Hi, we're OK Great, a tight-knit crew of designers, writers + artists, hell-bent on delivering the best in art, design and culture. The world is a big pile of awesome. We're the spoon. Dig in.
Apart from being home to the greatest soccer club on the planet (keep dreaming Evertonians), Liverpool is also a city with a flourishing art scene. Especially when it comes to the performing arts. Produced by the renowned street theatre company, Royal De Luxe, The Sea Odyssey is ‘a magical tale of love, loss and reunion played out on a gigantic scale’. Basically, giant puppets with crazy pulley systems stormed the streets of Liverpool this weekend to the awe of thousands of onlookers. How awesome is that?
There’s something amazing about putting the two terms ‘guerilla’ and ‘wayfinding’ together. Guerilla connotes a small group of revolutionary riffraff, usually running around under cover of darkness and/or bandanna, just generally fucking shit up. Wayfinding is a kinda the opposite of that, a service provided for order that reminds me of being in a museum and not knowing where the bathroom is. But Matt Tomasulo, a friend of mine in Raleigh and general civic-minded rabblerouser has found a great way to put the two together.
In early January, he and a few pals spent a dreary night engaging in some good ol’ guerrilla wayfinding. They printed up a series of simple signs letting the public know that it was just a short walk from where they were standing to a museum, green space, or point of interest not too far away. Brilliant in it’s simplicity, and meant to empower pedestrians to retake bipedal ownership of their city, people loved it. But unfortunately capital-R Raleigh didn’t – mostly because the signs were illegal. At that point though, word had spreadlikewildfire, and with a bit of hustling and a lot of signatures, Matt was able to convince the city to reinstate the project as a pilot program and the signs are (I believe) on their way back up.
Since I’ve known Matt, I’ve always had a ton of respect for the guy. He’s a civic-minded guy using his entreprenurial skills (go buy a shirt/tote from CityFabric) to back his civic-minded projects. His vision is having a two-pronged business; one side of it is selling merchandise that encourages conversations about place, but the other side is funded by the first, and consists of big thinking projects that use the city as the canvas for his design.
Building off the success of his Walk Raleigh campaign, Matt’s got a second Kickstarter project up right now to fund an open-source platform for creating your own guerilla wayfinding signs, similar to the ones he created for Raleigh. On the site, you’ll be able to put your starting point (where the sign gets posted) and destination, and print out a pdf with the signature “It’s a ___ minute walk from here to ___.”
Raleigh’s lucky to have someone as creative as Matt walking the streets and seeing it as an opportunity for better design. I’ve tried to poach him away to Durham, but for now, I’ll have to witness his work from up I-40.
I’ve been swimming in coffee and tea packaging inspiration, so I thought I’d share my world with you today. HAM is about to launch into a very exciting rebrand for a local bev maker here in NH. We’re very excited. Not to mention totally jacked up on the high quality coffee our client keeps generously sending us away with after meetings. Life is good.
Oh, and we here at Okay Great have a very exciting giveaway coming up (that’s related to this post, actually!) so keep reading and be on the lookout for that soon!
David Baldwin of Baldwin& got in touch again recently to share some of his latest work. As I’ve come to expect, it’s another example of the type of creative thinking that will inevitably leave you smiling.
The client: BMW. The target: PGA golfers.
The challenge was to get PGA pros behind the wheels of BMW’s new M cars. These pro golfers are always inundated with invitations to promotional events every time they go on tour, so it was imperative that the BMW invites stood out. Here is Baldwin&’s solution, right from the horses mouth:
“In this case, we created a motor oil scented cologne called “15W – 50″ that evokes the essence of the race track. The cologne was then placed in the player’s lockers. A week later when the players check into their hotel rooms, they’re greeted by skid marks coming out from beneath their sinks with another message inviting them to sign up for the event.”
This sunday will mark the 10th anniversary of 9/11. On Wednesday, NYC mayor Bloomberg and almost everyone else working on the new World Trade Center site held a press conference to give yet another thin update on building progress. I feel like the process has been long and empty – but I was thrilled to see Silverstein properties come out with a moving video to re-stimulate my interest and connection to the site.
The video (more like a short film, really) mixes live action, tilt shift and impressive CGI effects to tell the story of a new World Trade Center. Surprisingly, (though it’s been a big piece of the winners and losers bidding to build) there are green spaces and water features. It’s calm and thriving and new and somehow, even with it’s soaring heights, modest. After all NYC and the rest of the country have been through, it seems like a high point. Finally, after all this time.
Also, here is a link to an incredible article that my good friend sent me on grief and western culture’s abandonment of grieving rituals. It just makes me think about all those times when I felt a splinter of anger rise up in me when someone very, very far removed from the tragedy of 9/11 somehow makes a distant connection to the death and destruction via the friend of a 3rd cousing or something. I used to think that they had no right to feel the same way I felt about 9/11 – I was there, they were in Wisconsin or something. I’m rethinking that now. In a situation this big and sad, I guess we all need to grieve.
This Sunday, I’ll take a moment to remember that day back in 2001 and thank all the men and women involved in responding, recovering and rebuilding. I hope you do too.
There are troves of posts on the subject of inspiration. There are great arguments negotiating where the line is drawn between inspired and stolen. There’s also a great quote from Chuck Close that made the Tumblr rounds. Basically, he says to stop reading and looking at shit and just get the work done already. I could almost agree, but I’ll be damned if I miss out on all that glorious time lounging around, flipping through magazines and reading my google reader.
For inspiration, of course.
I think it’s good for us to seek inspiration but there needs to be some limits, some…routine, maybe? It’s easy to get sucked into the internet (particularly when you have a turntable.fm chat dinging in your ears) and it can get stale, boring, routine in the worst sense of the word, so I get away from my desk. I look for inspiration elsewhere and I try to allow myself a specific amount of time to revel and ruminate before a project begins. So, I thought I’d share what we do because IT’S FRIGGIN AWESOME. Not to mention, inspiring.
This is the Phillips Exeter Library, part of the Phillips Exeter Academy (see super serious and world renowned prep school) in Exeter, New Hampshire. 20 minutes from our office. The architectural style of the building is Brutalist. I mean, really? Can that be any cooler? The architect who designed it was Louis Kahn and this building was his opus. Again, it’s 20 minutes from our office.
So I’ve only been to Coachella once, and to this day it continues to be my best festival experience. This year though, Intel and Vice got together via their Creators Project, to encourage collaboration between the brightest of artists, geniuses and designers and to create an experience that would enhance the live performances and blow people’s minds. This makes me GREEN WITH ENVY to not have witnessed the spectacle live.
Spend some time on the website—all the artists are ridiculous. and inspiring enough to make your week full of magic.
Heike Weber is a German installation artist who creates large scale pieces using heavy repetition. Her recent work leverages markers and acrylic paint to transform boring floors and walls into eye catching pieces of art. A time lapse of her drawing spreading from one corner of the room to the other must be amazing. A great inspiration for some of you looking to add low cost design hotness to a visually “blah” room.
