BrandArt

Quoted from Drawn. Hand-painted lettering is powerful and eclectic, but also unique and surprising. There’s nothing else quite like a hand-painted sign.

This made the rounds about a month ago, but it’s funny.

Disney XD – Pair of Kings from saggyarmpit on Vimeo.

Two flip-book style animations. Both of these are about a year old but still very cool.

Being from Marin, and caring a lot about education, it’s great to read about Venables Bell & Partners donating their time and resources to help bring attention to school budget cuts. The audience for these ads in Marin may have deep enough pockets to help turn the situation around, but unfortunately most schools won’t be able to plug the gaps in school budgets with donations.

The ads themselves look good. Typography as the key visual. Interesting-looking, yet still readable.

It’s kind of surprising that they’re discussing anal warts in an ad for a food brand, but it’s a funny spot. They do know their audience, as they demonstrated with stoned unicorn ad in 2009. It’s good to see that they do some things besides TV ads with shots of food.

• Production Company: DumbDumb Productions in partnership with Electus
• Co-Creators: Jason Bateman & Will Arnett
• Co-Producers: Jason Bateman & Will Arnett
• Agency: Gotham
• Chief Creative Officer: Marty Orzio
• Content Distribution: Electus
• Branded Entertainment Agency: Ensemble

Via Agency Spy.

Annual video game sales are now regularly exceed Hollywood box office receipts. Video games are becoming the dominate popular art form of our era, but they are still largely a misunderstood medium. Video games were once played only by children, teens and nerds and there has been very little appreciation by their creators or their users that video games were a truly art. But even as a handful of game designers try to make a true art form out of video games, the convergence between advertising and gameplay will work against them. Video games, whether art or not, are becoming a powerful and diverse force in the media industries.

One of the reasons it’s been hard for video games to gain respect is that video games often communicate their messages through gameplay rather than storytelling. Stories and game play are both crucial to the human experience because they are both mechanisms with which children learn about the world. Storytelling has been at the center of all creative arts for centuries. Literature began with dramatic poetry and storytelling has been an important part of literature, theater, and even painting and photography ever since.

Traditional bias is probably the biggest reason why creatives tend to favor storytelling over game play as a communication technique, but it’s time for creative people to recognize the legitimacy of games (There’s a great post on W/K London’s blog that makes this point for advertising professionals). CP+B was one of the first advertising agencies to recognize the power games had by creating a Burger King game for the XBox. The children who grow up playing the burger king game will probably experience more video games than movies, and will probably view gameplay as a natural and possibly even more effective communication technique than traditional storytelling.

Video games have been incorporating storytelling in some form for many years. Some have been successful, but overall, gameplay is the most effective construction for game design: “the medium is the message.” Under close examination though, the gameplay vs. storytelling divide falls apart. Gameplay is just a non-linear and experiential form of storytelling. The biggest problem standing in the way of the video game’s ascendence into an accepted art form isn’t that gameplay falls short as a technique. It’s that nobody has completely figured it out how to master the video game form–yet. This is one of the central points in Tom Bissell’s Extra Lives. He critiques the cultural value and the storytelling aspects of the video games throughout their history and he shows that video games are indeed evolving into an art form, but there is still a long way to go. The writing within video games is still often sub-par. Bissell interviews game industry veterans and most have high expectations for video games, they continue to provide an opportunity to communicate in totally new ways.

But even as the traditional game industry is becoming more influential, the game industry itself is being transformed by the convergence of advertising, social media and games. Social games like Farmville combine online games with marketing and advertising. Farmville is built upon an online business opportunity that is an answer to psychological questions nobody else was asking, who would have thought that people would pay money to show up their friends in an online game? It’s amazing too that people would be willing to complete surveys and sign up for credit cards for points in a video game. Games are becoming a part of reality, a part of everyday life. Jesse Schell explains how he sees the convergence between games and reality and how it will evolve in the future. His talk is a plea to professional game designers to get involved in making these games better. With more than 80 million Farmville players game designers have a stage that is bigger than ever before, now is the time to make art out of video games.

Helvetica Neue is an attractive, versatile font, but have you ever tried to use it on a Mac running Leopard? How about sending print-ready PDF files using Helvetica Neue to a printer? In order to fix the font conflicts and create PDFs that didn’t drop apostrophes I deleted all my Postscript versions of Helvetica Neue and used Odystar PDF settings to export print-read PDFs from InDesign.  This might not be the only solution, but it worked for my situation.  Switching to Adobe’s OpenType version might also work too.

We go into a store, we get what we need and then we’re on our way. Very few of us stop and get to know the people who help us behind the counter. Corner Store is a documentary that tells the story of one particular corner store in San Francisco and its proprietor. I created this little mircosite to help promote the film. Hopefully it will be on the film festival circuit soon please check it out.

Augmented reality technology might one day be ubiquitous. Everybody might walk around wearing heads-up display glasses projecting directions, emails, text messages, various widgets and tags onto their field of vision. Will this technology liberate artists and their audience from billboard advertising or isolate and confine them into their own little worlds? Will augmented reality create a space for free expression or an opportunity for targeted marketing messages? I’m sure this technology could enable advertisers to deliver personalized billboard messages. Maybe we will opt-in to socially augmented reality groups in order to view art or advertising? Let’s hope augmented reality will make cool things possible and make life easier.

Heads-up closed captioning goggles for deaf people?

Heads-up subtitle-style translation goggles for traveling over-seas?

I blogged a while ago about Follow Your Instinct shortly after it came out.  It opened up amazing posibilities because it was the first creative use of buttons embeded in Youtube videos.  BooneOakley’s new website is another example. What’s incredible is that BooneOakley has completely committed to Youtube as their format. Their youtube site will reach people browsing youtube who aren’t in advertising and demonstrate that they understand the power of social media sites like youtube.