Hola Chica

I like these stems that employ an orange/lemon rind for a wineglass. And that it employs a strong magnet...you had me at, "rare earth."

Link
via notcot

New Economist Campaign

I've been a fan of the work BBDO has done for The Economist; it's clean, clever, and most important: thought-provoking. (How's that for punctuation?) And changing it at this point is, in my mind, akin to changing the Absolut campaign after just 3 years. But their new stuff is just as clever, bright, and stand-out good. Shows that the first campaign wasn't a fluke. These Creatives got depth of talent, and the highest professional ability.
By AMV.BBDO
Link to more samples.
Via Advertising/Design Goodness

Dove Follows "evolution" with "real beauty"

It's hard to follow up after a triumph, (see Sony Bravia) but I guess if your message has legs, your concept rolls out easier.
As a father of 2 young daughters, I like this. A girl likes to be a girl, and put on makeup and dress pretty; but the fashion/beauty industry has gone overboard with convincing women they're just not pretty enough...but can get a little closer to acceptable with " ". Playing games with girls' self image to sell them 20¢ worth of grease paint for $6.95, 40¢ worth of shampoo for $16.50, and still they can't measure up. I'm left with more respect for the tobacco industry.
Great campaigns don't seem to start with, "Let's sell more of this stuff," but with a notion to redirect society, change thinking. Sometimes it's just recognizing a movement waiting to happen and getting out in front.
Only thing that bothers me is; there's no such thing as a boy or man in Dove-world. I don't know if that's a step up from the normal ad-fact that "men are idiots."
by Ogilvy via Adverblog
Ref Evolution video Dove Film Dove True Colors

Vacation Postcards

Laura Schreiber, a freelance illustrator, took a nice vacation on a lake. She painted some watercolors and sent them as postcards to her friends here. Each was beautifully done, but the real gas was when they line up together. Click the changing picture above to see.
*The artist tells me this is an ocean, not a lake. Oops. I thought those were lakegulls.

Studio Crew in 3-D

I finally got to try some 3D phtography myself, with a second-hand Bell & Howell Colorist camera. I'll go into some tech details later in the comments. Here are some of the great 3-dimensional folks I work with; and a good capture of their brilliant spirit.

Nice Basic Bookbinding How-To

Designer Michael Shannon shares a sweet little tutorial on bookbinding. No real detail on correct cover making, but it's goodness is it's simplicity. Sewing and joining signatures with easy steps and clear pictures. Just enough to inspire a person to make a first attempt. What could be better.

Link

Light Hook

A really neat idea just a little off in execution. This is a light switch modified as a clothing hook. The problem is it's off when down, on when up. I'd buy in if hanging my jacket on the hook lit the lights, and taking my jacket off the hook to leave turned them out.
To be fair, there is a slew of real genius at this designer's site, Amron Exptl. I especially look forward to commercial production of the Brush and Rinse, the hardest "why-didn't-I-think-of-that" moment of my life.

Via Design Spotter

Hair Type

This has to be an ad for a barbershop, my guess is Korean. All I know for sure is I like it, and I want to find out what it says.

Visual Trend Graphing

Jim Bumgardner creates these beautiful images that illustrate trends. He'll pick a topic, like for the images shown: sunset, and then make/use software that places images gathered from Flickr onto a graph by time and date taken, assigns a translucency to the photos, and the pattern or trend reveals itself in the resulting composite image. The cool thing here is the trend revealed actually signifies the changing time of sunset. The bottom of the "curve" is summer solstice. I especially liked his trend image for photos tagged breakfast, lunch and dinner. The best thing is, I think he just does this for fun. He works at Yahoo! and facilitates some nice collaborations at Flickr.

Link to Flickr set of trend images

via visualcomplexity (an awesome site also)

Freeset™ does interactivity

I came across this neat "humanlocator™" at Swiss Miss, and dug just a little into the development company, Freeset. There's a lot to learn from them about smart use of interactivity. I've heard a lot of succesful bizmen who based their operations on collaboration, and common core advice from them boiled down to requiring partners, big or small, to have skin in the game. Good interactivity does just that, requires the viewer to put skin in the game, and make them a partner. Even their company introduction page reveals their headline only as you rolll over the words, and you have to keep rolling over to keep them up as they fade. "What if people don't bother to point there? They won't see it." If they don't have to interact with it, they may not bother to point their brain at it. Engaging is better.

Link to the humanlocator demo, I liked bubbles.

Via Swiss Miss