Design Debate

When planning our annual end of year project, we decided to focus on twelve influential aspects of the creative team's lives. We chose four items each to illustrate and print on badges. (They will be available for the beginning of January, feel free to request one). One of the four I selected was comic book art, a passion of mine since my teens, but I struggled to convince the other two designers in the team, Marie and Emma. There is undoubtedly prejudice against comic books from some demographic groups, and easy to see why. When trying to engender the same enthusiasm in the rest of the team, I was hard pressed to show good examples of the stunning art form without picking out blood spattered scenes in the more credible volumes, or stupidly revealing spandex outfits on female characters. There is a real need for graphic novels that bridge the gap between superhero books, full of characters that follow American foreign policy and resemble the Aryan ideal, and the direct antithesis i...

Fallon's recent advert for the Sony Bravia, Play Doh, has just won the British Television Advertising Craft Awards. In fact, they have been awarded a lot of well deserved awards for their television work this year. It just seems a shame that it was this advert that won them the award. Their previous two campaigns were outstanding, and altered way television advertising was formulated dramatically. The bouncing balls and exploding paint fireworks flowed seamlessly into the public consciousness, even spawning spoof campaigns by other companies such as this particularly well thought out homage: Those advertisements worked through their understated audacity and exceptional use of soundtrack, and their Play Doh piece started with as much promise, hinting that the initial concepts were being reworked with imagination. But then the Rolling Stones kicks in and lets everything following down. I happen to really like the track they chose, and it is very clear why "She's a Rainbow...