A London-based company, A Studio for Design, has created a wonderful new way to send a greeting – the Postcarden. This lovely little idea is packaged to be sent easily by post, utilises the skills of local artists and is created using ethical packaging and materials.
For our first product we looked at the most universal gift – the greeting card. We felt that this conventional card lacked surprise, bringing only a momentary enjoyment. The arrival of a greeting card or letter in the post can always brighten up your normal mail and bring pleasure but once opened its role becomes commonplace and static.
This quirky gift is currently available in three designs – Allotment, Botanical and City – for the price of £7.50 each.
I can’t wait to see what this creative bunch rolls out next!
Storm Thorgerson is a British designer and artist responsible for more classic album covers than you can possibly imagine one person could create in a lifetime. From Pink Floyd to Audioslave, The Cranberries to Muse, he has produced the most compelling and memorable album artworks of the last 40 years.
An excellent exhibition of his artwork runs in the east-London Idea Generation Gallery from April 2nd to May 2nd, 2010. Part of the exhibition highlights his creative process for a specific case study. Check out the exhibition yourself to see the process in action and in detail. For now, here’s a quick overview:
The Brief. The designer listens to the music (possibly only demos at this stage), reads the lyrics, and talks to the band. These create a ‘brain soup’, from which ideas can be extracted to form the brief.
Roughs. Over a number of meetings/days, the designer meets the band again for discussions, in an attempt to pin-down a theme or big idea. This stage is creative, with word-play, honest thoughts, and scribblings. The best are converted to more complete illustrations (the ‘roughs’).
Tests. Once a rough is accepted and a budget agreed, a prototype is often created to ensure that the idea works. Depending on the idea, this could involve the creation of scale models from clay or polystyrene. If everything works, the final models are constructed.
Shoot. A location is researched and booked, possibly for a long-time if outdoors and in uncertain weather. Models are erected and positioned, with help from volunteers if the shoot is big and complex. A wide range of photographs are then taken, under varying light/weather conditions and filters.
Editing. This could be called ‘selection’, where the best shot from the shoot is chosen. This can take several days, if hundreds of similar shots need to be compared.
Artwork. Finally, having chosen the perfect shot, any cleaning-up or final computer editing is performed, before handing over the final product.
Written down like this, the process seems so simple. When you consider that some ideas involve 700 or 800 iron beds arranged on a beach with the tide approaching, you begin to appreciate that it might not be so simple after all.
John Hughes, who suddenly passed away last year of a massive heart attack, is best known for writing and also often directing films about teen angst. Anyone who grew up in the 80s or even early 90s in North America probably came across The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and, even though some of it is cringe-worthy now, most probably felt some kinship with at least one or two of the characters. Whether you were the princess or the dork, Hughes’s characters are archetypes that resonate with the angsty misunderstood invisibility that many teenagers, even the most well-adjusted and privileged, feel from time to time.
To the less obsessive Hughes fan, these films very much stand on their own as independent productions, but there was a thread that connected most of his characters – they all lived in the imaginary town of Shermer, Illinois, which was based on Hughes’ own hometown of Northbrook. Films set in Shermer include The Breakfast Club, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Weird Science, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink, Uncle Buck, the Home Alone films, and the National Lampoon’s Vacation films.
Hughes’s Shermer was partly Northbrook and partly a composite of all the North Shore’s towns and neighborhoods – and, by externsion, all the different milieus that existed in American suburbia. In Hughes’s mind, the would later say, Molly Ringwald’s upper-middle class character in Sixteen Candles, Samantha, was a passing acquaintance of Mathew Broderick’s Ferris Bueller, while Judd Nelson’s troubled Breakfast Club punk, Bender, came from the same forlorn section of ton as Del Griffith, the hard-knock but relentlessly upbeat shower-curtain-ring salesman played by John Candy in Planes, Trains & Automobiles. (Vanity Fair, March 2010)
When Hughes died, his family found hundreds of notebooks filled with stories and notes – many of them a continuation of the story of Shermer. I would love to know what happened to Samantha Baker.
Recently, Esquire published an exquisite cover story on film critic Roger Ebert, who is best known for the decades he spent debating great and not-so-great films with his counterpart Gene Siskel on the popular television programme, At the Movies. Since the article came out last month, people can’t get enough of Ebert. His blog, which was already popular, has developed cult popularity, he has well over 100,000 followers on Twitter, he’s recently created a Fan Club (inspired by an old friend who also happens to be a successful web porn entrepreneur) and he was a guest on Oprah.
Although there are hundreds of hours of footage of Ebert’s voice in At the Movies, it seemed very unlikely, if not impossible, that he would ever be able to speak again, using anything other than an artificial voice that bears no resemblance to the original. Recently, a Scotland-based company called CereProc used archival recordings to recreate an artificial voice that sounds like Ebert. Although it is still in beta, it even has the potential to eventually take on emotional inflection. CereProc is “an advanced voice synthesis company… [which] creates customized text-to-speech software. Instead of producing flat computerized voices, the company says its voices include realistic, animated and emotional dimensions.” (source)
The company undertakes a great deal of research on, what they call, the emotional continuum to stimulate realistic emotional states in voice reproductions:
CereVoice uses two separate techniques to simulate emotional states. The first is to select tense or calm voice quality. This compares closely with the perception of negative and positive emotional states (however, it also has an active/passive effect to some extent). The second is to use digital signal processing (DSP) techniques to alter the speech to active or passive states. Active states involve: faster speech rate, higher volume and higher pitch, Passive states involve: slower speech rate, lower volume and lower pitch. (source)
Recently, a New York based company has sought to redress the embarrassment manly men apparently feel when indulging in their love of cupcakes.
Founder David Arrick became agrieved when he read a magazine article that described cupcakes are “pink, sweet, cute, and magical.” His response is Butch Bakery, where “Butch meets Burtercream”. There are currently 12 flavours of cupcake available ranging from Rum & Coke (rum-soaked madagascar vanilla cake with cola bavarian cream filling) to the Beer Run (chocolate beer cake with beer-infused buttercream topped with crushed pretzels).
Butch Bakery is a delivery-only service and although they recommend you order at least 72 hours in advance of when you want your cupcakes delivered, they are currently fully booked and not able to deliver new orders until the end of the first week in March. To quote their website, “Whoa!”
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