The Royal Television Society’s annual two-day event at The University of Cambridge brings together leading television industry bigwigs to ponder the present and future of the small screen. This year, over 350 luminaries descended on Cambridge to contend with such weighty topics as ‘the future of media, the impact of AI, and the role of opinion in news’. Quite a...
Mother New York and Mother Design have overseen the rebirth of Brooklyn Community Foundation as the commandingly named Brooklyn Org. The sea change arose from a desire to distance the organisation from ‘notions of traditional philanthropy, seen largely today as elitist, dysfunctional, and detached’. If that sounds like a solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist (who hates charities?) then...
Florentine design studio AUGE has created a sumptuous range of packaging for Italian luxury homeware brand Ginori, which was founded in 1735 as the Manifattura di Doccia by Marquis Carlo Ginori on the grounds of his villa at Doccia. Nearly three hundred years later, the venerable brand finds itself owned by Gucci, following a merger with Società Richard (and subsequent...
Barnardo’s is the UK’s largest children’s charity, and it undoubtedly does much good in the world. However, its history up to this point is also littered with uncomfortable controversies. Certainly, the most outlandish transgressions are concentrated in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Founder Thomas John Barnardo was taken to court 88 times for kidnapping children (or ‘philanthropic abductions’, as old...
Where to begin with Thick Pickle? This conceptual brand began in 2023 as a self-initiated ‘studio side project’ for California-based studio Studyhall. As it blew up though, Studyhall began to wonder if the brand had legs – literally, as demonstrated by the disconcertingly buff, aviator-shade-sporting animated pickle (gherkin or pickled cucumber for the Brits) mascot who strides across pop-up windows...
Dutch studio FCKLCK’s all-caps, blood-red website is full of declarations of belligerent provocations such as ‘OUR FAVOURITE CLIENTS ARE THE ONES WHO HAVE EVEN BIGGER BALLS THAN WE DO’. Talk of ‘CUTTING THROUGH THE BULLSHIT’ is accompanied by a mouseover gif of a defecating bovine. The name is of course an expletive repudiation of serendipity (who needs luck when you’ve...
The Blue Mountains of New South Wales, Australia are not technically mountains at all. They are, rather, a complex labyrinth of dissected plateaus, gorges and valleys of sandstone, formed over 50 million years ago. So far, so deceptive. Fortunately, however, the Blue Mountains are most definitely blue. When the atmospheric temperature of the region rises, a superfine mist of fragrant...
Estepona is a Spanish resort town on the Costa del Sol. It surveys the azure waves of the Mediterranean from the apex of a bight that traces a gentle South-Westerly arc from Marbella to Gibraltar. Strewn as it is on this notoriously idyllic coastline, Estepona largely conforms to the stereotypically cheerful charm of the Spanish resort town, pandering to the...
There are many kinds of rebrand. There are rebrands that tread lightly, reverently refining and polishing what is already there, like archaeologists delicately exhuming sunken lucre so that it can once again gleam (National Portrait Gallery). Then there are rebrands that are a little more decisive in their handling of the raw materials—imagine our similetic Time Team creatively re-assembling the...
The once laudable claim to have started a thriving business with ‘a small loan’ from a doting family member may have been muddied beyond recognition by the truth-stretching of serial tax-offender and part-time Presidential candidate Donald Trump. Despite this, turning ‘one thousand pounds from nan’ into a luxury watch and diamond dealership with a sparkling flagship store in Mayfair remains...
Les Francos de Montréal is Canada’s premier festival of French language music and culture. Held annually in downtown Montréal, it is a fixture in both the social calendar and cultural life of the city, and the wider francophone world. This year’s edition of the festival has been given a sophisticated new look, courtesy of LG2, Canada’s largest independent creative agency...
Plume is a Denver-based telehealth service (or ‘virtual-clinic’) tailored specifically to the needs of the trans community across the US, offering a range of services including prescriptions for oestrogen or testosterone. This is a hostile political landscape to step into, but Plume is doing it with bright and bold panache, courtesy of a fresh rebrand from London-based studio Human After...