ICM - Leeds Design Agency

They may not seem like the most festive of decorations for your Christmas tree – and that’s the point of these hand grenade-shaped baubles, conceived and designed by Manchester-based Dorothy for Ctrl.Alt.Shift in association with Suck UK. Entitled Christmas Declarations, the grenade baubles are designed to remind people that despite the joy of Christmas, all is not rosy in the world.

The limited edition decorations are available to buy in packs of six from Suck UK (£20) with a donation being made from the sale of each pack to support Ctrl.Alt.Shift’s fight against global confli…

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Panasonic Nose Hair Trimmer Billboards

These Panasonic Nose Hair Trimmer Billboards designed by Saatchi & Saatchi very cleverly use electrical wires and poles as part of the ad. More than just been amusing, they are memorable and caused quite a stir in Indonesia where they were placed.

VW Dream Bubbles

Car parks are rarely used as places to advertise. When placed above an inanimate object such as a car these clever little VW ads give it a voice of it’s own, they might even make you feel a prang of guilt. Being just above eye level they are unmissable as well.

2012

2012 is a film about a group of people who must deal with natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, typhoons and glaciers. Creating a flat static ad that coveys disaster isn’t going to have much impact, especially when it’s a very visual effect laden affair. This ad very effectively uses a metro tunnel as the scene of a flood.

The aim of any ad is getting the ‘customer’ to remember the product, so when they are in a position to buy whatever it is the ad is selling, that product pops to mind first. This is done through repetition or a clever idea. The above ads definitely come under the clever secti…

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After writing a blog on Otl Aicher’s finest set of sports posters I thought I’d follow it up with what I consider to be the finest film posters.

Saul Bass (1920-1996) is one of the greatest graphic designers of the 20th century. During his 40-year career he worked for some of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers, including most notably Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese.

Saul Bass was born in New York on May 8th 1920 and studied Graphic Art at Brooklyn College, NY before moving to Los Angeles in 1946. Bass was a pioneer of the pared down graphic, favouring minimalist symbolic images, which had been in vogue since he began designing for the film industry in the early 1950s.

For The Man with the Golden Arm a film about the struggle of its hero – a jazz musician played by Frank Sinatra, Saul Bass chose to base the design on a black cut-out of a heroin addict’s arm. Knowing that the arm was a powerful image of addiction, Bass had chosen it, rather than showing Frank Sinatra’s famous face, as the symbol of both the movie’s titles and its promotional poster.

For Vertigo Bass used the motif of the revolving Spirograph to evoke the dizzying sensations of the film, in all of his posters he seems to be offering the audiences a taste of the atmosphere and what story was about to unfold.

Unlike most of todays modern posters when looking at these posters it gets to the core of what the film is about, not who is in it or what fancy special effects are used. I think this is why movie posters today are not viewed as an art form any more. Which is a real shame as some of the themes in films are integral to society and what is going on in the wor…

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