New Pilot Pen Ad

The new pilot pen campaign by Grey is a really nicely executed piece of graphic design which I had to put up.

The ads by 2010 cannes award winning advertising agency grey, from Barcelona, have been widely published featuring the tattoo enhanced LEGO mini-figures. The goal of the campaign was to showcase the superthin lines of pilot's extrafine nibs.

The lego tattoos ads were developed by art director Jose Miguel Tortajada, Oscar Amodia, Dani Páez, copywriters Jürgen Krieger, Joan Mas, Luke Sholer, photographer Gonzalo Puertas,illustrators Diogo Dutra and Malen Feliz.

Useful Links

I stumbled across this list of useful links a couple of months ago and promptly emailed it around the other designers in the office. Some of the links you can give a miss but its incredibly difficult to find anthropometric data on the web, and you can never have too many material selection sites under your belt. I haven't yet had a chance to go through all the links but I am particularly impressed with the Kuler colour selection tools.

This site is probably one of the most powerful tools to have in your armoury as an industrial designer. Product Design Hub has some of the best Solidworks tutorials on the web and the forums are a great place to air new concepts and get feedback from IDer's all over the world. A word to the wise though some of these guys are pretty blunt!

Pioneering Design

This week in celebration of what would have been Sir Misha Black's 100th birthday the ICSID (International Council of Societies of Industrial Design) are honouring him for his contributions to the industrial design community. I'll be honest here, I didn't follow this link because I was interested in the man, in fact I had never heard of him. What drew me in was his 1946 design for an electric bicycle that he unveiled at the 'Britain can make it' exhibition, an invention of his own designed to promote manufacturing in Britain following the Second World War. And this is what reeled me in... You could be forgiven for thinking that this is a perhaps an over styled modern design but if you know your trends then the dynamic fluid curves are unmistakably those of the 40's - 50's, but what it does is display the progressive forward thinking of designers at the time following a period of intense international instability.

Having studied mid-20th century history at school (mainly political) I was interested to read how industrial design played a major role in turning around an economy was flat on its back. In his new exhibition Black included a section called the 'benefits of good design', where he promoted good design as a force for social change.

What interests me most about this article is that as Black was so influential in the rebuilding of a shattered economy through industry it lead me to thinking that as we come out of recession what is the state of British Industrial Design now. As many smaller consultancies and manufacturers were wiped out, what role does Industrial Design play today?

Why would I start a blog?

Having built up a wide range of design experience across a number discipline's and market sectors I have learnt a great deal about the difference between a great concept and a really great product. Though much of this education has come about through experience in the work place and pushing products through to market I owe a lot of my professional design development to the internet and what I consider to be peer assisted learning.

Many of the online resources that I use today I happened to stumble across through following links on other designers blogs and bits and bobs I receive in emails or facebook posts from friends and colleagues. Whilst this is all well and good it can often be difficult to remember which sites are good and which one's just aren't worth wasting your time with. So in a bid to help myself I decided to start a blog to keep a cumulation of useful links and design articles that I find useful and could be of benefit to my peers. As well as this I will be adding in some of my own views and opinions and encourage others to spark a bit of debate about design issues and the community in which we work.