Woah Lord!

Debuting on UK TV tonight, a new spot for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk looks set to lodge a certain Phil Collins “classic” well and truly into the collective short-term memory. Seriously, anyone who happens to be watching Big Brother this evening and clocks this fantastic minute-and-a-half spot from Fallon will be unconsciously pumping their fists and going “Woah Lord” til the early hours. You can watch it here.

What can you do in the Regents Park area of London? Just check out the gorilla…

Designer Oscar Wilson has created a series illustrations for Visit London, the Mayor of London’s campaign to entice visitors to some of the capital’s most famous areas, events and attractions. Each image is composed from multiple lines of hand-drawn copy, which includes the names of famous places, pursuits and – as with the somewhat psychedelic guitar – some of Camden’s most famous music venues. The work, commissioned by agency RKCR/Y&R, is currently doing the rounds on buses and tubes throughout the city.

Following all the debate generated by our interviews with Super Super’s Steve Slocombe and 032c art director Mike Meiré, here is the piece from the current issue of Creative Review which draws on those sources to set the work into a wider context

Stretched type, day-glo colours and a flagrant disregard for the rules: are we witnessing a knee-jerk reaction to the slick sameness of so much design or a genuine cultural shift?

In the early 90s, the mother of all rows blew up between, on the one hand, the traditionalist school of American designers led by Massimo Vignelli and, in defiant opposition, the avant garde of Emigre and the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The catalyst was an essay in Eye magazine by Steven Heller entitled Cult of the Ugly, in which the world’s most prolific design writer took Cranbrook and its students to task over, as he saw it, their gratuitously ugly output. Well now, it seems, ugly is back.

Here is another serving of recent music video goodness for your enjoyment, kicking off with Timothy Saccenti’s promo for Peacebone by Animal Collective.

From Happy Forsman & Bodenfors in Sweden come these neat magazine holders which, together, create a whole city block on the book shelf.

In last year’s Candlelight Competition, lighting company Mathmos, in collaboration with 100% East and Metropolitan Works, invited designers to create ideas for a Mathmos product on the theme of candlelight. Winner Richard Lawson’s idea has now gone into production as the 9 Volts Lamp.