Shanghai Tang Holiday Catalog's Balloon Art Will Leave You Breathless

... and that's without your having to blow up the thousands of balloons used in the catalog.




Every year retail companies scramble together around mid-june to start concepting and designing catalogs for the holiday season. It's hard to keep them fresh, original and memorable. But Shanghai Tang, the chinese lifetyle brand, has done it yet again.

Teaming up with Chandelier Creative, the cutting edge design firm (who has produced other fabulous holiday catalogs for them in the past) they've produce a 2009 holiday catalogue inspired by the whimsical world of balloon art. It's amazing what they've done in terms of styling stunning backgrounds and unusual product shots, photographed by talented product photographer Kanji Ishii, with simple colored balloons.

These are not all the images from the actual catalog, nor are they in order, but these are my favorites and I think you'll find them inspiring:
















In addition to a beautiful catalog, Shanghai Tang's gifts are equally as fabulous, shop for them here.

To see other impressive balloon art and design, check these out:

A Photographer Who Is Full Of Hot Air: Paul Graves' Balloon Sculpture Series
Paul Graves' Newest Work - Balloon Expletives & More

10 Advertising Campaigns That Used Faces Made Of Art, Images Or Items.

It's not uncommon to see trends in the creative executions of advertising, but here's one that reached critical mass. The compositing of items to create human faces has been used in several different ad campaigns from reputable agencies all over the world.

I saw a post on Brainpickings.org via PicoCool about three campaigns that are visual tributes to music using this technique. It was then that I realized, I knew of several others, so I decided to do a round up of ten campaigns for you, not exclusively related to music.

Here are ten (now, just updated..so make that 11!) different ad campaigns (and one art project) all created within the past 3 years. Each of them is well-executed and very nicely art directed... but I think it's time to put a moratorium on assembled faces.

In the meantime, enjoy these:

1. The first is an art project by multimedia artist Iri5 who considers this her "Ghost In The Machine" series in which Robert Smith from The Cure, Jimmie Hendrix and Bob Dylan are all composed of cassette tape. Most impressive is that these are NOT photoshopped or painted but use a real cassette and tape.


2. The stunningly composed Grammy Ads (and accompanying tv spot) incorporate a concept by using the musicians favorite songs typographically to compose the image. Shown below are Coldplay, Thom Yorke and Lil' Wayne.

credits:
Agency: TBWA Chiat Day
Copywriter: Eric Arnold
Art direction and illustration: Steve Yee

3. These four Bose ads feature Elvis, Kishore Kumar (an Indian singer who resembles Wayne Newton), Madonna and Jim Morrison made up of black and grey silhouetted audio components.

credits:
Ad agency: Unknown
Art director: Nirmalya Chakraborty
Copywriter: Sanjeev Anand

4. The ads for RAM FM, a Jerusalem and Ramallah radio station known as Peace Radio, communicate the fact that the station brings people of different beliefs together via the use of passport stamps to comprise the visuals.

credits:
Advertising Agency: Gitam BBDO, Tel-Aviv, Israel
Art Director: Noam Laist
Copywriter: Orel Bitan
Studio: Ariel Vitkon, Elina Uretsky

5. One of my personal favorite executions are these stunning out of home posters and bus shelters, which make the faces of actual postage stamps, celebrating Finnish Stamps for the 150 year Jubilee Exhibition.

credits:
Advertising Agency: TBWA\PHS, Helsinki, Finland
Art Directors: Pia Pitkanen, Jukka Rosti
Illustrator: Pia Pitkanen
Copywriter: Erkko Mannila

6. An Argentina agency created these Nike Football ads out of little stamped footballs (or soccerballs for those of us in the States) as tributes to individual players.

credits:
Nike football: Aguero
Advertising Agency: BBDO, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Copywriter:Pablo Alvarez Travieso
Art Director:Gonzalo Vecino

7. These bus shelters for the Swedish furniture chain, IKEA, celebrate diversity by showing people of different ages and races all made up of the various product items available at IKEA.

credits: unknown

8. A nice attribute of this campaign for A Bela Sintra, a restaurant in Sao Paulo, is the varied state of the beans for the art, from full beans to finely ground, all make up the faces.

credits:
Advertising Agency: Giovanni + DraftFcb, Brazil
Art Director: Sidney Araújo
Copywriters: Alexandre Peralta, Astério Segundo
Illustrator: Marco D'Giorgio

9. Playing off the adage that "Music soothes the savage beast", this campaign for the Samsung i450 uses terrorists and dictators like Idi Amin and Osama Bin Laden to show how music in their heads can bring an end to fighting.

credits: unknown

10. And finally, an anti-smoking campaign from Unimed uses actual cigarettes to comprise the faces of such hateful characters as Hitler and Osama Bin Laden with the phrase "cigarettes kill more" is accompanied by an animated tv spot of 'war' signed off with "smoking kills more".

credits:
Advertising Agency: F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi, Brazil
Copywriters: Ricardo Jones, Eduardo Lima
Art Director: Airton Carmignani

LAST MINUTE UPDATE (forgot to add these!)
11. Another nicely constructed campaign, this one for Harley Davidson that uses tools and motorcycle parts to make up the visages.

credits:
Agency: Carmichael Lynch, Minneapolis, USA
Copywriter: Eric Sorensen
Art Director: Brock Davis

A big shout out to Ivan and his Ads Of The World where I was able to find many of the visuals and credits.

D&AD's divider page imagery contest

Below is reprinted from The Creative Review UK Blog:



In order to provide imagery for the divider pages of this year’s D&AD Annual, Fabrica (who are designing the Annual this year) invited creatives around the world to take a picture featuring a D&AD flag.

The flags were sent out in a pack giving detailed instructions on the brief and how to submit images, the best of which are featured in the 2007 D&AD Annual, out on 4 September. Former D&AD President and founder of CDT Design, Mike Dempsey, however, used his opportunity to point out that perhaps this wasn’t the most environmentally sound exercise they could have come up with…

Dempsey’s response (above) is titled “D&AD’s contribution to the concerns of our planet”. It then goes on to question the point of producing a lavish pack that was sent to 500 D&AD members around the world “asking them to ’show off’ for no useful reason at all. Is this a responsible thing for D&AD to do at this moment in time?” he asks.

His image, unsurprisingly, was not one of those chosen to feature in the final Annual (although to D&AD’s credit, they did include it among a selection of images sent to journalists). However, two other somewhat cheeky contributions did make it in.

Dave King from M&C Saatchi in Australia seems to be implying that a D&AD Award is not quite as important to him as those from Cannes in his image.



While another former D&AD President, Michael Johnson of Johnson Banks, came up with this less-than-reverent idea (Photographer, Richard Maxted):


Others, however, took on the brief in a spirit perhaps closer to what was intended…
Such as Rosie Arnold from BBH. Photographer, Jonathan Kitchen:


And This Is Real Art’s Paul Belford:


And Quentin Newark of Atelier Works:


Other contributors included Steve Royle of The Chase Photographer, Paul Thompson:


The Glue Society. Photographer, Sam Hibbard:


The Designers Republic:


Margaret Calvert:


Ruth Bellotti of Publicis Mojo:


Lance Wyman. Photographer, Jonathan Posnett:


Clemenger BBDO. Photographer, Matt Hoyle:


Stephen Bell, Adam Ellis, Wendy Lewis and Joel Pearce of CPB:


Eike Koenig of The Hort:


And Rune Høgsberg / Bleed :


The D&AD Annual is published on 4 September.
It is only available to members, click here for details
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I don't know if I'm unimpressed with these entries because I've been spoiled by seeing so much untapped creativity on the web... or because I've been in the advertising art direction business for 20 years+. But if this is the best that 'creatives' can do with this assignment, it's no wonder so many people I know have stopped looking at the annual D&AD books.