Category Archives: design

Trees of Knowledge

Posted on April 6, 2011 | Leave a comment

We really like these bookshelves from Greek-Italian architect and designer Kostas Syrtariotis, aptly titled BookTree. The designs were exhibited at the kidsroomzoom event at Milan Design Week:

The bookshelves are easy to assemble and are attached to a wall with just two screws.

We think these are a really creative, modern portal to get children excited about reading and about showing off their books and subsequent knowledge.

Keeping with the children’s theme, we must commend Hot Wheels’ recent advertising in Bogotá, Colombia from Ogilvy and Mather:

The monstrous poster is quite life-like and is guaranteed to garner some double-takes. After all, what child wouldn’t want to go on a real life loop after subjecting their invincible/invisible Hot Wheels  drivers to such daredevil fun?!

(Sources: MyModernMet and Neatorama)

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Posted in advertising, art, creative, design, transport

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Modern Mad Men

Posted on April 5, 2011 | Leave a comment

Here at Baby, we love Mad Men (we may or may not regularly sip brandy during meetings). Hearing that we wouldn’t get another taste of Don Draper until 2012 was hard to handle, so we are grasping for anything Mad Men-esque that we can find. We came across this glorious set of photographs from photographer Ben Sandler that is certainly inspired by the 1960′s fashion and lifestyle epitomised in the series.

Furthermore, the Typescreen for iPads now offers a way for us to embody Mad Men characters in the 21st century! We love the classic, sleek feel of punching away at a typewriter, but functioning ones and their ink are expensive and hard to come by, plus their “erasing” was never quite seamless.

The Typescreen is also beneficial for those of us with bigger fingers (or even average size really), a problem which can make excessive typing on iPads quite annoying. We think this is a very cool accessory, and its an officially licensed Apple product.

(Sources: FastCo Design and Design Fetish)

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Posted in advertising, creative, design, technology

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Rubbish Island

Posted on April 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

Dutch architect Ramon Knoester is making the best of a trashy situation (pun intended, ha). He has plans to construct the world’s only fully-sustainable island built out of garbage. In the northern Pacific Ocean, a gargantuan garbage pile has accumulated in an area estimated to be twice the size of Texas. Knoester’s island will be about the size of Hawaii, and is planned to feature a single family home with a solar roof, compost toilets, blue energy from wave motion, and a sustainable agricultural system. We think is a very cool way to deal with our planet’s excess of trash , are incredibly envious of anyone who gets to visit it, and hope to see more of these in the future!

For more information on what is dubbed the Great Pacific Garbage Patch this video, which is quite depressing, sheds light on the capacity of this phenomenon.

On a lighter note, it’s Friday! Our advertising this week comes from Mother New York for Target and features an amazing light show done at the Standard Hotel in New York City. The event actually happened last year, but we just came across this video today, and had to share. Watch below:

Though the extravagance of the lights wholly distracted us from the clothing featured, we thought this was a great ploy on Target’s part. As evident in the video, people all over NY got to see the show, even if they weren’t planning on it. This seems like something a major fashion house would do, so kudos to Target for executing it so well.

Happy Friday!

(source: Dvice)

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Posted in advertising, art, Conservation, creative, design, environment, green, home, Plants, video

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Dream Come True: Photoshop for iPad2

Posted on March 31, 2011 | Leave a comment

As if our creatives needed yet another reason to be obsessed with every Mac product made ever, Adobe is developing a “real” Photoshop app (not Photoshop Express) for the iPad 2. If all goes as planned, this app will feature nearly all of the image manipulating tools available on a computer. With the original iPad, a full version of the program was not possible due to hardware limitations, whereas advancements on the iPad 2 can make this creative’s dream come true. Watch the video here to see a few of the app’s conceptual abilities, as demonstrated at Photoshop World 2011.

Although the app is still in the conceptual stages and we have no release date to mark on our calendars (or our iCals), we are really looking forward to the concept coming to fruition.We love that Adobe is working to generate more resources for our creatives! Now, if only everyone in the office got a complimentary iPad 2. . .

(Source: Photography Bay)

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Posted in advertising, art, creative, design, technology, video

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F is for Font (and Friday)

Posted on March 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

Sometimes a font can make or break an advertisement, so here at Baby we love a good font. Artist Chris Labrooy clearly shares the same appreciation, and has executed some well-known fonts in a clever architectural way:

In the same collection, Labrooy paid homage to some legendary architects:

Frank Gehry

Zaha Hadid

Oscar Niemeyer

Ettore Sottsass

We love how Labrooy made these fonts come to life, offering a 3D image of them in an unprecedented way. We also like how he incorporated household objects into a place where they seemingly wouldn’t belong, but do not appear out of place in any way.

Our ad this week isn’t an image or video, but a humourous job posting for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

We do a mix of quick hit investigative work when events call for it and mini-projects that might run for a few days. But every year we like to put together a project way too ambitious for a paper our size because we dream that one day Walt Bogdanich will have to say: “I can’t believe the Sarasota Whatever-Tribune cost me my 20th Pulitzer.” As many of you already know, those kinds of projects can be hellish, soul-sucking, doubt-inducing affairs. But if you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.For those unaware of Florida’s reputation, it’s arguably the best news state in the country and not just because of the great public records laws.

We have all kinds of corruption, violence and scumbaggery. The 9/11 terrorists trained here. Bush read My Pet Goat here. Our elections are colossal clusterfucks. Our new governor once ran a health care company that got hit with a record fine because of rampant Medicare fraud. We have hurricanes, wildfires, tar balls, bedbugs, diseased citrus trees and an entire town overrun by giant roaches (only one of those things is made up). And we have Disney World and beaches, so bring the whole family.

We love the brutal honesty of the post especially in light of the dwindling newspaper market. We also appreciate its poking fun of infamous Floridian mishaps – what journalist would want to go anywhere else?

Happy Friday!

(Sources: My Modern Met and Boing Boing)

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Posted in advertising, baby creative, creative, design

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Inspiring time lapse videos

Posted on March 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

Today we’ve come across two time lapse videos that are both inspiring and beautiful in two completely different ways. First, we will share Norwegian landscape photographer Terje Sorgjerd’s awe-inducing time lapse video of the Aurora Borealis:

The imagery in the video is absolutely stunning, and its hard to believe that this spectacle is not cinematically crafted, but a natural phenomenon caused by the sun’s radiation. To shoot the Northern Lights, Sorgjerd sustained -25° C temperatures every night for a week, taking nearly 22,000 pictures near Kirkenes and Pas National Park, near Norway’s Russian border. We can’t imagine seeing this with our own eyes, and are so appreciative that Sorgjerd endured such conditions to share nature’s beautiful art with the world.

The next video we came across is just as beautiful and inspiring, but on a much different level. The video is an advertisement for the Topsy Foundation, a UK registered charity that “provides a range of services to support families and meet the needs and personal development of orphans and children made vulnerable by HIV and AIDS in poor rural communities in South Africa.” The ad shows 90 days in the life of a women living with HIV/AIDS and the amazingly positive effects that ARV treatment had on her condition.

The time lapse effect in this video shows the effects of ARV therapy in a way that most Westerners would never get to see–a great way to appeal for donations in order to change the lives of others like Selinah. Check up on Selinah’s progress here.

(Sources: MSNPhotoBlog and boingboing)

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Posted in advertising, art, charity, creative, design, environment, video

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Getting Americans to museums

Posted on March 23, 2011 | Leave a comment

The following mock-up ads done by art director Jenny Burrows and copywriter Matt Kappler have gained instant internet appreciation, though they are (unfortunately) not being used in an actual campaign.Their quick success online suggests that the campaign would have been equally well received had it been for an actual American history museum.

“Our goal was to reach high school and college students, to try and engage them in a subject that many of them find extremely boring. To encourage them to learn more about people who they might have disregarded as stiff and dull. I think I can say without a doubt, if this had been a real campaign, it would have been immensely successful,” says Burrows.

We think this an excellent way to reach America’s youth – both Ozzy and Bret Michaels may be a bit outdated, but their recent stints and ridiculous antics on reality television have brought them back into modern pop culture. The ads feature a proper layout for speaking to the particular audience, and actually make one want to learn more about these ridiculous facts about historical figures. We would love to see ads like this comparing modern celebrities with past English or European monarchs (way more hardcore, ha)! Well done–we bet these 2 are wishing they’d pitched these to a museum before posting them!

(Source: My Modern Met)

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Eat your words… or your pen

Posted on March 22, 2011 | Leave a comment

About a year ago, we posted about Luxirare’s edible crayons. Today, we bring you a more adult version of this, with Dutch design student Dave Hakkens‘ edible pens. His original motive is illustrated below:

The creatives in the office are constantly brainstorming, sketching, crossing-out, and re-thinking, and are known to nibble on a pen here and there. We hate asking to borrow a pen and receiving a seemingly mauled plastic tube or lending our pen out to a known pen-muncher. Hakkens undoubtedly could relate to this, hence his edible creation.

The candy used to make the pens is similar to that of candy bracelets, so it does not melt in your hand when using it. The whole pen, including the ink, is edible except for the tip where the ink is released from. This solves the problem of those half-chewed pens being strewn about the office! Furthermore, the tip can be saved and used in a different flavoured pen.

Our only qualm with this very cool invention  is what one should do if they wish to put the pen down after having chewed it a bit. Perhaps an old-fashioned quill holder would solve this germy problem? Our favorite part of the product besides its power to cure a sweet tooth is its reduction of plastic waste. So often we throw out a pen after the ink runs out without even taking into consideration how much of the product is going to waste (as Hakkens pointed out, essentially 90%). Quite the double positive.

(Sources: M. E. Design and Dave Hakkens)

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Posted in art, Conservation, creative, design, environment, food, green

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Royal Facebooking & Falling Angels

Posted on March 18, 2011 | 1 Comment

How much time do you spend  perusing Facebook per day? How often do you check your @ mentions on Twitter? Have you ever Googled yourself just for the hell of it? We know we spend quite a bit of time on social networking sites everyday, letting our friends know how absolutely posh we are, and apparently so does Prince Charles (and through some sort of transitive property we’re now calling ourselves royal…just kidding).

Following a public Bible reading he did, the Prince of Wales claimed “what amused me so much were the comments that came in afterwards that I read on Twitter and Facebook.” We think the mental image of Prince Charles Facebooking is funny in itself, but overall are happy to know that the material joy gained from social networking attention is not lost on the royal family.

And, since it’s Friday, we’ll share some advertising we enjoyed this week. Our pick comes from Lynx, who set up a camera and screen at London Victoria and had some angels fall from heaven into the station with the passengers, who experienced a very cool Lynx Effect. Check it out:

We think this was a really great way to get potential consumers involved with the brand, as well as to extend their already credible falling angel campaign. The image portrayed on the screen is so realistic, and we wish we had been at Victoria to witness it for ourselves! What do you think of this Lynx campaign?

Happy Friday!

(Source: The Drum)

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Posted in advertising, creative, design, technology, video

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Happy St. Patrick’s Day from Baby

Posted on March 17, 2011 | Leave a comment

Or shall we say “beannachtaí na féile pádraig!”? Either way, we hope you’re being a stereotypical celebrator of this Irish holiday–wearing all of your green garments, either drinking or at least thinking (daydreaming?) about drinking a Guinness, and insisting that your grandfather’s cousin’s uncle was half-Irish, so you are in the clear. For this fine holiday, we thought we’d share some of our favorite St. Patrick’s Day themed adverts from recent years.

St. Patrick’s Day is all about tradition, and we think this ad for Fujifilm from last March appeals to the nostalgia of bygone celebration. The copy, though somewhat hard to read, speaks of a distant memory that so many can relate to, conceptualizing the timelessness of a Fujifilm photo.

(Source: Coloribus)

Following the theme of tradition, McDonald’s clever promotion for its Shamrock Shake plays on the annual dying of the Chicago River. We’ve heard the shake isn’t quite appetizing, but really appreciate the advertiser’s optimisation of placement at a spectacle that gathers tens of thousands every year. The Shamrock Shake “spilled” into the River for the past two years.

(Source: Ads of the World)

The following ad from Durex employs the stereotypical Irish phrase “to be sure, to be sure.” We like the use of white space to make the product the main spectacle, and assume the green condoms are meant to resemble four leaf clovers, creating a second layer of play on “getting lucky.”

(Source: The Chip Chop Awards)

Finally, what would St. Patrick’s Day (or advertising, for that matter) be without Guinness? We love this one, calling all to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day like a “real holiday,” and we couldn’t agree more!

So, as Durex advises, have a fun, safe St. Patrick’s Day!

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Posted in advertising, art, creative, design, drink, green

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