How do you make vodka that much more fashionable? Absolut has an idea or two and it’s strutting those ideas around as part of the upcoming New Zealand Fashion Week. The vodka brand has announced plans for its 2011 Absolut Fashion campaign, which includes the unveiling of its own Absolut fashion studio, along with some fashionable cocktails courtesy of top Kiwi designers Adrian Hailwood, Huffer and Lonely Hearts.
Readers might not have been too complimentary when it came to the new packaging design for Bell Original tea, but the company’s marketing attempt to reach the kiddie demographic of tea drinkers has earned Auckland-based digital agency Method Studios a bunch of website-orientated global accolades.
With the New Zealand Magazine Awards hangovers now well and truly abated, it’s time to reflect on those who did it best in the realm of magazine design. All up ten Best Cover Design awards and nine Designer of the Year awards were dished out across several categories.
Design agency Designworks looks to be going from strength to strength. Its Skycouch for Air New Zealand has picked up a finalist nomination at the Australian International Design Awards and, in line with Australian-orientated news, the agency has just announced it will open its first Australian office. With offices already in Auckland and Wellington, the agency last year also expanded to set up shop in Christchurch.
The Media Design School has just moved into a new swanky building in the Auckland CBD and to celebrate it’s launched a new series of weekend workshops for busy design professionals looking to upskill or add a few new strings to their bows. But the learning doesn’t stop there: the ever-popular—and free—NZ Post Direct Marketing Workshops are back again, with Rapp/Tribal’s creative director Aaron Goldring and Federation’s creative director Ben Chandler set to spread their words of wisdom.
Everyone loves outstanding examples of printing. So here’s a rundown of the esteemed and talented winners of the Pride in Print awards.
Can you make a beer taste better by changing the shape of a bottle? DB Breweries, the makers of Tui Blond Lager think so, announcing a few changes to the brand’s traditional bottle design, including the addition of a “vortex internal neck emboss”.
If you’re confused as to what exactly gamification is, the term refers to an industry that brings together game mechanics and marketing to create engagement and solve problems.
But don’t take it from us. Thanks to CAANZ Digital Leadership Group, world-leading authority on gamification, Gabe zicherman, is heading to New Zealand where he will discuss how game mechanics and funware can transform marketing, product development and operational processes.
The world of the consumer is an ever-evolving one and for business it presents many an opportunity, though it is certainly not without its challenges. And that commercial intimacy is something design agency DNA is keen to tap into with the re-launch of its Open website this week.
We told you about New Zealand’s Webby Awards finalists and official honorees a while back. But we missed one out: local graphic design and interactive design studio Supply, which was nominated in the IT Hardware/Software category for the Netsafe Scam Machine.
The Church has embarked on a pretty expansive journey over the past 10 years. Starting out as a small design agency, it’s since gone on to become a design, advertising and communications agency and on Monday, to coincide with the opening of its first office in Australia, and as a “coming of age” of sorts, the communications agency officially relaunched itself.
It’s been a staple of the design industry for just shy of 20 years, but spatial, product and graphic design magazine ProDesign is set to permanently close its pages with AGM Publishing announcing the upcoming May issue will be its last.
It was a time when Vanilla Ice was cool, Windows 3.0 was released and Tim Berners-Lee came up with a little thing called HTML. But 1990 also saw the birth of a company in Wellington called BNA design. Fast forward through an impressive client list that has included the likes of Telecom, Solid Energy, Formway, National Bank, NZTE and Yellow Pages, add in a rather scientific name change, and you get to the auspicious milestone of design agency DNA’s 21st birthday. To mark the occasion, DNA showed this video to clients and staff at its recent 21st parties in Auckland and Wellington. And having partied with the DNA folks at the Auckland bash, we felt the rest of you might want to have a gander at the entertaining documentation of the DNA story as well.
A sense of humour and some design prowess can get you a long way. In fact, for Kiwi-founded and now London-based designer chocolate bar company Bloomsberry & Co, it can take you all the way from New Zealand to the UK, and beyond.
We have to mobilise the New Zealand design community around the relief and rebuild efforts in Christchurch. This means we have to coordinate our own meaningful industry response. We have an important role to play in assisting both now and throughout the rebuilding of a shattered city. And I think this can work at two levels.
Jason Saunders, the creative director at Auckland-based graphic design company Everything Design, has caught the attention of the folks at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. A piece of his “modernist design” work is to be featured as part of an upcoming exhibition titled ‘Standard Deviations: Prototypes, Archetypes, and Families in Contemporary Design.’
…as SEEK goes on a job hunt of its own, The Sweet Shop appoints an appropriately named executive producer in Australia, Acumen Republic shores up its newish Aussie office with a big signing, SOAR printing announces a new operations manager and Pride in Print announces its new judging convenor.
For too long Kiwis have been unable to thrust examples of the best and worst packaging in New Zealand into the spotlight. But that’s all changed thanks to the launch of the Unpackit Packaging Awards, the brainchild of Wanaka-based “resource recovery community enterprise” Wastebusters.
Creative Review magazine called David Carson “the most famous graphic designer on the planet” and “art director of the era”; his first book The End of Print, is the top selling graphic design book of all time, selling over 200,000 copies; and he and his work have been featured in over 180 magazine and newspaper articles around the world, including a feature in Newsweek magazine and a front page article in the New York Times. Well, Kiwi design lovers rejoice, for you will be able to bask in his reflected glow when he conducts seminars Auckland and Wellington in February.
There’s almost nothing you opinionated marcomms folk love more than passing judgment on a new logo and the Media Design School’s bright and explosive brand makeover is quite the departure from its former black and white identity.
Earlier this year at Semi Permanent, Dick Frizzell gave Design Daily a taster of what he had planned by way of designs for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. And now the seven designs that will adorn the tournament’s official apparel have finally been unveiled.
Dow Design has given those purveyors of meaty Kiwi goodness, Hellers, a bit of a makeover, rolling out a new logo, new packaging and a positioning statement of ‘NZ’s butcher’.
There’s nothing better than making fun of twee town slogans (aside perhaps from coming up with your own). And a contest run by grabaseat and BillieTees called ‘Love Your Town’ has unearthed a few crowd-sourced beauts, with Cecilia of the West Coast and her ‘She’ll be Whitebait’ effort chosen as the worthy winner.
Two New Zealand soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines in western France during World War I. They find a crying baby in a ditch, lying under its dead parents. What happens when one man wants to save it and the other doesn’t? Not only is this based on a startling true story, but the CG animated short film version, Poppy, has won two top awards at the SIGGRAPH 2010 Computer Animation Festivals.
I’m always reluctant to get into discussions about logos because I don’t think I’m overly qualified to talk about them (and because everyone else thinks they are overly qualified to talk about them). Generally, those that bleat the most about logos are those that know the least about marketing; the ones who think branding is a sticker you put on an apple before you export it to Japan. But I feel the need to make a wee exception.
A relative outsider has stormed through the pack to take out the supreme award in the inaugural New Zealand edition of The Maggies, with the January 2010 issue of women’s surf and snow magazine Curl beating out the big boys to take Magazine Cover of the Year.
The Best Design Awards are recognised as the leading celebration of excellence in the design industry. And as the official awards of the New Zealand Designers’ Institute, it holds significant gravitas as an indicator of the current role that design is playing in the wider marketing landscape.
As draconian media overlord and Rhys Darby lookalike Vincent Heeringa opined soon after the recent New Zealand International Business awards were handed out this week, the creative economy used to be something that cute, boutique Kiwi businesses talked about. Now, however, design and intellectual property have become an integral aspect of the really big New Zealand exporters as well and they were the two elements that bound many of the winners—and particularly the supreme award-winning Pumpkin Patch—together.
There were entries from over 20 countries in the 2010 edition of the Pentawards, a show dedicated exclusively to the best packaging design in the world, and three Kiwi entries made the cut.
The process of makeovers isn’t always pretty, as the plethora of road cones that have littered the surrounding streets of Eden Park during its redevelopment are testament to. But while it may have not been such a pretty affair on the outside, it’s a different story on the inside, as those attending the unveiling of the new look park this Sunday will see. The makeover includes a new look ground and revitalised logo, all set to “put on a distinctively New Zealand face” for the half a million visitors expected to visit the park over the course of the Rugby World Cup.