SMS Artist - Paul Notzold

Paul Notzold's artworks allow an audience to SMS and interact with large speech bubbles projected onto a flat surface, like the facade of a building. The bubbles are positioned near windows and doors to encourage an audience to create the conversations happening inside. The public audience receives a flyer with a cell number and simple instructions. A participant sends a text message to the provided phone number and it is then displayed inside the speech bubble. Multiple bubbles may be used and the audience can direct their input to a specific bubble.

Not always an urban and outdoor experience, the concept has translated into the more traditional enviroment of the gallery with 'One Of You Will Betray Me', an image of the last supper that allows the audience to create the dialogue of the famous scene.

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As read on Include Digital Digest

Shin Tanaka - Paper Toy Designer

Shin Tanaka is a Japanese graphic designer and graffiti artist who has added a new angle to cool little toy designs, by releasing a collection that is made entirely of paper. Designers from around the world can submit their designs on predefiined templates, and then site visitors can open a box on the site and download a random toy design to print out and make for themselves.

Download one here.

As read on Include Digital Digest

Honda's Ethical F1 Team Sponsorship

Social awareness and ethical marketing arrives at one of the biggest marketing and advertising arenas - Formula One.

Normally sporting hundred of corporate logos from sponsors keen to be seen associated with the high octain sport, this years Honda F1 car it will have only an image of the world wrapping around it's high tech body. Reflecting the general trend in eco awareness and ethical issues, Honda's campaign is probably the biggest to tackle the issue of global warming.

Honda appears to be reinvesting it's traditional marketing dollars back into it's own F1 project - sponsoring their own car, not with their own branding, but with an eco awareness campaign. Their desire is to raise awareness of global warming and at the same time capitalise on the interest generated and raise awareness of their own efforts aimed at developing more eco friendly technology.

The car itself is quite stunning, with its large and totally un-Formual 1 livery, and is guaranteed to generate reaction and hence should fulfil Honda's objectives. Visitors to the MyEarthDream.com URL, the only text to apear on the car, are encouraged to make a pledge to help stop global warming and donate to a charity set up by Honda to support eco causes. Visitors that pledge will be rewarded by having their name printed onto one of the actual F1 race cars.

No doubt what Honda may miss out on in sponsorship invvestment they should recoup in PR. That said, I am sure that there will be many sponsors who while not featured on the car itself, will captialise from association with the car.

The site is very simple and well designed. View it here.

Terrorism In Second Life - American Apparel Attacked

The Second Life Liberation Army (SLLA), a band of long time residents of Second Life are demanding political rights and to be polled on changes to the virtual world. In an attempt to draw attention to their cause they have undertaken different campaigns, and one of the most recent was a terror attack against some of the new flock of big brands that are popping up with marketing actions in the popular 3D world.

Carrying out what they call military actions, they have targeted potential customers that entered American Apparel's Second Life store, shooting them and forcing them out of the store. Unlike the real world, American Apparel were able to disable the software that enabled such interaction within their zone. This is unfortunately where Second Life mimicing 'first life' ends.

The SLLA claim to have nothing against American Apparel, appearing to want to use a large brand as a means to drive stronger awareness to their cause.

An interview by Wayne Porter of ReveNews with the SLLA can be read here.

Heard on Popbitch and Marketing Vox.

Less Rain - T-Shirts

A really nicely designed and fun t-shirt design label. The t's are nice, farly common designs, and nothing too new - the dot matrix and 'Hello - My Name Is' t-shirts are cool as you can customise them with your own designs, blocking out squares on a matrix, or writting your name on the name sticker design. What is really nice is the simple and ironic animated store.

Check them out here...

Alessi - Kaj Watch

Designed by Karim Rashid for Alessi the Kaj Collection of watches are sleek, futuristic and paired down. Beautiful.
I saw this while checking out the Kobalt Online store - a Korean eCommerce site (also very beautiful) - but not sure quite else where you can find them.

Search By Sketching

This is a fun new experimental service which lets you search and explore a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch.

It will not recognise what you are drawing - say a corporate logo or a face for example, which would be a very interesting way of searching (although if you are searching for a chair, whiy not just type in the word chair) - but rather examines the colours and composition, delivering you results that are similar to your sketch. Draw a big red circle and you will get cherries and strawberries. Draw a yellow rectangle under a blue one, and you'll get images of the sea.

This is a great way of searching for images that you want to match certain colour ways or moods. Possibly one day it could be a way of searching for that elusive image in your collection that was not tagged in a searchable way.

What ever it's practical applications, it is a fun tool to play with. Have a play here.

Thanks to Peter for the link.

UPDATE:
This is another nice search tool for Flckr - where you can search by predominant colour of the image. View Here.

No Name Magazine - First Print Edition

The first printed version of No Name Magazine is set to be released on 21st February. Each three months NNM presents the work of contemporary artists, art directors, graphic designers, illustrators, photogrpahers, performers, stylists and fashion designers. Each issue is centred around a single concept that is expressed by the various contributors. Started in 2003 as an online gallery, it now counts more than 800 collaborations.

A back catalogue of previous editions can be viewed here.

Brio Network Toys

Brio's new Network range brings the line of traditionally classic wooden toys more upto date. Retaining the clean and high quality design, the new wooden toys have a more hi tech subject than their more classically themed train and farm yard predecessors. Appealing to the computer generation, the collection introduces computer themed characters, such as viruses, CD burners and characters that deliver emails. The toys retain their low tech and durable appeal and work much as the traditional counterparts, but have some interactive features when some pieces are placed near other components.

The site is also an example of very good web design. Essentially a slick catalogue style presentation, the site features impecable integration of 3D animated video. The site was made by Swedish agency, FarFar, who also created memory stick gadgets from the collection - which I think are almost more desirable than the toys themselves!

Visit the site

Jeep's Water Display

Jeep's stands at car shows incorporate an interesting innovation in screen display. Logos and animated patterns are displayed on a screen made of water. Much like a giant ink jet printer, droplets of water are controlled by computer to create the eyecatching effect. Thanks to Peter for this link.

Putting Content In The Hands Of The Viewer

The BBC reports of two interesting announcements today.

Viacom, owner of many TV shows including MTV's Pimp My Ride will allow web users to embed clips of their shows into their own web sites. Previously sites such as YouTube have been requested to remove such content, but in a change of strategy, Viacom wants to encourage users to embed cips into their sites, and eventually reduce the reliance on YouTube as a means to view clips.

Making content available and as easy to share as possible will start to exploit the public word of mouth as a media, rather than relying on more traditional means of distributing content.
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Vodaphone has also just announced a service to allow people to update and manage their YouTube accounts via their moble phones. I predict a strong increase in video blogging and that in the not too distant future that it will be standard practice to document and share video and images taken on mobile devices, and share them via services as Youtube and Flickr.
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Steve Jobs On The Future Of Music DRM

Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, writes a very frank article on the future of digital music distribution and the role of Digital Rights Management. Giving three possible outcomes, he describes the difficulties of allowing music bought from the iTunes store being able to be played on other manufacturers music devices, the option to leave things as they are, and the option that the music lables could ditch DRM completely. He comes out strongly in favor of this third option, and claims that DRM does not and will never work, and makes the interesting point that 90% of all music sold (i.e. music sold on CD), is sold without any form of DRM.

Read the article here.