world via the internet and what a brand does today in Beijing could just as easily come back to bite them tomorrow in New York. This fact requires more consistency, and dare I say character, for our global brands. You can’t be one thing here, and a completely different thing there. Our ad of the week is one such reminder. For part of their In An Absolute World campaign, Absolut has been running a print ad (below) showing the southwestern United States as part of Mexico, that some north of the border have found offensive. (Some would argue this border is more accurate, but I digress.) Amid a call for a US boycott, the Swedish vodka maker issued a formal apology and pulled the ad from circulation. Personally, I think it’s pretty stupid to act surprised that someone found this and passed it along to their friends in the states when email or facebook or flickr or whatever web 2.0 application is so readily available – but Absolut genuinely appears to be caught with their pants down. I think I would respect them more if they just told people to 'go get a sense of humor' instead of backtracking. They didn’t know that this would get around? Or maybe they did and it’s a way to get some pub, albeit of the mostly negative variety.

The campaign was created by Teran|TBWA.

Here it is: 

 

The Alliance for Climate Protection, Al Gore’s non-profit advocacy group dealing with global warming, has launched their program identity and campaign. Produced by The Martin Agency (think Geico, UPS and now Wal-Mart) and design consultant Brian Collins, the program deals with the idea of ‘We’ and ‘Me.’ It’s an interesting concept – strong in its simplicity and execution much like the ongoing (RED) and One campaigns. That’s a good thing. However from a design perspective, I feel like the actual craft of the logo is somewhat unfinished. I am left wanting more balance between the we and the me - a better graphic resolution somehow. As it stands now – even if you rotate the logo it still doesn’t read perfectly. Generally, I enjoy giving the audience some credit for figuring things out, but when they figure this out they realize it never actually works. There must be a better visual solution for the concept. Maybe the logo simply needed another round of design? That being said, I think it is good enough to be a successful anchor to a campaign that is tackling one of the biggest issues humanity has ever faced. Here's the NY Times article that I found yesterday.

 

THE online typography forum, Typophile has launched a redesign of their site. I’m hoping that it is an April Fool’s joke. I’m actually betting that it is, but I’ve been disappointed before (Baseline, anyone?). Can’t wait to come back tomorrow and see the ‘old design. Here's the justification (joke?) for the new look, straight from the site: "Another year has passed at Typophile, and as we are near our 8th year, we have completed another redesign. We moved away from the logo with the 7 animation (no one got it anyway). Also gone is the newsprint inspired design. The white on black text reflects the default state of the screen, where black is white. As we look toward the future and see that print is going the way of the dodo, we have redesigned our identity to include the futuristic electron blazing around the word mark in all of its probabilistic glory." I'm not sure that this is a funny joke at all. C'mon, futuristic electron? Ha.

New Identity: (seen above)

Old Identity: