We Made This

Redesign BP's logo

Loving this - Greenpeace UK have set up a campaign to redesign the BP logo, to more accurately reflect its current tarnished status, as well as to raise awareness about the company's plans for extracting oil from tar sands. 

These are our attempts at it, and Greenpeace have already posted almost three hundred entries to their Flickr set (they haven't provided links to show who's created each design, which seems a shame, but is perhaps wise), and that's just in the first week of the competition. You can download .eps, .tif and .pdf files of the logo, and there's a template as well, so that they can use the designs across lots of platforms. The competition is divided into three categories: design professionals & students; the general public; and Under 18s; and it runs until 28 June.

Twickenham Carnival Posters

We've just picked up a batch of posters we designed for Twickenham Carnival, which is organised by the London Borough of Richmond Upon Thames. The posters have been printed up from original woodblock and metal letterpress type by the good folks at New North Press, and we're dead chuffed with them.

Richmond Council asked us to put together the posters for the carnival based on the theme 'Heritage Now!' So by way of research we took a trip to the Local Studies Collection at Richmond Library, which is a real treasure trove. We unearthed some giant scrapbooks which had a whole series of fantastic original posters from local carnivals back in the 1920s, which was too good a gift to ignore.

We discussed the idea of doing purely typographic posters with the client, who could see that it fit snugly with their heritage theme. We then put together a rough layout, and took it to New North Press, who matched the type where possible, and proposed some great substitutions where not. 

They printed an all-black version for us to scan (so that we could create artwork for a large run of digitally printed posters), and then created a short run of original two-colour prints.

See the full set of shots of the reference imagery and the printing process on Alistair's Flickr set.

The carnival is at Orleans House Gallery, on Sunday 13 June.

Arcade Fire + Sergio Leone

It's a bit old, but we're loving this edit of Once Upon a Time in the West, used as an unofficial promo for Arcade Fire's My Body Is A Cage (from their fantastic Neon Bible album), by Chicago based designer J Tyler Helms.

And it give us a chance to link to this little promo piece the band have put together for their upcoming 12" double-A side, The Suburbs/Month of May:

(Sorry, doesn't seem to be any way to make that fit into our grid. Grr.)

2012 Olympic mascots launched

So, after the hoo-haa about the 2012 Olympic logo, here's the next big part of the Olympic branding, the mascots, Wenlock (on the left) and Mandeville. They've been designed by the folks at Iris, and given a back-story courtesy of children's author Michael Morpurgo.

Our first response on seeing them was "One-eyed aliens? Phew! Not a cuddly lion." 

They're far closer to fully realised characters than we were expecting, and slightly bonkers, which is great. There's a touch of Al Capp's The Shmoo in there, a fair bit of Futurama's Leela, and also a bit of Umberto Boccioni's magnificent Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.

They're obviously styled to be emblematic of loads of different stuff - Wenlock's head represents the three podium positions, as well as a taxi light, and the Olympic stadium roof; while Mandeville's head has three prongs representing the Paralympic emblem. Both of them have eyes that apparently double as cameras, and they are built for online customisation, so that people can create their own versions (here's hoping for physical versions of that customisation, a bit like Kid Robot's Munnys). We'd like to see an unembellished version, a bit cleaner, simpler.

And of course, they come in life-size versions too - which we reckon might scare the hell out of younger kids...

Overall though, we reckon these two are (relatively) cool - perhaps not up there with Jamie Hewlett's Monkey animations appropriated by the BBC for its coverage of the Beijing Olympics, but not a million miles away. What d'you think?

D&AD Sharp'ner

This looks like it could be good: the first of the D&AD's Sharp'ner events, The Future of Books & Book Design. It's got folk like Unit Editions, Penguin, Fuel Design and the Caseroom Press, having an informal chit chat. It's on at Corbet Place Bar & Lounge (at the Old Truman Brewery), on Wednesday 26 May, at 7pm - entry is a fiver, or free to members.

Get your tick'ts here.

Routemaster 2012 unveiled

So the kids over at the mayor's office have unveiled the 'iconic final design' for the new Routemaster buses (here's their press release on it, and another page with some video and pictures).

Back in December, it was announced that the design competition for the bus had been won by two teams: a collaborative team from Foster & Partners and Aston Martin, and a team from automotive design firm Capoco.

Their designs were then passed to bus manufacturers The Wright Group, who have joined up with the Heatherwick Studio to work on the final design, which should be pulling up at London bus stops sometime in 2012.

It boasts three doorways, two staircases, and a pile of green credentials; interestingly the jump-on-jump-off platform is designed to be closed at 'quieter times'. We're guessing that actually means at night, once most of the passengers are drunk.

We'll have to wait until 2012 to see if the design actually merits the term 'iconic', but that list of designers - Fosters, Aston Martin, and Heatherwick - that at least suggests that it might. Doesn't it?

Hold tight please...

Pink Mince

We don't get many magazines here at the We Made This studio, generally making do with a subscription to the ever brilliant Wired, the repeated random goodness that arrives courtesy of Stack (which we wrote about here), and of course the fantastic The Ride Journal (the latest issue of which is launching on 27 May!) We'll pick up the design press now and again, but generally look to the web for that sort of content.

So we were tickled to pick up a few issues of the rather wonderful Pink Mince magazine, "For the confirmed bachelor of exceptional taste". It's put together by typographer (and all round nice bloke) Dan Rhatigan, who amongst other things is responsible for the tasty typeface Gina (and who has some damn fine ink on his arms too).

Dan describes Pink Mince as a 'modest little zine that aims to delight, titillate, amuse, provoke, and inspire'; which isn't a bad ambition. The latest issue (below) is titled 'Your Dad Was Hot', and previous issues have covered Alter Egos, Contradictions, and a photoseries of 'hot man-on-man action' - using Action Man.

The also rather lovely (and D&AD nominated) Butt magazine (careful there - not particularly safe for work) has recently announced it's taking a sabbatical from printing to focus on online stuff, so Pink Mince fills that space perfectly. 

As it were.

Picked your colour?

Election time, and for the first time in an age it seems like there's a choice of three colours, rather than just the two. And that's got to be a good thing...

UPDATE: We've just been reading some more thoughts on the election hues over at JB Towers, and we've been pondering about how much the colours of the Union Jack (or Union Flag, to give it its correct name) might have always helped and hindered the parties. After all, if we regularly see the UK as being made up of just red and blue (shown here in the Labour and Conservative Pantone colours, rather than its true colours), might we subconsciously see yellow as not really fitting in?

Perhaps Mr Clegg might like to look at proposing a revised flag...

(Guess we'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if we've given each party the right proportion of the flag...)