After battling requests for a line of shoes made for kids, Allbirds has given the punters what they desire and launched a limited edition children’s footwear range called Smallbirds. And in the spirit of creative overachieving, co-founder Joey Zwillinger has written a children’s picture book about a sheep called Sadie Shaves the Day that will be given out for free with each purchase of a pair of shoes.
Browsing: Design
As part of its Design Month, Idealog picked the brains of some of the most interesting individuals in the industry to find out their favourite design-related things, their not-so-secretive side hustles and what inspires them creatively. Here’s Insight Creative’s David Storey.
Allpress Espresso may be doing well for itself with roasters in six countries, but to bring its brand into the digital world, it teamed with digital innovations agency Gladeye to launch a new website.
Awash with paintings, poems, prose and quotes, FCB’s senior designer Nick McFarlane follows up from his 2013 book about propaganda with ‘Hunting the Killer Idea’, a book on discovering the creative process.
In a rapidly evolving digital world, businesses can’t afford to fall behind. MYOB is doing its best to keep up by toasting its 25th birthday with a brand makeover that gives a visual representation of its transformation to a business in the cloud.
New Zealand Weddings magazine has unveiled new layouts on both its digital and print platforms, giving brides-to-be inspiration for every aspect of their day through elegant and easy to navigate planning tools.
Since the 2011 earthquake, Christchurch agency Plato Creative has moved six times into temporary spaces, doing its best to allow its creatives to thrive. But now, it’s opening the doors to its new home and the largest creative space in the South Island. We talk to co-owner John Plato about the move and what it means for the agency moving forward.
New Zealand cycle brand Avanti has given its logo a makeover, via Onfire Design, for the first time since the ’90s.
Home owners looking to renovate don’t always know how to tackle the job, let alone where to find the right people to do it. Design and renovation-focussed Houzz has aimed to help them out with its online and mobile platform connecting home owners with trade professionals, and it’s just launched a New Zealand site.
Tom Uglow, creative director at Google’s Creative lab, will find his happy place in a world where our interactions with technology and the internet aren’t limited to screens. Here’s what he envisions.
Apple has long been considered a design genius, associated with powerful yet simple product and packaging design, innovation, and of course for drawing ridiculously long queues after every new iPhone launch. As part of Idealog’s AUT Alumni Profiles, Jonathan Cotton caught up with one of the people responsible, Apple creative director Andrew McKechnie, to talk about his past at Y&R and DDB in New York, to ending up in charge of a 60-strong team.
Rarely, if ever, do furniture hunters settle on the first couch they try. The process usually involves trying out option after option, until the right couch announces its existence vicariously through the satisfied sigh of the person sitting in it. And, if a new video series from Hunter Furniture is anything to go by, then this seemingly endless search is also a familiar feeling for those in the business of producing the products we purchase at furniture stores.
The Best Design Awards were held last Friday, celebrating, well, the best in design as the name suggests. Here’s an overview of the supreme winners of the competition who were lucky (and talented) enough to head home with Purple Pins, as well as a rundown of the Gold Pin winners.
Colenso found itself among the winners at Cannes again overnight, picking up a pair of silvers in the Radio categoy for the ‘Lottery’ and ‘Whack job’ spots produced for Mars.
A well-designed future may be informed by trends but shouldn’t be determined by them, says Brian Slade.
A harvester that converts vibrations from city traffic into electricity, handles that turn sticks into sophisticated tramping poles and a 3D printed anchor to affix prosthetic noses to have been named as the three finalists in the New Zealand leg of the annual James Dyson Award global product design innovation contest.
Qantas has found a slightly different use for their inflight sick bags by encouraging passengers to utilize them as a canvas for a very unique type of art. Passengers are then encouraged to share there new masterpiece with the hashtag #QantasBlankCanvas.
It’s not often you get insight into user experience from a tattoo artist and Samsung’s US-based creative director in one day, but that’s what organiser’s of Wellington’s UX Design Day next month have managed to pull off.
Marketers are in a unique position to help engrain design principles in New Zealand business, writes Melissa Jenner.
New Zealand design company Hardhat has won best packaging in the non-alcoholic beverage category of the Dieline Package Design Awards 2013 for cups designed as part of its re-branding of fellow Kiwi’s Coffee Supreme. And Curious Design and Think Packaging came second in the same category for their work on Bolu Tea.
It’s always interesting to observe how brands have evolved over the years. As this infographic shows, companies like Canon and Mercedes-Benz have refined their iconic logos in fits and starts over the decades, but some are more or less unrecognisable alongside their original incarnations.
Creativity and originality go together like peas in a pod. But Auckland designer Kate Cullinane’s thesis, a book called Sample Copy: An Exploration of the Role of Copying in Design, takes the stance that imitation is a part of the creative process. And it’s just won an international Art Directors Club Gold Cube award, as well as being named in the top three in the global Type Directors Club Awards for Typographic Excellence (the final rankings will be announced in July).
If you’re anything like us, you’re wondering how Tom Selleck got involved in shot put coaching, why staying on your bike while waiting for the lights to change isn’t an Olympic sport yet, whether the Sunday Star Times cover was a casualty of coincidence or something more sinister, and what happened to Charlie Brooker to make him think the Olympics are better than they looked on the tin. You might also be wondering how an event like the Olympics develops its visual identity. Luckily, Design Boom has detailed the whole massive process to come up with a cohesive look for the games—and the pretty bloody impressive results.
All the Kiwi design shops missed out in Cannes, but Alt Group has been awarded five red dots, including a sought-after red dot: best of the best in the red dot awards in Berlin for The Social Kitchen, a project created for Fisher & Paykel in collaboration with The Engine Room restaurant and furniture design company IMO, following on from the silver Clio award it won in New York.
Designworks has just completed work to reposition the University of Canterbury and help attract prospective students, which has been a bit of struggle since the earthquakes. And it is urging Canterbury businesses to follow the university’s lead and take a fresh look at their positioning if they want to grow in the future.
Once you get past the Dr Seuss headline, there’s a serious question here. It’s also a hot topic right now. When big business is scouring every budget line to trim a little fat, many of them ask, “Can I save money with an in-house studio?” I reckon the answer is “maybe.” Having worked in big agencies, smaller ones, digital shops and in-house, here’s why I think the answer is “horses for courses.”
Professional designers may groan at the news that logo design has once again been commoditised, but Auckland branding design agency Rare is claiming a New Zealand-first by launching a digital marketplace called logoorchard.com where businesses can browse for and buy ready-to-use, exclusive, locally-created logos—and the associated generic business names.
Just four Kiwi agencies were in the running for Clio Awards, one of America’s most prestigious ad industry awards ceremonies, and only one ended up taking anything home, with Alt Group winning a silver for Fisher & Paykel’s Social Kitchen in the environmental design section.
Tasti Products Ltd is celebrating 80 years of making bars and baking bits this year and to make sure it’s looking its best for the important milestone it has shouted itself a whole new brand wardrobe and appointed Contagion as its creative partner.
Gone are the days when homebrew was a byword for, as your dad might say, bloody undrinkable horse piss. Craft beer is one the major growth areas of the booze market and there are now plenty of interesting brews being concocted in garages, laundries, hot water cupboards, man caves and, of course, breweries all around the country. To tap into the growing number of refined palates, Ian Williams and Anders Warn spent five years developing the world’s first personal brewery, WilliamsWarn, and the design and brand work by Studio Alexander has matched the quality of the product by taking gold in the international Graphis 100 Best in Design awards.