ICM - Leeds Design Agency

This month is Bubble-wrap’s 50th Birthday.

First invented by Marc Chavannes and Al Fielding, they weren’t looking for the solution to packing fragile items, they were creating textured wallpaper.

A classic case of searching for one thing but discovering something else. Sometimes losing sight of your goal can have a happy result.

The official licensed manufacturers of Bubble wrap, Sealed Air, have global revenues of over $4bn.

For an amazing insight into the world of Bubble wrap you should really ‘pop’ over to Virtual Bubble Wrap.com where you’ll learn about methods, etiquette (such as ‘Don’t pop someone else’s bubble wrap without permission’) and various methods to get the most out of your Bubble Wrap experience.

You’d never have that much fun with textured wallpaper now, would you?

Boffins are funny – I love them, mixing stuff up, running electricity through stuff, stitching body parts together and helping teenage boys get back into their own time with the use of Plutonium substitutes and industrial cable.

Fab, fantastic, wonderful . . . just do it over THERE so that I am out of the blast area.

Having a Lab coat and crazy hair comes with its own downsides – and the maniacal laughter and the secret volcano lair don’t help the social interaction either, but sometimes Researchers as we will call them from now on, come out of their lairs and unleash on the world their genius and its – often shambling – offspring.

One such Evil Lair Institute, is Oregon State University in the USA have recently been mixing stuff and heating it up. All good there I hear you say. But wait . . . there’s more. During one of their experiments they made a discovery (and not the one they were expecting – tho’ the original reason for the experiment is not explained). They discovered Blue – or rather, what is described as a New Blue.

The New York Times title on their Web Article is entitled: By Happy Accident, Chemists Produce a New Blue With the Journal Of The American Chemical Society publishing some rather more technical information

Now call me silly – but the last time I looked through a Pantone Book (Every night before I go to sleep . . .) there were HUNDREDS of Blues! Thousands! To be fair – the New York Times article explains that the current processes for…

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Between 9am on Friday 14th Jan and 9am on Saturday 15th Jan illustrator Johanna Basford worked her way through 13 pens as she illustrated 266 tweets from her Twitter followers.

With her blank artboard under the scrutiny of a live webcam, Johanna illustrated whatever a Twitter user suggested with the hashtag #twitterpicture.

Random suggestions such as ‘God is not a slotmachine’, ‘a monkey with a walking stick and a beard’, ‘a transistor radio wearing ear-muffs’ and ‘the forth rail bridge with a racing dinghy sailing underneath it’ all made the cut and were included in the final image.

Amazingly my own suggestion (I’d only known about the Twitterpicture for an hour or two at this point) made the cut: ‘a self-portrait of you illustrating the #twitterpicture’.

Here’s the end-result:

And here’s a link to a larger version.