Bale out The Sun

Anyone remember this?


Well now it's turned into this, created by WCRS&co:


Its saving grace? They actually asked the original artist Richard Swarbrick and his studio to produce it.

I must admit, it's a lovely animation style. But creatively, does it not seem a really easy way out? It's almost a carbon copy.

The Eyesight App

On Friday, I posted a new piece of work that Ed and I had created - the Specsavers Eyesight App.

In essence, the concept would emulate your prescription of your glasses. Using an app and the camera, you can look through your smartphone and see what you'd normally see while wearing glasses, but without them.

I popped this on Twitter and it got a very good response from a lot of you. And many said it should be made, or at least pitched to Specsavers. We were going to approach them, but then I received one tweet from a certain optical brand.

This, I must admit, was very exciting. A few emails back and forth and we'd arranged a conference call for Monday to talk more about our idea, which also had a quick facelift in preparation.

Monday happened. And went VERY well. We're off to Nottingham (hopefully next week) to meet them in person and discuss more. We've already asked an optometrist and a few devs to work out more of the technical specs, so hopefully it might just get off the concept table. Here's hoping all goes well and there's more to come from it. Keep your eyes peeled in the very near future.

The Shelf Awards

Last week I headed over to the Shelf Awards at IPA's HQ in Belgrave Square - random fact: Mrs Thatcher lives two doors down from them. This swanky venue played host to five teams and a single creative, who were all after one thing. An Argos Shelf. But don't doubt the random award, it's the award for the awards. That is to say you can put the next lot on it.

Mark & Steven from Falmouth, Christoph & Jakob and Lucy Radford from Bucks, James & Mike and Steph & Josh from Lincoln and Charlotte & Sian from Gloucs were the lucky people up for the award. And what's nice about it, is that everyone who turns up chooses the winners.

The creatives get the opportunity to showcase their work and the guests have plenty of time to flick through their portfolios and have a rather informal chat with them. They then rate their work on a scale of 1 to 5 and team with the most points wins, simple.

Having met most of these teams before at New Blood, for me, it was nice to see them all getting stuck in with selling themselves. There were also lots of big names in the building, not to mention a host of recruiters and head hunters. With cards exchanging hands at a rate of knots it seemed everyone was having a good time. And the free food and alcohol definitely aided this!

When the scores had been counted, Gary Sharpen, ex-ECD at WDMP and founder of The Shelf, talked in depth about where he sees these awards going and doing more to support creatives, which is exciting for us too.

Then all that was left to do was announce the top 3. Third was Steph and Josh, second were Mark and Steven, and the winners were... Christoph and Jakob! Big congrats to them, as they had some nice stuff in their book.

Now all they have to do now is work out how to put the shelf up!

Also a big thanks to Char, Caroline, Sue, James (and his flatmates Soph & Keighley) and Gary for the banter.

Owen Hargreaves Fitness Training

Owen Hargreaves was released as a Manchester United player at the end of the season. I'd the first to say he was a great player, but he was also more injury prone that Darren 'sicknote' Anderton. So in an attempt to find a new club, he's decided to do something brave and clever... Prove his fitness by posting YouTube videos of his training sessions.

So far he's got 20 videos (and counting), all showing him doing weird and wonderful exercises. And I must admit, this is a fantastic pro-active way to show that he can still be a good player.

Some may laugh, but I think we can all take a leaf out of his book. Why just rely on a good CV? Bayern Munich, Man United and England are about as good as it gets. But get creative and people will take a chance on you.

Twitter Job Hustle

I love, love, love this. This is by far the best use of Twitter I've seen in ages. It's as simple as the Google Job Experiment. And it worked.

Well played.

Their work is pretty damn good too.

Hat tip to CR for the link.