'Retail Inspiration' Archives

The Wild Bunch: Naturally Good

Wild Bunch & Co. Medley of Packaging
Wild Bunch & Co.’s eye-catching packaging

Wild Bunch & Co.: Healthy product, company-sponsored recycling, and business savvy. What’s not to like?

A Well-Branded Bunch

Kudos to Seed of the U.K., for their comprehensive branding, packaging and website design for the Wild Bunch & Co.’s line of organic products.

Seed is prominently noted as the design firm of choice at the bottom of Wild Bunch’s website—a clear message of partnership and a vote of confidence for both parties.

A Good Deal, Naturally

Perhaps a deal was struck, or maybe it’s simply a reflection of European culture long known to honor design firms in such ways. But you get the sense Wild Bunch recognizes the intrinsic value in honoring Seed.

Relative Greatness

By displaying Seed’s name, Wild Bunch has naturally imposed age-old motivators—peer pressure and pride in craft. Any self-respecting company allowed to hang its name on its customer’s shingle will likely live up to it.

Keep up the good work. May Savage Cabbage taste as good as it looks.

[via: dgirlp]

Jewelry with a Purpose

Beads

Beautiful Jewelry.
Right Out of a Magazine.
Literally.

Meticulously crafted by HIV-positive Kenyan’s in Imani Workshops, the beads in this necklace are made of tightly wound strips of recycled magazines. Because of its beautiful, brilliant colors, the periodical of choice for the beads is Oprah’s “O” Magazine.

Often, the stigma of HIV precludes employment, and therefore income; however, as part of an overall program of nutrition, support and treatment provided by the Indiana University School of Medicine and the IU-Kenya Partnership, the creation and sale of these beads provides income and hope to those afflicted with HIV/AIDS.

Old magazines giving sick people hope and a new chance at life.

Wouldn’t Oprah be proud?

Image: Illig

Where’s Wal-Mart?

Eboy Internet Media Poster

A New World Order

What if the world of brick and mortar were to revolve around, say, Google instead of Wal-Mart?

Reminiscent of a Where’s Waldo illustration, this Eboy creation shows what a tangible online world might look like—a metropolis of commerce where names like AT&T, Wal-Mart and the New York Times are supplanted by Skype, Ebay and Newsvine among others.

A New Land of Opportunity

According to Alexa, among online shopping sites worldwide, brick and mortar behemoth Wal-Mart ranks 8th behind Ebay’s #1. Wal-Mart is an irrelevant 438th among global sites at large.

Consider your brand’s locale in this new landscape of ecommerce and social media advertising.

A New Breed of Illustrator

From their site, “Eboy is Steffen Sauerteig, Svend Smital and Kai Vermehr. We create re-usable pixel objects and take them to build complex and extensible artwork.” The poster is available here for about US $25.

The Moc Croc Football

Paul Smith Moc Croc Soccer Football

SCORE!

Have a friend who loves soccer, collects novelties, enjoys a bold color triad and feels most comfortable in the company of reptiles? This signature Paul Smith soccer ball is for them.

To get your foot on a Moc Croc football or to check out Paul Smith furniture, novelties, clothing line, fragrances or other collections, click here.

Art-o-mat:
From Smokes to Fine Art

Art-o-mat

Retro Re-purposing

At a solo art show in 1997, artist Clark Wittington retro-fitted a relic of a mechanical pull-knob cigarette dispenser to vend his black and white photographs for $1.00 each. Thus, the Art-o-mat concept was born.

There are now 82 refurbished machines across the United States—often works of art themselves—selling the work of hundreds of artists. Work that is all 2 1/8″ x 3 1/4″ x 7/8″, the dimensions of a pack of cigarettes.

Revitalization

Like our pieces on Persephone books, or the Million Penguins wiki book authoring, new ideas and age-old icons are finding new life on the Internet.

To submit artwork for consideration, read the Art-o-mat guidelines. Visit their web site or find an Art-o-mat machine near you.

Art-o-mat thumbs

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