Five Things 016

January 13th, 2012 by Mat Dolphin

Hello 2012! We’ve hit the ground running this new year and are very excited by the projects we’ve got coming up. We’ve got plenty of exciting things in the pipeline and, as always, lots of lovely things to share with you. Which brings me nicely onto the latest post in our Five Things series. A mixed bag as always, we’ve got some great student work, some brilliant filmmaking, a lovely bit of branding, something music-related and some foodie stuff. Hopefully something to keep everyone happy.

Without further ado, click below to check out what’s been catching our beady little eyes recently.

We get sent quite a few emails, letters and other random bits and pieces by students looking for a helping hand onto the slippery career ladder of the design industry. Some of what we get sent is nice, some isn’t. This week, we got sent something very nice. Chris Mizen is a third year graphic design student at Cambridge School of Art, going a big step further than the usual ‘here’s a link to my work’ email, Chris produced a rather lovely book, exploring the humble Ampersand (to the uninitiated, it’s the ‘&’ symbol). Beautifully designed, researched, written, printed and presented, the book looks at the history of the ampersand, correct usage as well as plenty of great variations and styles. Impressively geeky and genuinely interesting (I didn’t know where the word ‘ampersand’ came from until yesterday), we were more than a bit impressed with the time, effort and care he’d put into the piece. Keep up the good work, Chris.

Advertising lies. The images you see of women on magazine covers and cosmetics adverts are not true representations of the ‘average’ woman. Filmmaker Jesse Rosten is aware of this and has produced a rather brilliant film to give a much needed reality check to ’society’s standards of beauty’. Squarely portioning the blame on the over-use of a certain piece of computer software, Jesse does a pitch perfect mimic of the ads we’ve come to know all too well.


Characters as part of brand identities are really difficult to get right. Some work, whilst others are so awful you just want to punch them in the face. The recent rebrand of consumer electronics company, Belkin is spot on in our opinion. Introducing ‘Mr. Pip’ – a simple and elegantly designed mascot for the brand who amongst other things references the companies ethos of People Inspired Products, encapsulates connecting the dots between people and technology, and even manages to give a nod to the surname of Belkin CEO Chet Pipkin. Tenuous rationale aside, the new branding looks really good. Supported by a neutral palette and nice, balanced typography we welcome plenty more considered, intelligent design of this nature. Great work as always from the good folks at Wolff Olins.

Like music? Of course you do. Like listening to music videos on YouTube while you work? Who doesn’t? Like your screen filled with annoying adverts, banners and sponsored links? Us neither. That’s why we were pleasantly surprised when we discovered Tubalr. Type in the name of your favourite band, sit back and listen a automatically generated back-to-back playlist without any of the clutter and fuss of YouTube. Simple as that.

For those of you who have already caved on the January health kick, if you fancy stuffing your face with huge amounts of chocolate, you may as well do it with style – If you’re going to do it wrong, do it right. These typographically lovely bars were created as holiday gifts for the clients, friends and collaborators of Montréal-based design studio Dynamo (along with the help of ‘premier chocolatiers’ Suite 88). They look pretty good and, we imagine, probably don’t taste too bad either.

So there you have it! The first Five Things of 2012. Was it good for you? You can check out previous posts in the series here and feel free to get in touch if you have anything you’d like to share.

Thank you for reading

Mat Dolphin


One Response to “Five Things 016”

  1. Would love a copy of that ampersand book, beautiful.pro

    Comment by P — January 13th, 2012 @ 1:33 pm |

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