I.D is a one minute film using passport photos collected over several years to explore teenage identity. The work is directed & edited by Sam Firth who is based in the Highlands of Scotland.

See more work by Sam on Vimeo.
See Sam’s website here.

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Discover more work by creatives on our creative networks here.
If you have a Flickr, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Behance or Cargo account connect with us.

INSIDE OUT is a large-scale participatory art project that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world.

These digitally uploaded images are made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. People can participate as an individual or in a group; posters can be placed anywhere, from a solitary image in an office window to a wall of portraits on an abandoned building or a full stadium. These exhibitions will be documented, archived and viewable virtually.

To find out more about INSIDE OUT,  to find out how to get involved or to just to see more of the images uploaded so far, go here.

Image by Françoise L  – Colmery, France

Image by JUAREZ M – Juarez, Mexico

Image: Vacuum Cleaner ‘Fuck Off’ Logo Recall 

In terms of design strategy, the new stripped down Starbucks execution does make eminent sense. What was surprising was that it was out of step by a decade or more with other major global brands in the trend for reductivist logos as ubiquitous signature (you may have noticed the likes of Nike relying less on the old ‘swoosh’ and offering up heritage themed diffusion lines like Nike Sportswear, to get the hipsters back in tow).

The real design innovation is coming down the line (Digital Networks and Facebook tie-ins) and this little bit of
re-engineering just clears the path for that.

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Anyway, this is where we’re at. A big logo gets thrown into an ocean of design blogs and a quickly polarised debate of “I liked the old one better” vs “Isn’t that clever” emerges*. But little else beyond.

I’m curious about how the design community reacts, evolves and positions itself in relation to the notion of ‘branding’ in the real, everyday world. I’m being honest here. I find it confusing, and hard to take a definite position sometimes – where are the ethical boundaries of what we do? What are the aims of designers –  to make things better? To make things look better? To just sell more stuff?

By the way, I’m not saying coffee is evil. Or design for branding is for that matter. That’d be stupid, I indulge in and rely on both on a daily basis. (In fact that might be a vicious circle I need to get out of). I did spend some formative years in the midst of anti-capitalist marches, Adbusters, and Naomi Klein. It’s good they’re still fighting and arming us with information, but ultimately I found their strategies to be laudible, but predictable and a little bit lame.

This is really just a call out, at the beginning of this ‘Focus On Design’ month, for an upping of the ante when it comes to online design criticism – here or anywhere else. Let’s scratch at the surface now and again. Stoically defending the industry in the face of lazy journalism about how much design costs is encouraging, but lets also be honest about the true value of what we do.

I’m optimistic about the development and redefinition of ‘branding’ and design. I enjoyed Neil McGuires recent link on here to Metahaven’s rebranding of Wikileaks, and their notions of ‘image economies’. Their apparent short-circuiting of a countercultural publishers is pretty funny. Ultimately I’m interested in how they’re signposting new strategies for design and branding, and their understanding of what happens online, and that maybe it’s less about ‘brand’ and more about identity.

Links:

Articles on Starbucks Rebrand:

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2011/january/starbucks-new-logo

http://www.logodesignlove.com/starbucks-logo-evolution

http://www.thedrum.co.uk/news/2011/01/12/17584-starbucks-to-bring-free-digital-network-to-uk-/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/poll/2011/jan/06/is-starbucks-makeover-worth-it

Vacuum Cleaner ‘Fuck Off’ Logo Recall

http://thevacuumcleaner.co.uk/recall/

http://www.starbuckscoffee.org.uk/sos/home/index.html

Metahaven

http://mthvn.tumblr.com/page/2

http://www.manystuff.org/?p=9986

I’d  just given a presentation in the  Pop-Up tour, showing a couple of Colliderscope‘s music videos, and a little introduction  to our work.. a great afternoon – lots of really vibrant, exciting work and interesting presentations.. then to the networking  and nibbles afterwards – great setting, lots of fascinating stuff on show, and people eager to mix and mingle and network… but what did strike me as something a little odd about the networking event in the  Hannah Maclure Centre was the lack of music, soundtrack, background ambience -  zilch… just a slightly awkward silence and polite mumbings until the room filled up a bit and people were more relaxed, and their individual conversations  not so starkly highlighted against the silence and white walls…

Which leads neatly onto the important relationship between space and sound, visual and aural, concrete and abstract – we need each other, music and vision!  Goethe said that architecture is frozen music…and sound, consisting of intangible vibrations,  needs the architecture of a  physical  resonating chamber before it can be heard.  The abstract  nature of music needs the concrete form of visual imagery to bring it down to earth, otherwise its just free floating in the ether…  Which is why, given the demise of the medium of album cover art , with the canvas of visual identity for a piece of music now reduced to the size of an iTunes thumbnail,  why audio-visual collaboration is such an exciting area to be working in…I remember the days when sitting on the floor listening to your favourite album and pouring over the artwork on the gatefold sleeve, was like a magic gateway into another mysterious world….flicking through postage stamp sized images on iTunes or Spotify doesnt really err, hit the spot…

After my presentation, I had quite a few people ask if I had any CD’s – “I would just love to listen to your music on my iPod while working away in my studio”  a comment which emphasised to me how art and music are so intertwined…. and so it still surprises me  when music is seemingly added as an after-thought, rather than being an integral part of the conceptualisation of an event.   When I suggested to the Censta organisers at the networking session  that maybe some sounds might be nice, we found out that there were no facilities rigged up… come on you art folk – we musos want to come to the party too!

In fact, our wee patent leather shoes and frilly frocks are being dusted off as we speak… we soooo cant wait, that we decided to throw one of our own… Colliderscope are putting in a proposal to the Central Station Members’ fund to produce a collaborative  audio-visual event with  films and music, audio-visual installations, music videos, VJ’s and live performances… so all you Central Stationers who would like to contribute to an event “celebrating the collaborative synergy of music and moving image” *get in touch with us! You heard it first here….Lots of love from Colliderscope. xx

https://vimeo.com/12707515

* this luscious phrase courtesy of Willie Richardson of iMan4D – thanks Willie!

Find out more about Colliderscope here.
See some of Colliderscope’s work on Vimeo.

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Mix-Blog: A bit like a mix-tape but with blogs instead. Read more from the series here.