Monthly Archives: September 2015

Ain’t Got No Type

type

Love Times New Roman? Have a passion for Helvetica? Good news for designer geeks: You can now wear your favorite font as eyewear.

After the initial success of their first line, Wieden & Kennedy Tokyo and Oh My Glasses have collaborated to launch a new line of TYPE glasses, glasses inspired by different fonts, with names like Garamond and styles ranging from “Light” to “Bold”. Times New Roman is one of three new models that made their debut at a Tokyo pop-up shop last week.

Each pair of TYPE glasses are meant to reflect characteristics of their respective fonts, like lines, curves, and shapes. Each font also comes in “light,” “regular,” and “bold” to denote thickness of the frames.

“As the choice of typeface affects expression in written communication, subtle design differences in eyeglasses frames change the impression of the person who wears them,” Wieden & Kennedy Tokyo state on their website.

What Sparks Our Fire: Products that finds new ways to showcase beautiful elements of design.

The New “Viral”

viral

Vaccination has been a highly controversial topic in recent years, resulting in a slew of “Anti-Vaxxers” and the School Vaccination Law in California, which mandates that children that attend public school must be vaccinated.

British Columbia’s ImmunizeBC and agency Rethink Vancouver have teamed up to create a unique mailing campaign to promote vaccination, appropriately called “Viral”. The trailer for the campaign states that “Measles is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet, but as you know, it’s making a comeback.”

However, the kicker is the actual mailing campaign: when exposed to sunlight, the UV-responsive ink on the paper appears suddenly in a rash of bright red spots, reminiscent of–you guessed it–measles. The alarming card shows how fast measles can spread, and reminds recipients that “not vaccinating your children puts us all at risk”.

This comes after particularly alarming reports of measles spreading throughout the United States, including an outbreak at Disneyland, and reminds parents to vaccinate their children or risk them being a public health hazard.

What Sparks Our Fire: Ingenious campaigns that post important public health reminders

Tech Goes Green

green

Sustainability has been a growing trend in business for years now as climate change becomes a more prevalent threat, however, now technology companies especially have realized that sustainability is a good investment.

Sustainability “ensures business continuity by conserving resources,” and now more than ever, economic and environmental sustainability are vital to businesses’ longevity and productivity.

In 2014, Unilever CEO Paul Polman declared that climate change-related natural disasters are costing Unilever at least $300 million a year. To combat this, several companies have come up with ways to conserve energy and other natural resources.

Creating environmental products is one such step. Samsung, for example, has taken the lead and released a solar-powered laptop, as well as three “green” mobile phones made of corn starch bioplastic and have energy-efficient chargers and recyclable packaging.

In order to ensure the future of the planet–and technology–it’s up to other companies to follow in Samsung’s small carbon footprints.

What Sparks Our Fire: Companies taking on a greater accountability for their sustainability and making moves to make sustainability a universal practice.

 

Make Love Not Scars

reshma

Since its founding in 2005, YouTube has been home to a myriad of beauty bloggers who post tutorials and other how-to makeup videos. But in a powerful new campaign for Make Love Not Scars by Ogilvy & Mather, the woman giving the red lip tutorial looks a little different than the typical 20-something beauty blogger.

Reshma, whose face has been scarred and disfigured, is a spokesperson for the #EndAcidSale campaign, whose goal is to curb the number of acid attack victims in India by limiting the accessibility to acid (you can buy a liter of it in any drugstore in India for about $1.50).

According to a petition that Reshma asks viewers to sign (which has over 65,000 signatures), India has over 1,000 reported acid attack cases per year, of which 90% of the victims are female.

What Sparks Our Fire: Creative and powerful campaigns that capture attention and call for change.

Raising the Bar

obi

The next step for global connectivity? A smartphone for the developing world. And it’s designed by none other than John Sculley, former Apple executive and Robert Brunner, the designer behind Beats by Dre headphones.

The Obi Worldphone marks a greater push toward accessible technology–Sculley aims to provide developing countries in places like Africa and Southeast Asia with high-powered, affordable smartphones, which he predicts will replace their needs for personal computers.

In addition to its sleek design, the phone is tailored to its target consumers’ preferences. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, texting, taking photos, and banking are popular uses for smartphones, so the Obi Worldphone has features like a 13-megapixel camera and a diverse marketplace of applications.

The phone will retail for $200, a reasonable price to most first-world Americans, but still may be a problem for the standard income in a developing country.

What Sparks Our Fire: A quest for a high-powered but inexpensive smartphone that makes technology more available on a global scale.