Latest Press: Moving Brands create campaign for UN Aids. 15/07/2010
Moving Brands have created a campaign to raise awareness of the travel restrictions placed on those living with HIV. We were invited to take part in ‘The Pitch’ alongside two other leading agencies. MB’s concept ‘Red Tape’ utilised the bureaucratic and restrictive symbolism of red tape to bring awareness to the issue, and to engage the public to help cut the restrictions against people living with HIV.
Please read the attached press release for more information on MB’s involvement and the travel restriction issue.
One of our new San Francisco studio clients has launched a genius new app — Flipboard. The app, which shapes up all your ragged social media feeds into one beautiful magazine experience, is being hyped big time. Ashton Kutcher tweeted “If you have an iPad the flipboard app is a must” to his 5 million followers, and Wired gave the new app a shout out and early hands-on review. It is currently the tenth most talked about topic on Twitter, and has had over 100,000 hits on youtube since yesterday.
This movie will give you an idea of how it works – you can see the moving identity we produced at the end of the clip.
Here’s the video from Granimator workshops in Tokyo earlier this summer. Team Granimator (friends from ustwo) came to Tokyo for series of creative workshops. Moving Brands and Gas hosted a couple of days in each studio. Many artists and designers from Tokyo joined us and had great creative discussions. Enjoy!
There is a great article on Japan’s CBC-Net about Granimator here. Or in English here.
Google Translate permitting, CBC-Net aims to “give a little spice to our lifesytle, to be able to have more creative communication. Our concept is to stay at ground level, and if this site ables to help you to design your lifestyle then I am delightful.”
Just had a lovely email from UsTwo to share their press clipping from this month’s Creative Review. CR said, “Drawing on a backgound in user interface design for global electronics brands, ustwo has emerged as a leader in engaging app design”. Mills says, “we have just had our dream come true and been recognised for our own IP work in Creative Review who kindly call us the ‘chaps for apps’”. Super fantastic.
We have had a brilliant response to Granimator and the Moving Brands’ artist pack, and have been demo-ing for the great and the good around the world. UsTwo are certainly our ‘chaps for apps’!
Cool write up of Granimator by MacWorld. Among other things they say, “the sheer simple pleasure of tapping on a screen to create instant designer images, backed by a bizarre soundtrack … should appeal to the inner child in us all”. Nice one UsTwo! Download the app and in-app Moving Brands artist pack here.
We are super duper excited to announce that Moving Brands has created an art pack for UsTwo’s iPad app – Granimator. The app is a free-form wallpaper creator, where you can create and interact with compositions using the multi touch to scale and rotate elements. You can then share your creation by sending it to an iPhone, or sharing on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or on Granimator.com.
The pack uses the elements created by the public on the Moving Brands collaborative website, Weare. In 2006, that gallery of icons was used to co-create the design for a scarf. Today, nearly one thousand icons, all created by Weare users, have become part of the Moving Brands Granimator pack. UsTwo are an incredible studio and we’ve loved working with them on this project. Check them out here. And click here to download the app.
Last week Moving Brands were featured in a Design Week article on animated logos. According to DW, “Clients increasingly have to consider the impact of their brand properties across a range of media platforms, so it makes economic sense to invest in animation at the early stages of any identity project” – a belief Moving Brands was founded upon! For those of you who can’t access DW Online, here’s our 5 inches of fame from the piece.
“A multi-platform, moving world is the starting point for all of Moving Brands’ projects. ’If you design a brand and haven’t thought about how it works on-screen, you haven’t done your job,’ says Moving Brands founder James Bull. ’I tell students that the letterhead, the logo and the business card should be the last things they think about. Companies use Power Point and e-mail, and send movies to each other – that’s where brands need to work.’
Moving Brands designs creative explorations and executions that include animation, sound and interactive elements for all their clients, whether they’re telecoms companies such as Swisscom or more traditional clients, such as Savile Row tailor Norton & Sons. ’Once you’ve got those elements, you can repurpose them for print,’ explains Bull. ’If you do it that way round it’s easy – and clients don’t then have to spend £30 000 on the last three seconds of an ad, because the branding consultancy has already worked that out.’ Not all branding consultancies have this unfailing and all-encompassing approach to animating brands.”
Click here to watch our latest case study showreel.
Today activities to mark the official launch of Moving Brands Inc, San Francisco begin. To the left you can see a photo of our new studio, with CEO and founder Ben Wolstenholme, in the foreground. Apparently Ben has already been helping MB SF members with some cultural learnings – starting with English language (”naff”, “jumpers”, etc) and the Americans have reciprocated with classics such as “git ‘er done”, “for sure”. It’s clearly a learning curve on both sides. For lots more information about the new studio and Ben Wolstenholme, please check out the ‘Press‘ section of our website.
In conjunction with the piece in today’s Design Week, we are pleased to officially announce the launch of our new studio in San Francisco. Moving Brands’ CEO and founder, Ben Wolstenholme (pictured), moved with his family to live full-time in the city in early 2010. The new Moving Brands studio, located in San Francisco’s eclectic SOMA neighborhood, will enable us to service the fast moving needs of our West Coast clients as well as the wider U.S. market. The San Francisco studio is our fourth global division, with studios already in London, Tokyo and Zurich.
Keep checking back to the MB blog for further updates of the launch as it rolls out state-side.
Guardian Media and Technology reporter, Mercedes Bunz, today posted the first of a two-part look at Augmented Reality. To reiterate our comment on the piece, we are very excited to see The Guardian giving some column inches to this technology. Check the piece out here and check back to the site tomorrow, when Mercedes is covering AR and journalism. Wonder if our Living Identity paper will get a shout out?
Speaking of shout outs, KanYe West gave our work for KEF a nod on his blog over the Christmas break. Thanks KanYe! And on this one, we’re gonna let you finish.
Images and films of our ‘Living identity’ paper can be viewed on the Moving Brands Flickr, Vimeo and YouTube accounts. Since launching in September 2009, the paper has received critical acclaim from the design industry, the technology industry, brands, in print, and online. Bruce Sterling featured it on his Wired blog, H+ Magazine said we had “revolutionised branding”, SeptemberIndustry have released a preview of our upcoming ‘Session’, and Grafik magazine are running an in-depth feature on the project in their November issue. If you would like to speak to us about the project, please email info@movingbrands.com.
A little bit of a news update for today’s blog post. Firstly, Executive Creative Director, James Bull spoke to students at the London College of Communication on the subject of “Making the Most of Social Media”. Feedback from the students was great and we have won some lovely new followers on the MB twitter. In the press, Design Director, Mat Heinl spoke to Marketing Week about “pushing boundaries in brand identities“. And lastly, but by no means least, we have been honoured to have a very special visitor from the U.S, George Englund, in the studio. Producer, director, actor, writer, Hollywood veteran, and friend to MB’s founder Ben Wolstenholme, George has been helping us incorporate the power of storytelling into our work as well as regaling us with tales of hanging out with Brando and breaking deals with the Vatican. You’ll be missed George!
