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.
Unbelievably, there are currently 51 countries, territories or areas that impose some form of travel restriction on people living with HIV.
UNAIDS invited Moving Brands to create an attention-grabbing global campaign to help put an end to these restrictions. The result can be seen in the feature ‘The Pitch’ in the Outlook Report, released this week in Geneva.
MB’s concept utilised the bureaucratic and restrictive symbolism of red tape. The tape could be placed over billboards, magazine covers and out on the street, as well as across all print, digital and onscreen media, to engage the public to help us cut the restrictions on people living with HIV.
We were thrilled to give our time and talents to help spread this important message, and very proud of the great work Darren, Marija and Rosanna and the rest of the team produced.
For more information on this project, pop over to our Press Section, and please check out the Outlook Report to learn more about imposed travel restrictions.
Our super fantastic friends at UsTwo kindly sent over this clipping from Computer Arts. Moving Brands gets a name check as part of a bigger article on UsTwo and the Granimator app.
In other “press” news, we were delighted to see that Futurising – the recent LCC festival we spoke at – got the nod of approval from British Vogue. And Michael Dusing gave Moving Brands a very complimentary write up in his recent blog post on ARE2010.
Thanks for the love everyone!
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.”
That is delightful.
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.
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.
365: AIGA Year in Design 30, AIGA’s annual publication documenting the 2009 competition selections has now been published in a digital edition. Moving Brands’ work on Swisscom, E. Tautz, Weare and Yahoo! has been featured in edition, which can be viewed here. In the words of the AIGA, “We are in an extraordinary new era in which media, technology and design have joined to create new opportunities for communication design. AIGA is exploring these new media not just as categories in a competition, but also as a means of communicating its selections in greater depth and dimension”. The digital edition is easy to navigate and holds a wealth of beautiful designs and ideas.
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.
“Mercury Brands” a new insight piece from Viewpoint magazine, highlights the core of MB’s philosophy – that brands must learn to lose control and love change. The piece, in issue 25, the latest edition of the magazine, cites our open pitch for A Brand for London, as an example of agencies “taking an increasingly collaborative approach with the public”. As an agency we feel excited for the brand possibilities emerging from a more open, collaborative culture. The strongest, and most successful brands, are the ones that adapt and respond to the environment around them – be that anything from time of day and user activity to consumer input and re-interpretation.
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!
Following our time in the spotlight during our open pitch for A Brand for London, we have been asked to contribute to a couple of pieces in the industry press. Moving Brands founder, Ben Wolstenholme, was in last week’s Design Week as an “activist” for interactive progress, asserting that ‘Design [should be] for people, not technology’. Click here to read. And in Marketing Week, Ben’s co-founder, James Bull, gave his view on the proposed merger of Orange and T-Mobile. Returning to the London Pitch, Creative Review published a piece by Michael Johnson, which mentions our efforts. Johnson Banks were also unfortunately unsuccessful in getting to the next stage but, in the spirit of our work, have published their submission in the post (an adaptation of their existing Think London logo).
Moving Brands’ founder and Executive Creative Director, James Bull, is featured in a new book, Audio Branding: Brands, Sound and Communication by Kai Bronner and Rainer Hirt. James’ chapter is entitled The Narrative Ear – Realities in Creating Sound, Story and Emotion for Brands. With special emphasis on Moving Brands’ work for Swisscom, James considers the role of sound in creating a fully immersive, multi-sensorial and memorable brand. The book is out now and availble from Amazon by clicking here.
The Creative Review Annual 2009 is out today and features our self-initiated project, Weare, in the Interactive/Digital Media category. Weare is a co-created fashion project, which encouraged people to submit icons to our Weare website. We then took the resulting gallery of icons and turned them into the pattern for a scarf. The Annual aims to be the definitive guide to the year in visual communication, displaying the finest creative work produced worldwide during 2008. So we are honoured to be included.
Digital Temple – the free, online magazine in French and English – have just released issue 5. In it Executive Creative Director, James Bull, has been grilled on Moving Brands’ dream projects, favourite drinks, and mode of working. Click here to go to the latest issue (see page 133).
The latest Campaign magazine profiles Moving Brands’ client, Mindshare, as one of the UK’s most influential companies. Much of their recent success is attributed to a successful restructure and delivering on a new proposition. As their branding agency, we found them to be a visionary client who were deeply involved in all stages of the brand identity development. The resulting re-brand has allowed them to build on their heritage, reaffirm their market leading position and herald in a new, future focused era. Mindshare have also been named Global Media Agency of the Year by Advertising Age.