Inside Out

Look forward, look sideways, stay curious. We open up on some of the things we find intriguing, inspiring and impossibly compelling. We share some of our stories, insights, favorites and pull back the curtain and get behind the scenes.

To celebrate the Wellington City Council rolling out their new website we thought we would celebrate with a little ray of sunshine for our Wellington office.

Emily MacDonald - 22 February 2013

The loving and lasting solution for your mechancial bereavement... Bicylce Taxidermy. Finally.

Grenville Main - 26 November 2012

A new collection of geometric animal prints is available at Lumadessa a little art and design label by Josh Brill. Via Under Consideration

2011-11-30 08:21:38

We were wondering if we should update our profile images on the website – and we thought we might do something a little different. What do you think?

You can see the full set of the Auckland team by coming up to see us in the Ferry Building.

Hannah Suvalko - 26 November 2012

Although hipsterbranding seems like a little bit of harmless graphic fun – is this potentially the next stage for brands who want to appeal to niche markets – yet another potential result of greater commercial intimacy?

Who is to say that your identity as a brand should be the same for every audience anyway? We all have different relationships with brands and we interact with them in different ways and in different places. As a result of media fragmentation, social networks and our diversifying relationships with brands – are we seeing the future of brand identity being influenced more strongly by the values of the groups they connect with?

Or is this just what it appears to be – another well-crafted, funny, creative diversion that keeps us amused for a few minutes. Until the next one comes along.

Steve Maskell - 15 March 2012

The sound sculptures and installations of Zimoun are graceful, mechanised works of playful poetry, their structural simplicity opens like an industrial bloom to reveal a complex and intricate series of relationships, an ongoing interplay between the artificial and the organic.

It‘s an artistic research of simple and elegant systems to generate and study complex behaviors in sound and motion. Zimoun creates sound pieces from basic components, often using multiples of the same prepared mechanical elements to examine the creation and degeneration of patterns.

Via Tim Beck

2011-09-20 17:55:52

Influencers is a short documentary that explores what it means to be an influencer and how trends and creativity become contagious today in music, fashion and entertainment.
The film attempts to understand the essence of influence, what makes a person influential without taking a statistical or metric approach.

Written and Directed by Paul Rojanathara and Davis Johnson, the film is a Polaroid snapshot of New York influential creatives (advertising, design, fashion and entertainment) who are shaping today's pop culture.

2011-09-20 17:41:41

The huge body of work created by UK based studio North for Barbican is nothing short of stunning. A great example of the grid in action and wonderful use of the typeface Futura.

The identity guidelines are an example of an utterly consistent and rigourously applied design system. Via September Industry.

2011-09-20 17:37:46

This is Edward Tufte. He is an information designer and he’s well regarded for his ability to visualise complex data sets in ways that people can easily understand. He’s also well known for his dislike of PowerPoint which is a bit ironic.

Like most properly famous people, he’s coined some well used phrases, and one of them is the ‘data:ink ratio’. In information design, you want to impart a lot of information (data) with as little ink as you can manage. Generally the less things there are to look at, the easier it will be to understand.

All screens are made up of millions of tiny dots called pixels. Being small, mobile screens have less of them. When you’re designing for mobile, you want to use as few pixels as possible to communicate as much information as you can.

Or, you want to optimise the data:pixel ratio. Thanks Edward Tufte.

2011-09-07 17:14:41