Breakfast Beer and Bingo

Mr Tait and Mr Bingo attempting an appropriate morning ‘good times’ face.

I’ve known the wonderful Mr Bingo for many many years. In fact, this morning, he announced that the freelancing he did for Poke was his first proper creative gig (after working at Size?). 

Anyway, I bumped into him on Friday – he was hanging out in our window with the supremely talented Wilfrid Wood – and we got chatting. He asked me if I was still not drinking (last time we met I’d decided not to drink for a while). I admitted that I’d given up giving up. A nonsense conversation flowed and I mentioned to him that I’d just finished reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

In the book Mr Walker talks about how it’d be much better if students drank in the morning rather than the evening, from a sleep and memory retention point of view. We formed a pact to meet for a morning beer at the soonest opportunity. Mr Bingo, being a knowledgeable sort of chap suggested The Masque Haunt on Old Street (it opens at 8am for those who are interested in such things).

So this morning we met, we drank a single pint of beer, and we talked a very enjoyable hours worth of nonsense. We covered off a lot of things. From:

  • What kind of face is appropriate to make in a photograph whilst drinking a pint at 9am (our best attempt is above).
  • Who else frequents such a venue at such an hour? (Turns out all kinds of people. Most of them just having very reasonable breakfasts and coffee).
  • How do you start a naive and innocent movement when everything in culture is so pre-meditated?
  • Have you ever drunk a 9am beer when not at an airport?
  • Mr Bingo’s 2018 scratch-off-the-clothes advent calendar
  • Getting older, and the attractiveness of older men / women.
  • Whether we’d have a good time at Bangface?
  • About how those sober morning raves are the antithesis of what we were doing – not that either of us have anything against morning glory parties – I’m quite up for that too.
  • Happy Hardcore tape packs and the merits of DJ Sy, Slipmatt, Dougal, etc. I shared The Old School Rave Tape Archive on Mixcloud.
  • We also reminisced about how, after the first job he’d done for me I took him out and told him he wasn’t charging us enough money. Apparently I used to have scruples, who knew?

There’s something very free about a Weatherspoons at 9am, especially on a sunny day. 

We agreed to do it again in a month. And to bring a guest each. And the next month that guest could then bring another guest. And pretty soon there’d be a Weatherspoons full of nonsense, and affordable breakfasts…

My Search for an Interactive Music Video with Windows in it

Last night I was trying to find a particular interactive music video. I tried mailing a couple of people: “You know, the one where there’s a window in the middle, and objects come out of it in other windows, and I think you could buy them or something”.

When you get to the end of the post, you’ll hopefully see that I’m not as stupid as you perhaps think I am right now.

I had a good old dig around to find it, and on my way unearthed a few gems I’d not seen before. Hopefully you haven’t seen all of them…

Rugby by Brightly

Really interesting video that pulls in live image searches from Giphy so you’ll never see the same video twice. It works incredibly well.

Do Not Touch by Kilo

Crowd-sourced-cursors work brilliantly well in this super interesting video for Kilo. Might be by favourite of the lot.

Carry Me by Bombay Bicycle Club

Really lovely interaction in this one. Very simple. But super satisfying. Give it a go.

Then Finally. I found the video I was looking for…

Golden Chains by ALB

Although unfortunately I can’t find an actual live version of the experience anywhere. There’s also a case study that says you were able to buy all the items on eBay. See. It’s pretty much like I described at the top of the post…

The Outline is an antidote to the shitweb

I don’t fully agree with all of it all the time, but The Outline is a wonderful thing. A publication that’s well written and beautifully designed for phones and computers. Loved this piece that came in the email yesterday: Productivity Is Dangerous.

Perhaps most surpsingly of all they’ve also managed to make advertising that doesn’t make you want to punch it in the face. I even shared a Goldman Sachs Blockchain Ad they’d made. Not because it was a good or bad ad. Because it was the best way of describing the Blockchain I’d come across. To be fair I’ve no idea who made the ad, maybe I should be congratulating the Goldman Sachs guys, but I’d rather not.

I’ve stuck a couple more screengrabs underneath. But if you want to read all about the design and see more, head over to Code and Theory’s page on how and why they did what they did. Kudos to them.

Tastees.nl

Cous Cous t-shirt

I spotted a fellow from WeTransfer wearing a rather snazzy ‘Cous Cous’ tshirt last night. I liked it. He told me it was from Tastees (tastees.nl I’ve removed the link because their site appears to have been hacked and is redirecting people to odd websites on a mobile browser).

They’re cool. They make typographic tees with dishes on them. If you buy one, they donate a dish to someone who needs it. Which is nice. Check them out (again link to tastees.nl removed to avoid dodgy redirects).

Sneak into The Kennedys (a home for random creative folk)

Are you, or do you know, someone ‘creative’? Someone who’d like to come and work with us for 7-ish months? (Please forward this on to people you think might be interested).

You’ll get thrown-in at the deep end of advertising — with support from some great mentors. And you’ll be encouraged to develop your own creative practice as part of a wider team.

We’re taking 6 people in London (and 6 in Amsterdam) — giving them a place to live, a space to work, a workable wage, and a bunch of creative opportunities to work on together. They’ll also have support and guidance from a bunch of good nice people.

The Kennedys has been running in Amsterdam for a few years. It’s been a roaring success. Great work has been made. Individuals have blossomed. And much fun has been had. A big percentage of the office’s creative department is now made up of people who’ve been through the Kennedys program. Which is great, and something we hope to replicate.

This is as much about us learning from them as it is them learning from us. We do not have all the answers. Actually we’re rather proud to have none of the answers at the start of a project. (That’s part of the whole “Walk In Stupid” thing this agency likes).

Tony Davidson (the other Exec Creative Director), is overseeing the admissions. He’s rather fond of randomness and is prone to saying things like “Dial up the crazy”, “let’s f**k things up”, etc. So I won’t be entirely surprised if The Kennedys is made up of: a Polish Food YouTuber, a viola player from Hull, a poet who no-one is quite sure where they come from but writes in Klingon, a performance coder from Spain, a furniture designer from the Outer Hebrides, and an amateur baker from Belgium who happens to have a really good Instagram feed.

And that would be really good. Provided they’re up for collaborating to make interesting and culturally relevant work. (The only restriction is that we need people who are legally able to work in the EU).

This is not an internship program. This is not an extra door into the agency for people who have been to advertising school and have a portfolio. This is a program for people who may never have thought about advertising as a career — or have thought about it and assumed they don’t have the right experience or skills.

Unfortunately the official closing date for applications has passed.

 ACORN

BUT…

I sit on a desk next to Tony and I can see the pile of applications, I’m certain I can sneak some extras in at the bottom (metaphorically speaking). But you’ll need to get them in quick…

The questions we’ve asked people to answer are below. Make of them what you will. Choose to answer some or all of them in a way that you think demonstrates something about you. Feel free to include anything else you think might be interesting, amusing, or inspiring.

For details of where to send your stuff see the very bottom of the page.

kennedys_list

I’ve set up a Dropbox folder where you can upload your applications — don’t worry no-one can see them but me — the uploads will close at 23:00GMT on Sunday 20th March. No extensions. No nonsense.

Here’s the official site for The Kennedys if you want more proper details.

Mobile Cyber Theft of a van den Nieuwendijk

And on the subject of Jordy van den Nieuwendijk. I manged to trick him into giving me a 100% original and exclusive work.

I pretended that he should have a play with my Samsung Galaxy Note and ‘see how good the stylus is’ . (Knowing full well he wouldn’t be able to not do something good).

image

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He’ll probably hate me for posting this (it was done on a bumpy bus ride after a couple of beers) but I think it’s pretty wonderful. Sorry @JvdNieuwendijk

I wonder if I can trick any other artists into creating original works for me using the ‘try my stylus’ method…?

Typeset In The Future

Thank you @daveaddey from the Internet you’ve made my evening. Thank you for analysing fonts from sci-fi. You are wonderful.

Typeset In The Future | Dedicated to fonts in sci-fi.

via: metafilter

The Single Most Brilliant Single Web Page in Recent Memory

Artist David Horvitz has a load of really great things on site site. Really do go and have a poke about it’s great.

The best bit is a page of things called FOR YOU…

It’s a list by the artist of “THINGS FOR SALE THAT I WILL MAIL YOU”

For example:

If you give me $10 I will take a photograph of the sky just for you. That means I will go outside, shoot a photograph of the sky, print it as a 8.5″ x 11″ full color laser jet print, write the date on it, fold it into an envelope, and mail it to you. Oh, and I will also delete the file so that you will have the only existing copy of that photograph. It’s just for you.

Or:

If you give me $630 I will give it to my landlord for the month’s rent. I won’t work for one month and I’ll send you an email everyday of what I did and why it was important (unless I am away from a computer). Actually, I am going to need some more money for food and utilities. I am going to raise this to $1000. (NOTE: this is one person a month, if you buy this you will be given a specific month). I will also print out the emails I sent you everyday and mail it to you as a small edition of one artist book.

Honestly it might sound a bit odd, but go and have a look at the list. It’s really compelling. The values that he’s given to things and hist notion of ownership and limited-editionness are really interesting.

You can also subscribe to get a picture of the sky every day for a year sent by email. Which seems to be part of his project to take a picture of the sky every day for the rest of his life.

Thank you Ze Frank for the link!

If you’ve not seen Ze Frank’s ColorWars – you really should. It’s incredible.