'Products' Archives

Free Range Thinking:
Revealing to Appeal


1 : 20 An appealing ratio.

The Story of Stuff Teaser #1

This one minute video employs the old adage: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them.”

A simple storyline, childlike line art, straightforward logic, and narration combine verbally and visually to reduce a complex issue to an easily understood, engaging message.

Turning Less to More

The video culminates in an opt-in question designed to entice the viewer to engage in a 20-minute video that expounds on the basic communication. It’s served up in manageable segments at the viewer’s discretion. Nothing is forced or difficult to understand, just the way we like it—a concealed appeal.

See the longer video, produced by Free Range Studios, at storyofstuff.com.

[ via: Pat Coyle ]

Visualize a Customizable
Health Drink

Vessel
Vessel conceptual product rendering

Strong Concept + Strong Visualization

Creating a Personalized Beverage

According to their tagline, The Greener Grass.org is “Collaborating to design a better future.” With that and your health in mind, they created the Vessel concept, a system of components and options that would allow you to customize a drink to fit your personal tastes as well as your health and lifestyle needs.

With these three main bases and countless options, it’s about as far removed from today’s mainstream beverage model as you can get.

Bases: Nutrients to fit your lifestyle and demographic needs such as iron and calcium for women, or zinc and saw palmetto for men.

Flavors: Organic extracts to sate your specific tastebuds—everything from chocolate to wheatgrass, mango to mocha, or any imaginable combination in between.

Agents: Active ingredients like vitamins, minerals, and energy boosters for functional benefits—you name it, proteins or taurine, caffeine or ginseng—whatever you need.

The concept includes a reusable Vessel Lexan™ container strategically designed for optimum ingredient agitation.

Making the Concept Count

Programmatic design, packaging and convenience count in brand marketing. Whether or not the Vessel line ever comes to fruition, the concept is far more believable and supportable when visualized as a fully-branded product rendering.

Strong concepts become real through strong visualization.

V Water: An Animation



There’s Something in the Water™

Refreshing

A charming bit of animated promotion replete with a simple, whistled ditty and spartan, yet lyrically rendered, line drawings. Like any good short story, the conflict is quickly established and resolved. Produced by 20:20 of London for V Water, a purveyor of vitamin-enhanced bottled water products. (1:19)

Well branded by:

Creative Director: Peter Riley
Art Director: Jennifer Chen
Copywriter: Sara Leal
Animation: Conkerco Studio

Diddy: Diageo’s Ciroc Vodka
New Brand Manager & CMO

Diddy the marketeer

“I’m always about having the No. 1 shows, albums, fragrances and clothing lines.”
—Diddy

Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs

Puff Daddy, Puffy, P. Diddy, Diddy, his many names share one common distinction—accomplished marketeer. And as if to prove it, Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs announced his appointment as Diageo’s Ciroc Vodka Brand Manager and CMO in an Ad Age Q&A interview this week.

The role is “too big for one title,” he told Ad Age, but, he added, “I’ll be taking the lead on all the things traditionally a CMO or a brand manager would do, just doing them my way. Marketing in a way that is truly unique.”

Savvy Product Placement

Having Diddy both vested and invested in Diageo’s marketing objectives transcends typical endorsement relationships. Before Diddy—a product and brand himself—launches his first marketing directive, he’s already a walking talking media channel for the Ciroc Vodka brand. Not your standard brand agent hire.

Assuming the world’s big enough for both Diddy and Diageo to coexist, this could prove to be a very savvy real life product placement.

Read the entire Ad Age article here.

[via: dgirlp | image: 6e]

They’re Here:
Nokia N810 and iPhone SDK

Nokia 810

The Nokia N810 Internet tablet

Breaking news in the small device category:

iPhone/iTouch SDK

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Apple’s embrace of third-party applications for Apple iPhone and iTouch today, promising the upcoming release of a Software Development Kit (SDK) to enable application development.

According to Wired, the news coincided with word that France is forcing Apple to unlock the iPhone over Apple’s deal with Orange, Apple’s French carrier partner.

Nokia N810 Released

On the heels of that announcement, Nokia released the new N810 to Engadget today in hopes of an early blessing. Engadget’s review was mixed: Looks good but you wouldn’t want to type on one.

We’ll take two of everything, please.

[via: scriptingnews]

More Thought

Brainstorm Featured

in Step Inside Design’s recently released, 2008 Best of Web Annual for the design and development of Lumina Foundation for Education’s Camino a la Universidad site.

.THINK now listed on Alltop.com

under Branding. Grouped by topic, Alltop aggregates stories from “all the top” sites across the web (that’s their story and we’re sticking to it). View our .think listing, here: branding.alltop.

RapidoStart (Mac)

Here’s a free Mac app allowing you to call up, via customized abbreviations, any text string you copy and paste frequently. Best of all the text is placed pre-formatted - returns, bullets and all. It’s become a staple here at Brainstorm. You can download your own at app4mac.

PimpMyNews

If you can get past the vapid brand identity and UI, PimpMyNews, the talking social news site, is an interesting concept. The site will read your RSS feeds to you over your mp3 player, iPhone, etc. or computer.
[via: PR-Squared]

The iPlanet

NPI’s personal cosmos transport. Like Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine Happiness Machine, the iPlanet, a holiday product parody, promises a “thoroughly self-absorbed social media experience.”

Twitter Unseat Email?

Robert Scoble explores the notion in this BusinessWeek piece re: the running debate over where we’re headed with aging, albeit ubiquitous, email paradigms versus spam-free Tweets.
[via: Scobleizer]

Track the Hive’s Buzz

Aggregate the aggregators at Popurls.com—simultaneously follow the most current posts from all the top sites like Digg, Newsvine, YouTube and Flickr. Or, “find your favorite thing,” over at Buzzfeed.

Fountain

Peter Bruhn’s Swedish type foundry is preparing a new freshet of fonts to flow forth and flourish among us—according to Typographi and Bruhn himself.
[via: Sheer Brick]

Design by Metaphor

A word from A List Apart about design based on simile.

Master’s Color Palettes

Looking for a digital color scheme that will last the ages? Colour Lovers explores masters inspired color schemes.

Visualizing Volumes

Can’t see how your two soda bottles a day are impacting the environment? Chris Jordan’s images will help you visualize it. View his amazing statistical depictions at Running the Numbers, An American Self-Portrait.

Steve Jobs Unveils the Apple iRack

Regardless of your geopolitical views you’ll likely appreciate the satirical humor of this product parody sketch run amok.

Qbesq

Okay this would just be a goofy flash-based Spirograph-esque toy if it didn’t generate downloadable .svg (Scalable Vector Graphic) files—which it does. Pattern enthusiasts, meet Qbesq.

Those Funny Googlers

Here’s Google’s take on the phrase, “Across the pond.” Visit Google Maps, enter New York to London in the search field, scroll to step #24.

Tip: Reducing Firefox Memory Usage

How to reduce Firefox from a memory hog to a piglet. Caught this Firefox usage tip over on Ade Olonoh’s blog (see comments).

CSS Developments

If you’re a developer or just interested in CSS, check out this article entitled, #IEroot — Targeting IE Using Conditional Comments and Just One Stylesheet,” over on the PIE site.

The History of Branding

An iconic-rich, one-click site on how hundreds of the planet’s most noteworthy brands came to be. Updated daily.

The Hexafluoride Float

From the Bonn Physikshow—A lesson on YouTube regarding the denser than air properties of hexafluoride (likely sulphur hexafluoride) gas.

Worst Website Design, Ever?

Enter at your own risk. A proof of concept that design does matter. Havenworks.com hailed on Digg recently as perhaps, “…the most poorly designed website in the world!”

50 Essential Bookmarks

Originally published in Communication Arts November Design Annual 2006, here’s their list of 50 essential bookmarks. Conspicuously missing, sites such as Delicious, Technorati and Lifehacker.

Greetings Earthling

Sure to appeal to the megalomaniacal extraterrestrial in all of us. World, meet geoGreetings. When you care enough to send a satellite image.

A Modern Medium

An interactive glimpse into the the random and spontaneous feedback Jackson Pollock once realized in his medium—sans the clean up.

Impressive Product

Pressed toast with panache. From the, “Table Manners Collection,” Delfts Toast Pan by Minale Maeda. As seen on “ohmygooshness.”

Other Thoughts

Items we find compelling, of late.

Our latest top 20 list of inane musings from the Brainstorm office white board: Top 20 Thoughts on What No.15 Means

(at right)

.think Flickr

Objects of interest, engaging designs, diagrams, downloadable visuals and any other imagery we felt worth sharing.

Top 20 Top 20 Things to do (we did)
on the 4th of July

  1. Enjoy an apple pie in a Chevrolet…or a nutrition bar in a Smart Car
  2. Wax my upper lip
  3. Overdose on televised sports
  4. See Wall-E
  5. Midnight Parade – Anderson
  6. Read the Declaration of Independence (first part anyway)
  7. Blow off steam, or digits
  8. Enjoy the neighbors’ fireworks, late at night, for weeks
  9. Populate FunctionFox
  10. Rest my dogs
  11. Wax the car
  12. Wax nostalgic
  13. Watch fireworks…Just a thought
  14. Groove to the sounds of Baghdad (try Quantum Sonic Orchestra…or the Bamboos–nostalgia circa 1977)
  15. Fret all night that Homeland Security doesn’t run a keyword analysis and cough up #16
  16. “Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it”
  17. Grill some burgers & dogs cats
  18. Hope it doesn’t rain cats, burgers and dogs
  19. Grill the Burgher – and his dog – get to the bottom of this “independence”
  20. Join the kids in the bike parade
  21. Celebrate with the Katzenbergers
  22. See the entire board