John Jay of Wieden + Kennedy was recently named one of the most creative business people in 2011 by Fast Company. His position as W+K’s executive creative director takes him between all of the W+K offices in an effort to breed those cultures into the main headquarters in Portland.
In this video John Jay talks about his creative process. He takes a step back and approaches his interpretation of process from a wise view. What I’ve drawn mostly from this is that it’s about conversation. Most importantly it’s about listening to what people have to say and then taking that to make it relative and understandable to other people.
The last thing that I’ve drawn from this that I agree with is that you should always place yourself around people that you aspire to be. It’s really about surrounding yourself with positive energy. It sounds cheesy but it makes a world of difference.
The greatest thing we can offer is to be great listeners.
Awesome imagery archive of Czech motorcycle maker Jawa (short for Janeček and Wanderer). Great logos and type treatments, some nice inspiration in there.
Flickr user “Advertising Hitchcock” has a large collection of beautiful high-res scans of — as the name implies — original advertising from Hitchcock films. Of particular interest is the Psycho (1960) set, which includes international versions of the release poster. The Italian version is definitely my favorite; considering that the file is generously offered at such a high resolution (1352×2674 @ 300dpi), I’m going to have to fire up the Epson. For some reason made me think of the classic sci-fi covers stuff from Eric Carl. Also be sure to check out the type on the lobby cards; great layout.
Sorry, no information on the designers. Please let me know if you have any names.
Alan Fletcher (later of Fletcher/Forbes/Gill) created these adverts for Pirelli while living in Milan in 1959. Just another one to add to the pile of things I wish were posters.
We’ve covered some of Franco Grignani’s (Italian, 1908-1999) work here on the blog before, but I recently ran across some very nice new scans over at Display. Some of these I hadn’t seen yet or was unable to locate high enough resolution images to post. Inspiring stuff; and a quick Google image search reveals the debt modern graphic design owes this man.
Retro Synth Ads has some great scans of various electronic music equipment from the 70’s and 80’s. It’s interesting to observe how the sophistication of advertising design in niche industries — like music technology — predictably lags behind that of the mainstream. These are pretty far along and represent output from some of the biggest names of the day, but examples like this and this are fascinating in their simplicity. I’m guessing the engineers who built the machines were moonlighting as their own designers in these cases. Loving the TL-12, makes me wish I had a MSQ-700.
Dwell has an excellent piece on Swiss design shop Geigy. The in house agency has such a rich portfolio of beautiful work, most for the medical industry. I particularly enjoy the packaging work.
Grain Edit also has some more info and pics from a book about Geigy design here
Just hearing the name Volkswagen makes me think deep history. Especially now after stumbling upon a Volkswagen archive that has scans from Everett Barnes’ collection. It’s well worth checking out if you have the time. The collection starts from the early 1930s’ and goes all the way until 2005. It has nearly more images and spreads of brochures and random Volkswagen nostalgia than you can shake a stick at.
