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Having done some work with the British Heart Foundation during my time on placement, I was excited to see what the next installment of Grey's campaign for the BHF was going to be. Knowing they were targeting a younger market I was pleasantly surprised to see the "Yoobot" site. A yoobot is a virtual you, you put in your age and register, you can even upload your face as a picture! Your yoobot gets to live your life, basically, online and through your actions, you can see how the yoobot is affected, for example if you feed it too many burgers, you can see it become ill and even die!
I think this is a great site to teach children from a young age about heart disease, especially with obesity become such a large problem for the youth of today. Its fun for us bigger kids too! Go to http://yoobot.co.uk/ to try it out!
Sorry I haven't blogged in a while, i've been away running a youth camp for my job, and now that i'm back, i'm leaving for America in a few hours! Thought I would share something interesting with you before I left..... IKEA'S NEW TYPEFACE! And believe me I was shocked! After years of using their own style of Futura, Ikea has decided to switch to using Verdana. 
Some have expressed disbelief at Ikea using a typeface which is usually seen as a text face on our computer screen, and declare Verdana too ugly for display use! So why the change? Having found this piece of news on Typophile, who point out that the company's founder is cheap, which probably motivated the switch as Ikea moves into more markets that require better language support from its corporate fonts. Verdana already has extensive multi-lingual support, and it's available on all the computers throughout the company at no additional cost. In my opinion, its a bit of a shame that Ikea have changed their typeface, as their own version of Futura was Ikea, a and they had built up their brand.
Before and After
Today in the corner shop, i found this lovely new Tango product, called "Tango with added Tango." I wondered what this added ingredient could be, so I excitedly purchased this can, which was 59p for 440ml as opposed to the usual 330ml. When I got back to the office, a colleague and I pondered over what this mystery ingredient could be, then realised what morons we were and that the added Tango was actually the added liquid!!I thought it was really cool that they were giving extra product for the same price. The design of the can is also slightly different, for the new product they have added a faux warning label, with a helpline to call, like the old Jaffa Cake packets.
They've also added a couple of touches, for example in the ingredients section, it describes Tango as an "orange soft drink with sugar and sweeteners. contains no artificial colours or flavours (or any of those poncy ingredients like ginseng or elderflower.")They are obviously trying to cater to a specific type of market, like Yorkie bars. I think its a good thing that customers are getting more for their money in these recession-ary times but i'm not sure if more sugary products is such a good thing!
I'm not really a fan of these horror films that cross over into gaming, but I came across this campaign for Resident Evil and actually thought it was quite clever, amusing too.
The only problem is I haven't seen any of these around, but apart from that I think its a great idea, if I was in charge of this campaign I think I would get everyone to do a kind of flash-mob style event, like the recent and effective T-Mobile adverts.
Shepard Fairey is an artist, graphic designer and illustrator from the USA, who made his name whilst still studying. He created the "Andre the giant has a posse" sticker/ambient media campaign in 1989, work which still has influence and relevance today, with many spin-offs on his original sticker still around. 
However it is Fairey's more recent work that i'm interested in. He was the one responsible for creating Barack Obama's "Hope" campaign, reaching people all over the world. This was probably one of the most influential American political posters since the World War II "Uncle Sam Wants You" campaign. Fairey helped Obama become a national icon and an inspiration to others.
Fairey worked his way up, from the skateboarding music scene, and getting arrested for graffiti art to a highly successful designer, creating his own agency specialising in ambient media, working with clients such as Pepsi and Netscape. He has really done some incredible things, from designing to DJ-ing, so I would encourage you to check out more of his work. (You can visit the OBEY website here.)
Nu!... or so?! in Hebrew is a campaign run by Israelis in the town of Sderot, which is bombarded daily with rockets from the Gaza strip. This campaign not only is trying to to raise awareness of the plight of the people in Sderot, but is trying to connect people to the human stories behind the headlines.
To quote Nu; "By using art and creativity through apparel, we hope to foster awareness and activism. Each story will be told through stimulating graphics and text that will appear on the inverse of the shirt—directly in line with the heart, where the NU Campaign stems from."
This is a unique and thoughtful way of bringing something from so far away into our consciousness. The current tshirts have a graphic showing the number 15 on them, because Sderot residents have 15 seconds to run for cover from the time a rocket is launched and the air raid siren sounds, until the rocket hits its target.
Having done some work with the British Heart Foundation during my time on placement, I was excited to see what the next installment of Grey's campaign for the BHF was going to be. Knowing they were targeting a younger market I was pleasantly surprised to see the "Yoobot" site. A yoobot is a virtual you, you put in your age and register, you can even upload your face as a picture! Your yoobot gets to live your life, basically, online and through your actions, you can see how the yoobot is affected, for example if you feed it too many burgers, you can see it become ill and even die!
