Damn these succinct, effective, colourful, visual, text-free ads. As a writer, I get freaked out when I see this stuff. I would have written a huge paragraph, wittily explaining why fish makes you smell like crap. Oh, how verbose and jolly it would have been. Now I’ll never get the chance because these design bastards have beaten me to the punch with these Listerine print ads… and done them so simply that I don’t have anything to say about it. Damn them.
(Agency: JWT San Juan)
In a recently launched print campaign, created for the New South Wales Police by DDB Sydney, the message is clear: your iPod will kill you.
These ads are clearly ridiculous. If anyone offered me an iPod with headphone cords long enough to wrap a chalk line around someone, I’d save them the trauma of the accident and just murder them for it. A little sensationalism never hurts when promoting public safety, I suppose, but I combed the NSWP site and couldn’t find any hard data or stats that backed up their claim that iPod-caused road deaths have reached the “epidemic proportions” they claim.
What I find most interesting about these ads are that they have an obvious iPod lying next to the corpse. I’m don’t know what Apple’s official feelings might be, but the online fan-geeks are already up in arms over the slandering of the beloved music player. Let’s face it: an iPod is now as necessary as a mobile phone. Since your mobile phone’s will give you brain cancer and now your iPod will get your hit by a bus, it’s a surprise there are still so many mobile-phone chatting iPod-listening young people still walking around. We should really all be dead by now.
You’ve heard it before. A picture is worth a thousand words and so forth. As a writer, it does get a little disheartening sometimes to see the influx of visual-based print ads. What, people can’t read three lines anymore? It’s not Dostoyevsky. Ah, but yes, we all have John Grishman attention spans and so the burden of words is sometimes too much.
I like these ads for Dinodia Photo Library because, even though they’re taking the counter argument that pictures mean more than words, they’ve proven the intrinsic power of words anyway. The message is clear – even though you read one name you see another picture and so decide that’s what you’re really talking about. Notice, though, that without the word creating the paradox these ads would just be pictures of dictators and saints.
(Agency: Leo Burnett Mumbai)
UPDATE #2 – 01.26.08: I recently got an email from Brandt Botes asking me to post this apology to Justin Jorgenson. It’s easy to not be accountable for your actions in the blogosphere, and I think apologizing takes some guts. Here’s Brandt’s statement:
“Thanks for featuring my set on your blog. Since doing this in 2001, i got told about the original Obscene Interiors by Justin a few years later. I loved what he did to personal ads and the commentary he wrote – more than that i couldn’t think of a more apt description than Obscene Interiors. I carelessly hi-jacked the name in 2007 when i published my set on Flickr, without asking permission or giving credit.
When created, it was done so without knowing anything about Justin’s work. For me it revolved around a love of wallpaper and pattern – something found in excess in 70’s porn. Once the figures were removed, it became a “guess the position” scenario to boot.
Justin – apologies for using your name. I have changed it, for what it is worth. Other than that similarities between the work is purely coincidental.”
UPDATE #1 – 01.11.08: Since this post went up I’ve been contacted by artist Justin Jorgenson. Here’s what he said:
“FYI – this concept of removing the figures from porn began with a feature called “Obscene Interiors” on my website http://JustinSpace.com in 1999 and was covered shortly after by The New York Times and other publications. My collection of online male personal ads with the figures grayed out became a book, “Obscene Interiors: Hardcore Amateur Decor” published in 2004 by Baby Tatoo. This Brandt Botes person (aka Von Brandis) you’ve mentioned was clearly “inspired” by my work.”
I looked through his site and his claims are totally legit. Whether Brandt Botes had seen Jorgenson’s work before beginning his own is impossible to know. Either way, plagiarism is serious shit. Check out Justinspace to decide for yourself…
ORIGINAL POST:
And you thought the best part of vintage porn was the music (or possibly the glaring lack of pubic grooming). Well, think again…
Thanks to South African artist Brandt Botes‘ (aka Von Brandis) latest Flickr set, Obscene Interiors, we can now clearly see how vintage porn really excelled in “set design”. By removing the actual pornstars from old skool shots he found on the internet, we can now check out, unhindered, the no-holds-barred shag carpeted key party glory of it all. Plus the white silhouettes, positions discernible from the outlines but the details and money shots blurred away, are tantalizing little brain teasers. Of course our imaginations are pervier than reality… or at least mine is.
If you’re into it, he’s also got a (ultimately not-printed but still worthwhile) tee design on Threadless.
Via Juxtapoz
It’s becoming clear to me that I need to spend more time letting the ink from pens leak into the world around me. First Fernando Brizio beat me to the punch with his stellar bowl and now UK artist Daniel Eatock has followed a similar method for his prints.
He arranged a set of ink pens in the colour spectrum and let them rest upside down on 500 sheets of paper for a month. At the end, the ink had seeped through 73 sheets and created, as you can see, beautiful and organic clouds of colour.
Each of the 73 works was numbered and priced based on how far it rested in the stack. Number 1/73 was furthest from the top (and so got the least amount of colour) and was priced at £1. 73/73, the most brilliant and thickly coloured of the group, was valued at £73. Easy as that.
Besides being astonished at how cheap these are, it’s the wonderful simplicity of the whole project – from the idea to the execution to the pricing itself – that I love so much.
Having been inspired, I’m currently lying in bed with 100 uncapped Crayola markers rolling around my white sheets. I’m hoping for big things. I’ll let you all know how it turns out…
Via NOTCOT
I’m of the personal opinion that not enough corpses are depicted in advertising. This print ad for Head Snowboards is a step in the right direction.
(Agency: Advico Young & Rubicam, Zurich)
Bra advertising is a straight-forward equation: buy bra + put on = big ‘uns.
While Victoria’s Secret pretty much dominates the whole glamazon supermodel angle, Wonderbra succeeds with interesting advertising and outdoor that takes a bit of a new turn on the basic formula:
(Agency: Publicis Belgium)
Here’s a new print ad for Niedermeyer Cameras. Um, ok. So, not that I’m necessarily shocked by this, but I just find it really sort of mind-blowing that we’re using Osama Bin Laden to sell things (besides the War on Terror… he sold that really well). I’m not coming from any sort of neo-conservative “support our troops” standpoint. I don’t think anything should ever be off limits. I think I’m just surprised that the US manhunt for Osama is so engrained in the worldwide culture that it could be used to sell something as banal as a camera.
Besides that, the ad also makes total sense purely from it’s marketing pitch: hunt for Osama – can’t find him – got a camera – zooms really good – there’s Osama – great camera. Isn’t that, I dunno… just weird?
It’s also an odd statement on how the omnipresence of advertising has made it at least reasonable to market a product on this type of situation. I don’t care if people find it offensive or not (people are way too easily offended, in my opinion). I’m more interested that this was seen, by some camera company, as a viable idea. I’m pretty sure that up to this point we wouldn’t have used Hitler or Pol Pot or Stalin to sell electronics. Unless you’re in North Korea, of course. In which case you’re only using dictators to sell electronics. But that’s a whole other story…
I love Diesel because they’re never afraid to take risks. After their recent post-environmental apocalypse campaign, they’re doing the futuristic thing again with their new Human After All campaign.
No matter how technologically advanced we become, our little human fights and foibles aren’t going anywhere. And (thank god) we still get to wear fabulously hot jeans. My personal fave is the first – where even in the future putting together your Ikea is a pain in the ass…
(Agency: Marcel Paris)
Via ibelieveinadv
shape+colour 