London’s Alternative Olympic Mascots
Wednesday 19th May 2010
The master’s of decency here at Head have prepared some truly British alternatives to the official London Olympic Mascot launch and the press have already caught on after the mascots were featured on the Guardian Sport website today.
The series of alternative mascots range from pork scratchings and 50p pieces to pints of ale and dirty fivers – mainly pub lifestyle orientated. As the Guardian put it “What about some pub snack characters, offers James Kirkup who, it would appear, reckons that by putting arms on any object you can create an Olympic mascot”.
To see the rest of the entries and a few more of our ideas head over to the Guardian’s gallery here.
The .Net makeover
Tuesday 2nd February 2010
Last month the wonderful people at .Net magazine asked our Andy to put together a makeover article to be featured in the March issue of their magazine. The brief was to redesign the homepage of SoGlos.com, Gloucestershire’s online culture resource.
The article includes loads of great tips and advice on how Andy went about the redesign and an insight into how we would go about this kind of work on a larger scale at Head. The article can be found on page 96 of this months issues, on sale now at all good news agents.
Canvas8 ‘The Changing Face of Media’
Wednesday 16th September 2009
Last week our Ramsey spoke at ‘The Changing Face of Media’, an event hosted by Canvas8 at London’s Host Gallery. The theme was emerging technology. Based on speaker experiences, the theme everyone came along to hear about was: how can brands best use technology and not be used by it?
First up was top media futurist, Gerd Leonhard, who gave a rousing talk about what’s in store technology wise. One of the most interesting things he mentioned was O3B, a Google backed satellite venture that will deliver the web to the whole of Africa and remote parts of Asia and the Far East – in 2010. (O3B stands for the world’s other 3 billion not connected to the web yet). Gerd’s talk was pretty mind blowing, and his blog has more great topics well worth reading.
Next to speak is surely one of the brainiest guys in the biz, David Bausola, creator of several new media firsts, including the famous “where are the Jones’s?” campaign for Ford, and more recently Purefold, developed in partnership with Ridley and Tony Scott’s new venture, Free Scott. David spoke eloquently about Purefold – an open media franchise /platform, for brands, developers, filmmakers, anyone in fact, who wants to collaborate over Purefold’s central theme “what does it mean to be human?” itself a reference, appropriately enough, to Blade Runner. You can find out more about the super interesting Purefold over at ag8.com
Finally, Ramsey gave us a wonderfully clear exposition of how brands can avoid technology ruling them by attending to a simple enough philosophy ‘Move fast, Strike hard’. Ramsey highlighted the need to believe in an idea and take an agile approach to developing it, so you can at least keep pace with the latest trends and technologies, if not outpace them. But you have to really believe in the idea (ergo it needs to be a good one).
All in all 3 excellent presentations and a fab fun evening. A big special thanks goes out to our wonderful hosts, Canvas8, who looked after everyone superbubbly.
For more photos of the event check out Marina’s wonderful set over on flickr.
A feast of updates…
Thursday 30th July 2009It’s all been very exciting here at Head recently, the whole team have been locked up working hard on lots of great new projects we just can’t wait to share with you, including a new addition to Head Labs but we’ll save news on those for another time.
All hell broke loose last week as Percy Street transformed itself into a mini-jungle as one of the tree’s took a wee tumble and ended up face-down between two cars. An enormous shout goes out to the tree surgeons of our lovely borough who were round in a jiffy to clean up all the mess.
There’s also been a few new additions to the office, starting with our new Web Trend Map from the very intelligent people at iA. “The Web Trend Map plots the Internet’s leading names and domains onto the Tokyo Metro map. Domains and personalities are carefully selected through dialogue with map enthusiasts, and every domain is evaluated based on traffic, revenue, and character.”
Some more photos of this and last years poster can be found over on our Flickr.
And secondly our new four legged friend Lily has joined the team. Unfortunately Lily be working from home for the meantime leaving duster to munch on all of the office grub but stay tuned for more news on the office animal collective soon.
Ask Obama
Thursday 26th March 2009We’ve been following the Obama web presence closely and can’t help but feel flattered that they’re using a similar feature we introduced to Webcameron back in its day.
‘Ask David’ was a really popular feature that gave the public a platform to address David Cameron directly. It allowed anyone to register, put forward a question or vote for a question to be answered by David personally. In the true spirit of Webcameron it allowed access to David in a transparent and sociable way. A recent article in The Times quoted Obama’s web guru, Thomas Gensemer as saying “In its day WebCameron was cute, it came across as authentic. That’s a good use of the online media to personalise your candidate.”
‘Ask David’ worked really well for Webcameron and we think ‘Open for Questions‘, the Obama equivalent, will work well for Obama too.
Obama’s ‘Open for Questions’
Webcameron’s ‘Ask David’
Home page photo credit: AP