ERROL FLANAGAN

Nike Harajuku Tokyo Flagship Store/ powerful Brand Experience

'The whole thing is like a piece of equipment in a playground, or a big toy. To play with that idea, not as a store, but as a place for experiencing space, and a time, where people get excited and can return to a childlike state. That's what I wanted to express.' says Masamichi Katayama, architect of the flagship store.

A great example of a powerful Brand Experience where an intention to be provocative and take a branded content approach to everything, i.e. everything communicates, can turn a retail experience into something to talk about whilst selling product at the same time. And then of course every product bought there becomes itself another start point for an enthusiastic brand story, and the wave goes on, and the brand enigma builds.

Like other great things (people, places, ideas, products, brands, businesses), it seems brands like Nike set themselves apart from the normal by living (thinking and doing) the Jerry Garcia quote, 'You don't want to be known as the best of the best, you want to be known as the only one who does what you do.'

Interesting too that this film was sponsored by Nike but shown on and made by coolhunting.com's usual film team.

Light and Space, Olafur Eliasson at TED - in between thinking and doing is experience

Some great uses of light, water and space in these experiments from a TED talk in July 09 - very interesting how moving water gives a measure of distance, and especially like the idea that what's between thinking and doing is experience.

Say less to involve more

More from Stefan Sagmeister.

Here he makes a great point on a theory on abstraction while talking about an Yves Klein Blue field painting, all in the context of design that's made him happy.

His observation is that, 'if you abstract an image you merely open as much room for the unrepresentable, and therefore are able to involve the viewer more'. Less information brings more involvement and engagement.

As usual, some great ideas and design insights that can be applied to brands and the persuasion business of marketing.

Genius graphic design

A brilliant collection of playful and inspiring inventiveness - mostly with a client attached. A timeless and enduring truth that comes through for me here is that inspiring people is the main thing to achieve to makes something stand out.

New Did You Know? from Xplane - convergence and how the internet is changing our lives

via PSFK.

Culture stuff - the great Gibson Les Paul

I was listening to community radio here in Sydney 2SER 107.3FM, running programmes on Les Paul, inventor of two phenomenal things that changed music forever - the Gibson Les Paul solid body electric guitar and also multitrack recording. All fascinating and good to hear early recordings of twiddly Bert Weedon-esque 50's twanginess by Les Paul, the talented multitracking guitarist. 

The Les Paul goldtop is a big icon in the guitar world - that and the starburst finishes are timeless standards - from Paul Kossoff in Free, to Jimmy Page and later to Thin Lizzy and Pete Townsend and many others. For me though, the quintessential Les Paul experience turns up on the genius debut album by Boston. 

'More Than A Feeling' is the complete crowd pleaser - but 'Hitch A Ride' has the brilliant soundtrack of great things to come feel. Download 06 Hitch A Ride - Fabulous how a technological revolution in instruments of human expression in one decade, can move people generations later in ways the inventor could probably never have imagined.

Elephant - a new magazine for 'the enthusiastic and curious'

The owner of Magma bookstores, Marc Valli, has created a new magazine called Elephant aimed at people he describes as being 'enthusiastic and curious'. This is a link to an article in Creative Review about it.

He says in the article that he wanted to create, 'the kind of magazine a group of beat friends would have done in the 50s, before the art world became the art world, and the creative industries took over, a time when artists didn’t measure the worth of their work according to auction prices, but by the opinion of their peers.'

The content and design looks interesting. It replaces a previous magazine, Graphic, that was themed based. Colors, made by Benetton and edited in the 90s by Tibor Kalman, used to be a good theme based magazine. It was a good source of interesting facts and figures and great images and was a design studio must-have. 

Elephant looks like another good aggregator of interesting things in culture, like Monocle and Wallpaper, set to do well. Valli says that while books sales are down, magazines seem to be thriving. Elephant will have global distribution in stores and newsagents.

This is an old Colors cover. The magazine is printed in French and English which gives it both a graphically interesting and continental feel at the same time. It was always a fascinating read and a great example of a very subtly branded content.

Daniel Libeskind does Brand Planning

I saw this and thought a bit of simple word substitution might be interesting.

For architecture read brand point of view, for space read brand expression, and for building read campaign or creative execution - this talk is from TED by Daniel Libeskind on Architecture in 2007. 

Good for anyone who likes taking principles and thinking from one area and mapping them onto another.

Kesselskramer exhibition in Sydney

I saw this walking to work this morning in Bondi Junction. 

Kesselskramer are a famous dutch creative agency, often mentioned in the company of other great Amsterdam creative agencies like Strawberry Frog, Wieden + Kennedy, Droog and 180. This should be well worth checking out.

Apple store in Sydney

I saw this today in Sydney's George Street. I had a fleeting thought that it would be interesting if there was nothing actually behind the big blue poster awning covering the supposed new shop construction, and that one morning it suddenly wasn't there - a sort of pop-up pretend-to-construct-a-store.

It also struck me that such a vast piece of surface could have been put to some more interesting marketing use other than just being a great big coming soon poster.

People could have interacted with it in some way - perhaps a giant scratch card surface like the one in the post below about the Royal Festival Hall's 'Hidden Love Song' programme. Or a projection site of some kind, or a simple spilling on to the pavement or interacting with the buildings around it in some way.

Like the £106 million architectural wonder, the Eden Project cleverly did in Cornwall, UK, people might have been encouraged to come and watch the build progress. Eden Project sold tickets to come and see 'the big build' from a platform high above the disused China Clay pit as the vast biome structures took shape.

Perhaps it's a testament to Apple that something special is expected to be their business as usual. Once an expectation of innovation is set, there's no turning back to doing the normal kind of things other less innovative brands would do unnoticed.

Prada spring/summer 2008 launch

This is a film called 'Trembled Blossoms' made by Prada to launch their Spring/Summer 2008 collection. The illustrator James Jean also worked on designs for the collection and the catwalk shows.

Apparently, the more alien a model looks, the more likely it is they will achieve super-model status. This takes that to the extreme to a parallel universe of some kind of place of perpetual and beautiful cycles of metamorphosis, much like how some would describe Prada is, as a brand.

Typical of the Prada sensibility and brand ethos, the film is not confrontational, but provocative and inviting, and as irrelevant as it might appear to be, I think the film is a good pointer for brands when they try to break out of traditional ways of communicating. Simple, universal, positively inspiring.