Italian photographer Mateo Ferrari shows a series of photographs of people being loyal to their cars, over quite a significant number of years. What happened to brand loyalty in the car industry – and where are the objects of desire anno 2008 to be found? How many people do you know who buy (and not lease) and keep their car over the span of more then 10 years?

I should start every blog entry with the words ‘Is it just me…?’, but this one must be obvious to any fashion conscious consumer, so why was it not obvious to the Banana Republic Brand Designers?

Below we can see Rock & Republic’s logotype.

And while walking to my favorite design and architecture book store off of Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, I had to look twice before I stopped in awe as I saw Banana Republic’s huge display of its new sub-line’s ‘BR Monogram’ logo (below as seen on their site):

‘Is it just me’ or is this either a very uneducated or a very strategic, but either way, a very unoriginal choice?

I just signed up a dream client/job for Geyrhalter Design. A client who actually needs a real brand (mark), one to put on his barrels of wine. We will create all aspects of our Brand Atmospheres offerings for a new Winery up north and I could not be more thrilled about the first written (‘snail mail’) communication I received from my client: A check in a blank envelope with a real wine-glass stain as the ‘seal’ on the back. Especially after a day of a record setting 9 hours (!) of continuous lecturing at Art Center College Of Design, receiving this envelope in the mail surely put a grin on my face. I will keep you updated, after the research/hangover phase is over.

I will get to Part II of the Serious Play conference review shortly, but as my life so very often plays out, I am crazy busy. In the interim I share two pieces of inspirations that Geyrhalter Design team members Julia Hou and Marco Vides have brought to my attention in the past week. First off is the stunning fence work by dutch design house Demakersvan:

I am taken by the creativity that went into the juxtaposition. It’s the beauty of life that you can get surprised by beautiful new ideas being born every day. ‘Everything has already been done before,’ I often hear people say in the design world. Well, I think the glass is rather half full then half empty, but that’s just my personal belief and I keep being stunned by new ideas every day.

Marco shared this ‘wall painted animation’ by MUTO with me. A day later I have received the link from an old friend, so before everybody has already seen it, I wanted to share this insane graffiti 2.0 piece with you (OK, not sure if Graffiti 2.0 has been a term sofar…).

No blog entries for a week meant a very busy agency life with two fantastic new (very) creative accounts, which I will share with you soon. No excuses here, instead I make up for it by sharing the most inspiring moments of today, which I spent at the Art Center College Of Design Conference in Pasadena, titled ‘Serious Play’, with you.

I registered for many reasons, but the title was not one of them, which left me entering today’s conference, in the critically appraised South Campus building (which students and faculty ended up loathing rather then loving since it is a great example of form over function), without knowing what I have to expect.

The ambiguous title soon started making sense as many creative kids end up becoming commercial artists (creativity + money makes parents and kids happy), nerds become rocket scientists, and the sneaky little ones end up becoming magicians. All of them were speaking today, from the Founder of the National Institute for Play to the professional Origami Virtuoso. Most were utilizing the topic, some, like Irene Au, Director of User Experience at Google – and supervisor of Geyrhalter Design Graduate Evelyn – disappointed slightly by giving company-centric speeches that were less inspiring as a whole.

Instead of giving you a boring write-up, I decided to share tid-bits with you that inspired me today:

First off a video that I had the hardest time finding online since it was just a filler in between speakers, but it was definitely a highlight for me.

A take away thought I scribbled down, not having noted the heritage:

‘Don’t go where there is a path, rather go where there is no path and leave a trail.’

Stuart Brown, who studied mass murderers and animals’ behaviours around the term ‘play’, said:

‘The opposite of play is not work, it is depression.’

An amazing thought, one that my good friend (and client, as well as New York Geyrhalter Design Contact) Gene shared with me the other weekend as we were having coffee. He said something in the likes of: ‘See some people get up on a Sunday, they brew a cup of joe and then spend an hour reading the papers. They love it. I get up, brew me some coffee and get s#!@ done on my laptop. I love it too. I don’t see a problem with enjoying getting stuff done.’

Not new (and I kept raving about their ‘ball’ ad in a long past GD Newsletter), but this Sony Bravia commercial seemed to work well as another filler in the ‘serious play’ conference.

It was stunning to see someone who made Origami not only into his full-time job, but also into a software that transformed it from an art form into a commercially used design tool, as seen in this Mitsubishi commercial. Yes, Robert Lang and his team built the entire set (all but the car) by hand.

The most insipiring presentation came from ‘the James Bond of Sleight-of-hand artists’, whose techniques have been compared by The New Yorker with ‘seeing Yo-Yo Ma practicing scales at Carnegie Hall’: Jamy Ian Swiss. It came as a surprise to me, but the similarities of subliminal messaging in design and advertising are extremely similar to the ones that transform a generic card trick into convincing magic. Like an actor, every little movement is perfectly staged, even the mistakes are carefully planned to take attention away from one side of the body (where the trick is being pulled) to the other, as the trick transforms into a pure form of art. It is the same trick/art that us designers use to make the spectator focus on a specific portion of the messaging in our designs. And it also is what differentiates an amazing designer from an amazing Creative Director or Presenter. Both need to understand and master the theory behind the art, but the CD needs to sell it, and then the acting role steps in, which most of the times sells – but sometimes also creates a little bit of – the magic. As Jamy would say, ‘Plan it out so that it makes it seem impossible, then pull it off with an even bigger impact’.

For the official conference blog, please go here.

I rarely watch television. If I do I am the one who gets excited when everyone else leaves for the fridge: I watch for the commercials. But things have changed. Maybe I have been absent from the T.V. screen for too long, or does every commercial these days look like a self absorbed outreach of a failing Creative Director to do something unique to win themselves an award, because most of the ads don’t make any sense, they do not reach their target and they feel like they tend to forget their own purpose. And then my dear friend, colleague and client Uwe sent me this commercial for Monster and I have hope again that there are still some Ad Agency Creatives out there who care about the results, and by that I do not mean an award on the shelf.