Look around. It’s all happy people with big grins on their faces. Let’s admit it. Winning feels good.

Yesterday night we, the lovely people at Dare, enjoyed a bit of the sweet feeling as the agency picked five awards at the Campaign Digital Awards including a very well deserve one going to Mr. Collier as the biggest achiever of the year. Congratulations Mark. It’s not that usual to see every single member of a team being that honestly happy for their boss.

But above all, the night was a very special one for those of us working for the Vodafone account. Picking awards for the three nominations we had (including the one for the best ongoing brand campaign) is a fantastic result for a wonderful and bright team of people who work really hard in a daily basis and not always enjoying the recognition that this huge effort deserves.

Well done and many thanks to everyone involved. You are the best and most talented team one could dream of.

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We are finally done with our latest job for Vodafone. This campaign to promote the mobile Internet services is their biggest digital campaign ever and it has required a huge effort from the team at Dare to put it together and bring it to life on time. Massive thanks go to everyone involved.

This is what Campaign says about the work:

Dare has created a digital campaign to promote Vodafone’s mobile internet service, which launched last week with a road-block above-the-line campaign.

The campaign includes a website, banner ads and homepage takeover ads to demonstrate how websites can be used via Vodafone handsets.

The takeover ads fold up whole web pages including Yahoo!, lastminute.com and Tiscali and then drop them into an image of a mobile phone to show visitors how the service enables them to “take websites
with you”.

The banner ads promote Vodafone’s tie-ins with media owners including MySpace and Google by using colourful cartoon animations to explain that customers can use the services from their mobile phone.

Finally, the website offers a tour of a fictional street in London. As visitors scroll over the scene, text appears explaining the benefits of mobile internet in everyday life.

See the some of the work here.

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Direct Response TV ads are all tedious and uninteresting. Perhaps not all but most of them are and this is something many people would agree with. So… how to turn a ‘dirty’ DRTV brief into a sexy piece of communication?

Just adding a bit of extra care to the execution. Let’s face it. There’s not much crazy stuff that one can do with the narrative. You need to show the handsets, display the ‘call to action’ on the screen for the entire length of the advert and explain the offer (x minutes + x SMS + free phone) in the clearest way possible. Add some very long t&c’s and you’ll have a DRTV ad. This is what this is all about and these few golden rules simply work very hard so no reason to ignore them.

However it’s not written anywhere that this needs to work against aesthetics and a bit of interesting storytelling and this is what we have done at Dare, where we’ve just delivered the final response to our first brief to create a TV ad for Vodafone. The result is a solid piece of work with some nice illustrations lovely animated by Monsieur Gavin, who’s invested some good long hours to crack this on.

Put your headphones on and judge by yourself. Then let me know what you think (sorry about the crappy YouTube quality, I’ll try to get a higher quality copy in the future and I’ll post it here).

Some credits (magazines always get it wrong so hopefully this will be a one place where everyone gets the right credit for the work):

Director: Gavin Leisfield
Account Director: Katherine Davidson
Group Account Director: Claire Hynes
Producer: Hannah Hilbery
Copywriter: Amy Gould
Art Director: Amy Gould
Illustration: Gavin Leisfield / Luke Stenzhorn
Animation: Gavin Leisfield
Postproduction: David McNulty
Planner: Amy Whittaker / Nick Emmel
Creative Director: James Cooper
Creative Lead: Eduardo de Felipe
Music: Samuel Sim
Voice over: Sean Pertwee

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Back in 1998 I collaborated with strdub to produce tofu type, an art project to develop a typeface built out of different combinations of the same unique module. Like tofu, which absorbs its taste from other ingredients, the different characters would build their own identity from the different position and arrangement of one single shape.

The result was an unreadable typeface. It was not the point to achieve a good readability but to keep a basic recognizable structure for all the different characters. However many might be right by saying that this is not a real typeface but a visual exercise or an art project. Well, that is true.

I had lost track of this project completely until some days ago, when browsing Enrique’s site I found out that the website we developed to document the project (one of my very first websites) is still live.

Somewhere within my old back up discs I might keep the file with the typeface. Maybe one of these days I should make an effort and try to find where it lays.

See the ‘Tofu_type’ website.

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Knitting is cool. So if you want to follow the trends and you have some little ones in the family then you might like Kokobino.

Kokobino was the last project I was involved with before I left Rednomad last summer. Coats, the largest hand knitting products seller in the world, commissioned Rednomad to create a completely new brand. The proposition was very simple: luxury designer knitting kits targeted at mums who want to create something very special for their babies.

Rednomad created everything from the visual identity to the packaging for the different range of products. I started to work on the definition of the site layouts and overall design together with Amanda, who contributed with her amazing talent and skills to bring the new brand to life thanks to some lovely illustrations and layout designs.

Visit Kokobino or read more about the project.

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Some months ago my friend José Luis honoured me with a four-pages interview for Visual (issue 122), the one classic Spanish magazine about design, creativity and communication.

Download the interview here (PDF in Spanish).

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The new digital advertising campaign for Vodafone to support the sponsorship of the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes F1 team is now live. As everything we do for Vodafone, the brand message ‘Make the most of now’ is central to the campaign. This time the proposition focuses on how Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton made the most of their now to chase their childhood dreams.

Click below to see the work:

Dedicated website (rich media site only available to PC users - bohoo!)
“3d track” expandable leatherboard
“Boxcart” MPU
“Go kart” MPU
“Toy car” MPU

Read what Campaign magazine said about the work: here and here.

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