I set off before the Christmas break this year with high aspirations of gallery visits, an intellectual reading list and a general full-on immersion into everything cultural. The reality, as so often happens was a heady mixture of family reunions, social engagements and hunting Japanese bargains at Dover Street Market.

Fortunately the first week back in January I had booked a short trip to Venice, four days of nonchalant meandering around this beautiful Italian city built on water. The place was amazing (my first trip) incredible architecture, a million churches, fantastically overpriced Gondolas and an awe inspiring display of sunglasses.

The highlight of the trip however was a visit to the Punta Della Dogana, an incredible contemporary art gallery on the banks of the Grand canal. Part of the Francois Pinault foundation and something I had been particularly looking forward to seeing, the gallery housed a range of pieces from international contemporary artists including Subodh Gupta, Chen Zhen, Paul McCarthy and my favourite Maurizio Cattelan.

The building itself was pretty spectacular, reimagined by Tadao Ando – who has collaborated with Francois Pinaut in Venice before – the architect had managed to beautifully combine the old and new; maintaining the essence of the original building. His new vision created a modern, visually imposing interior that acted as the perfect canvas for such a collection. It reminded me of everything I love about the Tate Modern here in the UK.

In regards to the collection, I knew I was in for a treat the moment I entered the first room. The untitled work of Maurizio Cattelan featured a full size, taxidermy horse with it’s body jutting out of the brickwork. Creating a paradoxical trophy (normally its the head that sits on the wall of a dead animal), I loved the imagination and dark sense of humour I took from the piece. Others highlights included Edward Kienholz’s Roxys, an  “environment tableau” offering his twisted version of a 1940′s house of ill repute – it felt like staring straight into the set of a David Lynch nightmare. There were a series of Jeff Koons sculptures, inflatable toys mirrored to perfection out of Stainless steel and a selection of works from Paul McCarthy that reminded me very much of some of the Chapman brothers’ work from the mid 90′s.

I am a great lover of contemporary art and find it incredibly inspiring when thinking about my own work and the broader field of branding. It’s the sense of storytelling; quite often contextualising a thought or feeling which in essence has been explored before and representing it in a way that simply has not. It’s here I find the parallel with branding; communicating a companies values often not a million miles away from their competitors – variations on trust and openness immediately spring to mind, and telling that story in a way that delights, intrigues or dare I say shocks.

It’s so easy to find yourself looking through the usual design books and blogs for inspiration when starting new projects, but why not cast the net slightly further a field? By looking outside our immediate world the constraints for creativity can suddenly feel so much more imaginative and challenging.

As and when new posts go up we’ll be sure to link back to them here.

I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of ‘SantaCon’: “a non-denominational, non-commercial, non-political and non-sensical Santa Claus convention that occurs once a year for absolutely no reason.” This if most fun I’ve seen adults have at Christmas for a long time!

The stressful and depressing struggle of finding an apartment in New York – beautifully illustrated by this clip.

Wondering through MoMA’s pretty big design collection, I wasn’t expecting to see anything that would blow me away. Then I stumbled across this set of beautiful old PanAm posters from 1971:

Their simplicity is a break from advertising today where QR codes, headlines, and obligatory social media icons take over. These are simply gorgeous. Unfortunately, they were a one-off series commissioned by PamAm’s new Chairman who was forced to resign after just one year – PamAm’s design approach then reverted back to their old style – what a shame.

The subway isn’t the most wonderful of places…But every Sunday in December the New York Subway runs a selection of vintage subway cars from as far back as the 30′s, along one of New York most popular shopping lines – for the same price as a normal one! It really does make your day. Check out all the old hand drawn advertising:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And now as we enter January, the city has turned into a Christmas tree graveyard:

Happy New Year!

Firstly, the trees in Central Park have been changing since I arrived:

and 10 days later:

It’s taking longer fro me to get used to the way things are done in America.
How direct the advertising is for example:
But my faith in humanity was restored however when I visited the New York gem that it the ‘The Highline’:

A beautiful park above the streets of West Manhattan, created along an old freight railway track. It’s a peaceful break from the traffic below and has been expertly designed to include things like this window that simply looks out onto the street below. You can’t help but sit there and wait for rush of traffic below every time the lights turn green. http://www.thehighline.org

Now I know that Americans can sometimes come across a bit too patriotic for our stiff British attitude, but if it means my milk look as funky as this, then that’s fine by me.

On a last, more cultural note, do you recognize this?

This is a shot of the slide at Carsten Höller’s solo exhibition at the New Museum (www.newmuseum.org), a gallery in the downtown neighborhood of Bowery. The exhibit features a number of different works, including a full-size mirrored carousel and the ‘psycho tank’ (a pool of highly salinated, skin temperature water that is supposed to be void of any sensory experience), but the slide is undoubtedly the main attraction. It runs across three floors, the exit being in a strobe lit room with life size fluorescent crocodiles, hippos and some other creatures I couldn’t work out. Höller has definitely succeeded in creating an overall experience that makes you feel like a kid again, even if some of the pieces seemed to lack any real or worthy purpose…

I’m going to try and feature a range of things here from New York, but as an official ‘alien’, I may need some help. If there’s anything you know about and can recommend, then just post it below.

Highgate Cemetery

Too old for trick-or-treating? This Halloween weekend go see some of London’s scariest sights. 

As we approach Halloween weekend, I start to get the urge to be scared.   Something that rarely happens as I normally flat out refuse to watch scary movies and jump when the phone rings.  But nevertheless, I find at Halloween my scare tolerance increases.  In recent years, I’ve been to Fright Night at Thorpe Park, gone on a Jack the Ripper walking tour, and gone to see An American Werewolf in London, while all spooky in their own right this year I’m looking for something a little more gruesome.  While I could join the throngs of tourists at The London Dungeon or the Tower of London, I thought why not find somewhere where I might have a real chance of seeing a ghost.

So what would make the perfect spooky Halloween weekend? A tour of some of London’s scariest and most haunted Locations.  First stop is Highgate Cemetery, if you have not been to this North London Victorian cemetery this has to be your first stop on your spooky London tour.  There are close to 200,000 people buried here, but what really chills my bones are the rumours of the Highgate Vampire. Throughout the years animals have been found drained of their blood and a man was even found murdered in 1970 with wounds to the neck.  Since 2007 there have been numerous reports of a tall, dark figure lurking around, so make sure you wear your garlic necklace.

Along with cemeteries there a number of haunted tube stations around London, all of which have reports of staff hearing eerie noises or seeing ghostly figures.  Bethnal Green station workers have reported hearing sounds of women and children screaming, only to find empty tickets halls and platforms.  During WWII, 173 people were crushed in the station during an air-raid warning.  Another station many of us pass through every day was built above an old burial ground, so be careful when changing trains at Bank Station.  Other haunted tube stations include Becontree, Liverpool Street, Aldgate, and even our nearest Farringdon, where screams of a little girl murdered there in 1758 can still be heard.

If you get a bit thirsty during your journey there are no shortage of haunted pubs to keep you in the spirit.  First is The Ten Bells, this pub just off of Spitalfields market is thought to be the watering hole for the world’s most notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper.  Just down the road from us The Bleeding Heart Tavern is where Lady Elizabeth Hatton was found murdered in the yard in 1626.  Another one close to us and dear to our hearts is The Rising Sun, where it’s rumoured in the 18^th century body snatchers lurked waiting to snatch cadavers from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital nearby.  Other haunted pubs include The Flask in Highgate, The Laughing Cavalier in Soho, and The Viaduct Tavern near Holborn.

Hope this provides you with a bit of a fright over the weekend.  I know after visiting a few of these places I may well be sleeping with the light on.

In the report one photographer criticizes the technology of removing the creative element from the profession, I see it as the opposite. It leaves less to chance during a shoot and allows for more calculated decisions to be made on imagery during post production.

Check out the report here.

Gone are the days when curating was reserved for those academic art experts. Thanks to the web, there’s now endless websites dedicated to collecting the weird and wonderful.
I want to point your attention to a website I came across where you can browse websites that feature collections/archives of anything and everything.

Here’s a few of my favourites:

A collection of drug bags:
http://babylonfalling.tumblr.com/clayton_patterson_dope

Sad stuff on the street:
http://sadstuffonthestreet.com/

Some cracking postcards from the states:
http://bad-postcards.tumblr.com/

And a huge collection of cat purrs. Genius:
http://www.ronsen.org/purrfectsounds/

Check out loads more at the website of all websites:
http://www.delicious.com/MarcFischer/public_collectors?page=1

WARNING: These unique collections make a few hours pass very quickly.

If using brand names as nouns – as in “leave my post-its alone”, and “you’re wearing my speedos” wasn’t enough, we’ve now got ‘verbing’ to deal with.
The trend of ‘verbing’, when a noun becomes a verb, is responsible for friending, trending, texting, blogging, bombing, lunching, and many more. This, to be fair, is nothing new. The English language has been doing this for centuries, it’s why we ‘sheathe’ a sword and ‘fish’ for fish…and then there was Google.

Now we Google this, eBay that, Facebook our friends, and tweet about, well…anything. Brands are finding their way into our everyday language more and more. While I understand this can make life easier–I’d rather “tweet” about something, rather than “broadcast it to an online members community”– the initial thought of a brand infiltrating a language does make me feel a bit uncomfortable. But is it now the ultimate mark of success for a brand?

Whereas a name was once the most precious and defended asset of a brand, Google and Facebook have set the bar high for allowing a name to be used in any which way, so what made them catch on? In G.L’s article ‘Why, perhaps, we Google’ he creates two rules of a brand verb. The first being that the word must refer to a “clearly-defined, frequent action for which there isn’t a perfectly adequate pre-existing verb”, and the second is that two brand-verbs for the same action cannot coexist. Perhaps the reason why Bing search engine never caught on.

Whilst a lot of new media and technology is rapidly transforming our language, for better and for worse, those scrabble enthusiasts might say that this is the destruction of our language and blah blah blah, but I say bring it on. Hopefully it means that for a brand verb to stick it’s got to be something that works, and is like nothing already out there. If a better option to Google came along, brand loyalty is so low these days that I’ve got a feeling we would all switch, and almost overnight they would have the biggest global brand verb.

Imagine the brief: “Get our brand name into everyday language”…

The London 2012 Olympic medal design was launched yesterday and most news reports I saw made heavy mention of the figure of the Greek goddess of victory, Nike, on the reverse of the medal. Straightaway, that feels instinctively wrong. I can’t help but draw the link to Nike, the brand, as I’m sure is true of pretty much everyone else too. And, as soon as my mind has made that link, the medal’s place within it is devalued. “This is the Olympics,” I tell myself, “not some dumb fun run for the middle-aged.”

But a closer inspection of the facts reveals a back-story that seems to provide some justification. Every Olympic medal since 1928 has featured the goddess Nike on its obverse – it’s an Olympic tradition that long pre-dates the brand (and perhaps it was the very reason that Phil Knight chose the name in the first place). And let’s be civilised about this: the enduring narrative of Classical mythology is surely more significant than the throwaway consumer culture of today. And what better narrative could there be for the winners at 2012 than the symbolic representation of superhuman victory with its cultural roots in the self-same geographic location as those of the event itself. The design brief pretty much writes itself. Rationally speaking, of course it’s right to have the goddess Nike on the 2012 medals – any connection to the sportswear and equipment brand is an irrelevance and should be ignored. “This is the Olympics,” I tell myself again, “not some dumb fun run for the middle-aged.”

Except, it’s still wrong. Because the fact is that we don’t live in ancient Greece any longer, nor in the Renaissance, nor indeed in the 20^th Century where popular opinion was largely manipulated by those who attended private school. We live in the age of brands. And in this age, Nike the brand is bigger and more significant than Nike the mythological goddess. Its narrative is richer and more evocative. The emotional connotations of the word, Nike, are driven by the activities of the business – it’s products, sponsorships, marketing, labour practices, CSR etc. When people hear Nike, they see Swoosh, and they think about a commercial business that is vying for their attention and for their cash. The marketing teams at Nike must be rubbing their hands together with glee this morning. Their automated press searches for mentions of their brand name will be churning our page after page of results for something that has cost them nothing and involved zero effort on their behalf. It’s irrelevant that the image on the medal is not their own, the mere mention of the name is enough. There can be no question that this is driving a clear benefit to the Nike brand. And I confidently predict that a large percentage of the public reading this news will assume a connection between the brand and the medals even though one doesn’t exist. Whatever the protestations of the classicists and historians (and in this uber-democratic age they are but a tiny share of voice) the truth is that Nike is first and foremost a consumer brand. And, as such, it is clearly not a part of the story that the Olympics should tell.

The commissioners of these medals should have had the sense to see this. In fact I would guess that they did, but chose to prioritise history and tradition instead. They probably hoped for an elephant-in-the-room situation where everyone fails to comment on the big, obvious thing for no more reason than everyone else has failed to do so. And, you know, there’s a lot of me that wants to say that’s the right approach – why should the rise of branded organisations dumb down the intellectual standards of public discourse? (Answer: it needn’t.) But the age of brands is not about rational assessments of the underlying brief, nor is it about historical precedents and upholding tradition. Like it or not, it’s about emotional resonance, immediacy and innovation. It’s about instinct and understanding what people really think, not what you’d ideally like them to.

Olympic medals are a bestowment from the people of the world to those god-like individuals who have achieved the ultimate victory to which we all, as human beings, aspire. Now surely there’s a way to design something that meets that brief without associating it to one of the world’s most commercially voracious brands?