Advertising Is Dead! Long Live Advertising!

I'm not going to lie, I bought the book because of the name. I enjoy anything that looks niche or quirky so I jumped at it on the shelf.

I have a passion for Ambient Advertising: it's the medium that'd I'd like to specialize in after HOPEFULLY graduating from Leeds Uni.

It's exciting. Knowing that an idea you have doesn't have to be confined to the traditional formats of the 48 Sheets etc is a concept I was introduced to a few years ago and haven't stopped wanting to learn about. I can concede that sometimes the traditional mediums can perform better but I know which of the two I'd rather stumble across on an amble through town. Once again, I've put up examples of the most effective from the book....


In my opinion, the most effective piece of ambient advertising. Located "outside the main gates of the Big Day Out, New Zealand's largest outdoor music festival, a girl pretending to have just been dumped invited girls to smash her ex's car with a sledgehammer. This simple idea to draw attention to nzgirl, an online magazine for girls, generated much word of mouth during and after the festival." Who wouldn't enjoy smashing up a car with a big hammer?



This one works quite well too.



This book features the cream of the crop and I can never go a day without looking back through it.

Playing With Type

Nothing beats the feeling of an impulse purchase of a good-looking book. I fell victim recently to Playful Type - a book dedicated to having fun with type. Before coming to Leeds Uni, it never really dawned on me that there's more to typography than just picking a typeface on Illustrator that looked 'nice'. Thankfully I was mistaken.


I realize that this isn't a new and unique idea of carving letters out of apples or what have you but I've gone through this book many, many times and given you a small selection of the best. This was quite difficult because there isn't a minger in the pack; each beautiful in their own way.


Personally, this is the most bewitching type design I have ever seen. It draws me in every time. Made using his own fingerprints, Jonathon Lowman used type to convey an idea of who he is and what type is to him.









I'm going through an experimentation with type at the moment, using fried eggs and piercing the yoke at different angles to create phrases. Should hopefully be posting that up soon.



Buy Playful Type here.
Or if you want to save some pennies then here.

Clever Design

Designed by product innovator Richard Shed, this is his submission for the Blood on Paper exhibition. On display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, many artists were each given an important book from the past and commissioned to use their contemporary skills to reinvigorate and reintroduce them to the 21st century.

Mr Shed didn't want to deface the 60 year old 'The New Machiavelli' (H.G. Wells) book. Instead, he decided to conserve it by photographing every page and protecting it for years to come on a USB stick.


"I wish I'd thought of that first" - If you think that then you know you've seen a great piece of design.

I Heart Vectors

Everyone enjoys a vector every now and then, their lack of detail makes them somehow more pleasing to the eye. Best example? If you've seen Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy then you'll know what I mean.



Absolutely stunning to watch.

So when I saw Neubauwelt on the shelf solely devoted to the things that I love, the purchase was a no-brainier. It's concept? Gather the greater majority of objects in the big wide wide, capture them in their simplest form and provide them all on a CD with a catalog.

Some of the MANY vectors below. There's a wide range of different categories: clothes, chairs, vehicles, fruit, mammals, plants, leaves etc.




When I first bought this, there were over 1,000 highly-detailed vectors available for me. Since then, I've been adding vectors of my own to the collection - you never know when they may come in handy.

Buy from here.

Stefan Sagmeister

There are many guilty pleasures out there: the smell of petrol around the gas pumps, stepping on dried autumn leaves to hear them crunch, new car smell. My main vice is new book smell coupled with an exquisite design. They don't get much more well-designed than Stefan Sagmeister's Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far. I'm a sucker for a good-looking book, so when I came across a book made up of smaller books, and ones that you can interchange to create different covers: it was a winning combination.





This 'collection' is a result of the man in question taking a 12 month sabbatical in 2000 from any projects or clients in the hope of seeing how work will change. He kept a diary of his progress; this would later provide the title for his collection of works and what each piece of work would be based on. Each small book is based on a specific phrase that relates to his thoughts during his idyllic break from the professional advertising sphere.







His work is so enticing. By no means, there isn't a single one that is legible or easily interpretable but that is what makes his work quite special. He makes you work hard to decipher what's in front of you, and as a result, you begin to see the smallest of details that help the overall impact. His work isn't clean or composed but rather chaotic (some are quite disgusting to look at). It's for these reasons why I will happily look at the work he does because he offers something that is hard to find anywhere else.