Pierre and Damien of Plmd and Stef Van Campenhoudt (who drives a bit like Kirsty) have collaborated to cut a spanking new font, with a car. Basically the cars movements have been tracked using some clever software by interactive guru Zachary Lieberman and the results are gorgeous.

Part sustainable water company, part art project, part philanthropic project, and not that new. Boxed Water Is Better they say, is it really? What with it being the fashion to be ‘going all green’ these days, so it was with a healthy dose of scepticism when I came across water in a Tetrapak pack… The creators of Boxed Water is Better claim, the packaging is more sustainable and the carbon footprint for distribution is up to 80% smaller than that of bottled water…

…Yeah right, those of you who work in packaging also said bull sh*t too because just like plastic bottles, it uses resources unwisely (energy used for manufacturing and shipping, not to mention the trees) and creates more waste in the landfill. However, they’ve put together an interesting PDF to further substantiate the claims and to back up their mission. Additionally they are donating 10% of profits to water relief foundations, and another 10% to the reforestation foundations. Of course this is not new, here in then UK Aquapax have been rustling up environmentally conscious water packaging for a bit but it does looks like Boxed Water is the real thing and the cartons are simple and beautifully designed we’re hoping it catches on, or people just start installing filtration in there homes and not buy packaged water full stop.

Kirsty bought me Geometric, for being good last week. It’s gorgeous and I keep sniffing the fresh print and smiling. Printed on heavy matte stock, it features an embossed cover that’s wrapped in an American-style poster and bound with a distinctive rhythm technique. The colourful and monochrome patterns are enough to get any designer dribbling and all excited and best of all, tucked at the back a CD containing 100 pattern fonts – that’s the most extensive pattern font collection available from any foundry. If like me you like pattern you need this in your life.

Fridge magnets are normally a bit crap and the kind of thing your well meaning granny might give you after visiting someplace you never actually wanted to go to. And no, it’s not that now over done rubbish fridge poetry, where you can put together rude sentences but when you read them back it makes you sound like you have a learning disability.

However, if the white or metal expanse of your fridge door is leaving you cold, what can you do? Well, we found this and it looks cool. It’s called Motifo and basically they’re magnetic mosaic packs, each pack contains 1296 magnetic tiles made up of six colours. You can make your own mosaic masterpiece or download one of their off the shelf designs and get sticking.

Spotted on Shirtluv.com, the Fuck The Rain umbrella is a thing of genius. It’s simple fun and more importantly it made us laugh on a crappy Monday morning. The Designers are Artemy Lebedev, Anton Schnaider and the umbrella features a cool carabiner handle so that you can clip it to things like your backpack or a small child when it’s not raining.

Those tip top Landscape architects Anouk Vogel and cooler than polar bears architect Johan Selbing have just won a high profile competition to design the new lighting and furniture for the Vondelpark in Amsterdam. Their jaw dropping winning entry, called Vondel Verses, includes fabulous kiosks, funky park benches and some nice lamp posts. Each object has a different organic motif such as birds incorporated into the design.

The renovation of this iconic Amsterdam park is coming to a head 2009, after 10 years of major restoration work. The Vondelpark is one of the most beloved and well-visited parks in Holland, counting up to ten million visitors per year.

We’re off to Amsterdam soon for a nice photoshoot with those fabulous people at Fuera Dentro and can’t wait to get all Alan Titchmarch down at the park…

There are so many traditional advertising agencies out there in trouble and they’re all blaming the recession. However, yes times are difficult but this is a lame duck excuse. These mainly ‘traditional’ agencies totally missed the online video trend and social media  is still frightening them. They keep banging on about the fragmented media landscape, how it’s impossible to reach consumers. Well frankly it’s claptrap, all they need to do is look at consumer behavior and start to believe what they are seeing; consumers are switching their media mixes towards online.

Here’s a thought… Was it God that told Pope Benedictus XVI that to touch the hard to reach ‘screenagers’ he must get his holy behind on YouTube? I like to think it was an agency, who had the vision to realize that newspapers and TV had lost their halo. Hell, even Michael Jackson and that Obama chap realised that they needed a YouTube Channel. Perhaps, if failing agencies would stop the ‘fragmented media and hard done by’ recession talk, and simply tap into the huge online trends like video and social networks, they’ll stop going bust.

I wonder how many agencies have launched online listening or conversational tracking programs yet? With large brands struggling to stay in the game, why is it, that only a pitiful 5% of them are doing this? Really, if times were not so desperate, it would be ridiculous.

Next for a major shake up, is online advertising. The online advert exchanges are starting to gain traction. If you’ve not dealt with one yet it works like this: Advertisers can buy online ads directly, it’s literally ‘I want that one’. It costs less, and it’s damn easy. So if you are an online sales rep, start thinking about a new career path today.

The real problem for agencies is that if you’re playing catching up you’re not looking to the future. If you fall off or were never on the ‘merry go round’ it’s getting damn hard to get back on. So what of the future? Well it appears to us that ‘proper marketing’ is having a renaissance. Understanding consumer behavior is back in fashion (as if it ever was out of fashion), however the tools are now awesome.

Looking to the future and it’s going to about powerful databases of consumers likes, interests, click behavior and buying behavior. With a little more imagination and some eCRM technology, publishers will be serving relevant ads to relevant consumers depending on their database profile. To achieve this level of consumer insight the collection of data has already begun and that’s a fact.

We are loving Spotify here at Brighenup Towers. It’s all the craze down here in Brighton and I am convinced in other towns in Europe. It is a new music streaming service. You don’t download illegal music from it, you just choose what you want to listen to and then it streams a whole album or just one track for FREE. Most of the music labels are behind it so that there are no copy write issues.

Once downloaded, the service allows us to search the music catalog by artist, genre, or title, and plays the tracks on-demand any number of times. One of the cooler features is the ability to create and share playlists. It is easy to use, speed is good, as well as the sound. As the free version is funded by advertising, we have found it to be very subtle, on average we only hear one advert every half hour. We are sure that they are adding new tracks each day to grow the library, but we are not expecting to find some obscure back water local band that Tom’s cousin is in!

We are also well chuffed that our friends in the USA can’t get it. It’s only accessible to the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Hurrah for us.

In summary, it is a great way to hear your old favorites, try new albums, create that all important 80’s play list for the studio and save heaps of money buying or downloading albums that turn out to be disappointing. Go on and try it.

New York has a history of reactive ‘ad-jacking’, from the legendry Ron English to the likes of Violator of the Regime. However there is a new kid on the block, simply calling himself as ‘Poster Boy’. His on the spot improvised mash-ups reminds me of the cut-and-paste aesthetic of the 70’s punk era.

Of course, defacing posters might not sound a particularly big or clever. But hang on, Poster Boy who for obvious reasons wishes to remain anonymous, produces some surprisingly high-minded work. His social critiques include rearranging the recent Iron Man logo into ‘Iran=Nam’ and altering an NYPD recruitment poster to read ‘My NYPD Killed Sean Bell’.

Poster Boy’s, easily accessible and great work has propelled him to cult status amongst the new wave of media manipulators. But to keep this reputation he has to keep producing new and relevant pieces, which I guess puts him ever closer to the long arm, of the law.

See more of Posters Boys work on Flickr

Social media is all we seam to be hearing about at the moment. However, Brightenup are putting a different spin on it for one of the worlds largest insurance companies. Our current challenge, is to turn an internal communications intranet from being a place for corporate information into a fabulous space where employees will want to go and have conversations.