I’m a big movie fan, and so one of my favourite destinations is the apple movie trailers site. On going there recently I saw some beautifully designed posters advertising some classic films that are set in Texas.

I clicked on one of them and discovered that the Alamo Drafthouse is running a film festival called ‘The Texas Monthly Rolling Roadshow’, which will be showing te films that a panel of esteemed judges consider the ten best movies set in Texas.

To coincide with the festival, they have commissioned designer Jason Munn to redesign the posters for the films they are showing… the results of which are absolutely fantastic and make me want to jump on a plane to Texas and go buy all of these posters… and more that Jason Munn has designed.

So who is this Jason Munn guy?

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Quite. And life is better with beautiful design.

I rarely get really excited about packaging these days. In fact, apart from Apple, Boden, Innocent and Jane’s Addiction’s Cabinet of Curiosities I can’t really think of much that has grabbed my attention in the last few years.

And that’s why when I received my vinyl wall graphics from Blik through the post I almost jumped for joy. Gorgeous package design fizzing with witty copy and a fab product to boot… pure joy from start to finish. Read more…

When Build Center (one of our clients at Wolseley) called us with an urgent brief to spread the word about their £3 loft insulation plus free delivery promotion, we knew we had a real challenge on our hands. Not only did we have just over a week to develop the campaign and roll it out… they wanted us to deliver something a little out of the ordinary to maximise the impact. Cue one Mini, one woman, 17 rolls of loft insulation, a 56-link chainsaw and a 2 minute viral ad. Read more…

This is a strange one for the we like section but I’m treating it as more of a celebration of the life and work of photographer, Corinne Day who sadly passed away recently after a long term illness.

Corinne’s unique style introduced us all to a new way of shooting fashion. It’s a more realistic, unposed & edgy feel known as ‘heroin chic’ which to some people was seen to “make heroin addiction seem glamorous and sexy and cool”. And although her style at times was shocking it has changed the way we all look at fashion photography. Helping us to try new styles and inject more personality.

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So after partaking in some fine ale at the Newcastle Beer Festival and catching up with some friends I found myself waking up in my hotel room in Newcastle with a slight headache. I now had the day to kill in Newcastle, and certainly one port of call had to be to the gallery which sat opposite my hotel… The Baltic Flour Mill, which for some reason had a bizarre message emblazoned on the side of this impressive gallery. The message simply read ‘The beginning of the war will be secret’. Which when placed on such an imposing looking building, certainly peaked my interest.

The message on the side of the gallery was of course advertising the work of Jenny Holzer, who is currently exhibiting at the Baltic in Newcastle/Gateshead until mid-May. A brief synopsis in the hotel guide had me hooked… as a writer and someone dealing in snappy headlines and slogans, I simply had to see this exhibition.

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Along with giving me an addiction to Fig Rolls and introducing me to the music of Mr Scruff I also credit my old Art Director, Simon Rowlands, with introducing me to the photographic work of Martin Parr about 6 years ago… and ever since then I’ve been a fan of his unique views of both Britain and the world in which we live.

Internationally recognised as a brilliant satirist of contemporary life, Martin Parr has led the development of the British documentary tradition with wit, style, and intelligence in a career that boasts numerous publications and exhibitions. His work is held by major galleries and museums worldwide. ‘Common Sense’, which this week graces our reception area, combines extravagantly lurid and luscious colour with Parr’s trademark sense of irony. Though hilariously funny – as always with Parr’s work – there is a sharp and biting edge to the humour.

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In no way strange.

Studio music policy. Now there’s a touchy subject. When Julian, our Creative Director, isn’t insisting on a start-to-finish playback of the Grease soundtrack, there’s Studio Manager Dawn requesting Energy 98’s hands-in-the-air euro-trance cheesefest. It’s enough to drive you insane. Or in my case, put some headphones on.

I like listening to music when I write, but it has to be the right kind. When you write, you should be listening to the words in your head as they hit the page. So any particularly vocal tunes are distracting. That means hip-hop’s a no-no, Olivia Newton-John is out and Energy 98 should be locked in a soundproofed room…full of vipers.

Matthew Herbert on the other hand is just right – light and sinuous, deep house grooves with hushed rhythms and jazzy melodies. He’s pretty cool, I’d recommend him.

He’s an interesting guy too…

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I stumbled upon a book recently which I simply had to buy for the sheer inventiveness of the images inside it. Mixing sharp humour with a delicious edge of melancholy, ‘Little people in the city’ brings together the collected photographs of Slinkachu, a street artist who for several years has been leaving little people in the bustling city to fend for themselves, waiting to be discovered.

Flicking through the pages of this book is like discovering a whole new miniature world around us… think Land Of The Giants meets the Borrowers in the modern world. As you see page after page of these miniature statues going about their daily lives, whitewashing graffiti and moving into new homes… you really do get the sense that there could actually be miniature people living amongst us.

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Imagine walking down any street and holding up your iPhone… what you see on the screen is a view of the street yet there are lots of Zombies running towards you that you then have to shoot. Or imagine walking up to a wall and touching it… just for the wall to then display the view that is on the other side of it…. This is the world of Augmented Reality and it’s a world that looks like it’s going to be very big indeed.

Put simply, Augmented Reality blurs the line between what’s real and what’s computer-generated by enhancing what we see, hear, feel and smell. It adds graphics, sounds, and smell to our world… and through a normal pair of glasses or display screen, informative graphics appear in your field of view, and audio coincides with whatever you see. These enhancements are then refreshed continually to reflect the movements of your head and the world around you.

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Confession time. After a week striving to produce fabulous concepts and design work for our clients I sometimes like to unwind by looking at fabulously bad concepts and design. One of my favourite places for this is a wonderful blog called Awful Library Books, the brainchild of Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner, a pair of public librarians from Michigan who catalog the outdated, weird or just completely insane books gathering dust on library shelves across America.

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