Lego Genius

Just some more fantastic print ads for lego. There have been tonnes of ads for lego but this series is definitely one of the best. Inspiring and totally makes me want to get out my old lego!

Semi-Permanent 08

Semi-permanent is a design conference held in Auckland this year on the 15th and 16th of August, with an extraordinary lineup of speakers from all over the world. It was an incredibly inspiring weekend and we learnt so much about design, technology and life in general.

Marian Bantjes explaining the method behind her remarkable work.

Stephan Sagmeister talks about life, design and sea elephants.

The first presentation (and my favourite) was by typographer Marian Bantjes. Her work is amazingly detailed and beautiful and also has a lot of her personality in it, which is something I admire in a designer. Other presentations were done by David Pidgeon of Design by Pidgeon, Interactive designer and artist Joel Gethin Lewis, Collider, The Wilderness, Karsten Schmidt (aka Toxi), Sea Design, Debaser, Stephan Sagmeister and our favourites - Kate Bezar (Dumbo Feather), photographer Derek Henderson and director Danny Yount. They were all awesome actually!

Kate Bezar speaks about her creation - a mook called 'Dumbo Feather, pass it on'. She is Michael's favourite!

The amazingly talented Danny Yount showed us some of his work from film titles. He has worked on movies like Iron Man, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and the opening sequence of Six feet Under.

There must have been over 2000 people at the conference and it seems to be getting bigger and better every year. While there we saw Anthony and Alysa from Axis and also managed to meet Matthias and Jono from BCG and had a little chat with them which was cool. So all in all it was a fantastic couple of days sitting in the dark eating skittles and listening to some people talk about their crazy thoughts and creative lives.

SKITTLES!!!

Just before the Saturday afternoon presentations.

The aftermath of an inspiring weekend - slightly crazy creatives.

Introducing...Emily~!

Extraordinarily lifelike characters, like Emily in the clip, are to begin appearing in films and computer games thanks to a new type of animation technology. Maybe someday they will be used for advertising as well?

Ignite Launch

Held at the Ignite bar (Komodo's) in Auckland on the 7th August, this was a really exciting event for young creatives. Ignite has just recently been set up to help us talented advertising babies get a foot in the door of the advertising world, creating opportunities to network, meet some of the top creatives in NZ and even giving us the opportunity to work on real briefs.

Amazing people from left to right:

Katie, Paul, Sonya, Jody, Ben & Vaughn.

The launch of this new initiative was awesome. Michael and I got to meet a whole lot of people including Ben Lightfoot (Managing Partner - Blackwood Communications Group), Jody King (General Manager - BCG), Katie Ray (Account Manager - BCG), Sonya Crosby (National Marketing Manager - NZ Post), Vaughn Davis (CD - Y&R), and we had a friendly chat to Paul Catmur who was also the guest speaker. His little presentation was really interesting with lots of laughs and some little pearls of wisdom and advice. We also got to chat with David Bell (Course Leader - Axis Adschool) and met some students from this years class. Overall we met some amazingly nice people who all took the time to chat with us and were genuinely interested in what we were up to. Thanks guys!