Last week Moving Brands said a sad farewell to Panja Göbel. Panja has been a senior designer at MB since 2005, bringing her considerable talents to some of our most stand-out projects, including Nokia, University of the Arts, NSN Cloud Experience and, more recently, 100% Open. Readers of this blog will be familiar with Panja’s distinctive voice, seemingly inherent understanding of new and emerging technologies and rightful title of “Princess of AR”. Panja is now off to blaze her own unique trail elsewhere but she, and her inspirational commitment to rocking “Double Denim” will be sorely missed.
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.
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!
Without any prior notification and yet to our surprise and delight, we received our Finalist certificate from Cannes Lions. Our work for Swiss telecoms company, Swisscom, was shortlisted by the Cannes Design Lions in the Corporate Identity Schemes category. You can view our case study here or see the short film we made here. Swisscom has done fantastically in awards this year – winning a Red Dot award, a bronze award at the European Design Awards, being selected by the AIGA, as well as shortlisted by both Design Preis and, more recently, the Benchmarks. Next up Design Week Awards… what a year!
For those of you reading this post on the Moving Brands homepage, you will notice that there is a bit of a new look going on. Moving Brand’s designer Panja worked with programmer Matt Sephton to create a page which aggregates all our feeds and content onto one, ever updateable page.
In other news, Moving Brands’ co-founder is currently featured on the landing page of Central Saint Martins. While our other founder, Ben Wolstenholme, has been named as one of the judges for the DW Benchmark Awards. Also in Design Week this week was the announcement of Aki Shelton’s appointment as Creative Director of Moving Brands Japan. We are very excited about her impending arrival in London for on-boarding.