Ideas About Ideas

Studiothink recently won several awards for our creative and strategic marketing materials created for CommuniCare Health Services, a client that prides itself on dedicated and compassionate service in rehabilitative and nursing home environments. We’ve created materials that portray the passion our client has for treating the elderly in a way that is both engaging and meaningful.

The National Mature Media Awards is an awards program that recognizes the best and most creative materials created for individuals ages 50 and over. It’s the largest program of its kind, accepts materials for 32 categories and awards recognition in the levels of Gold, Silver, Bronze and Merit. This year, there were 1,000 entries competing for recognition.

Awards were received for photography, commercial, logo and brochure work done for our healthcare client, and we are excited and thankful for this achievement!

If you work in an agency, design studio or marketing department, you know how important it is to make deadlines as well as keep your creative juices flowing.

Here’s a project that involves some do-it-yourself, and will enable you to keep track of appointments, meetings and deadlines in a unique way. And, if your office needs some sprucing up—this should do the trick.

Make your own chalkboard paint by following this recipe and how-to, and paint a chalkboard calendar on your office wall. You can create any color you want, and customize your calendar to suit your personal style. It’s a way to have some fun while getting organized—and you won’t be staring at a desk calendar with blocks too small to read your own writing in.

Happy crafting!

-Britni

Below, is an e-mail I received from AIGA. For all designers out there, I hope you are as disgusted with this as I am. It’s these type people that trivialize our profession and belittle those who have dedicated their lives to design.

         —Alex

ACTION ALERT: Check LogoGarden for identity work stolen from you

A website promoting access to “do-it-yourself logos for entrepreneurs” starting at $79 has copied logos and other images created by designers and displayed them as LogoGarden founder John Williams’s own work for sale, without the original designers’ permission.

Bill Gardner of Gardner Design, who found more than 200 of his own designs offered on the site, has documented Williams’s outrageous and unethical behavior on the blog Rock Paper Ink, including examples of the slight modifications of well-known logos like the identity for World Wildlife Fund and Time Warner Cable.

Williams has made slight modifications to many of the images, presumably in an attempt to avoid claims that he infringed on the original designers’ copyright rights, although these modifications are not enough to avoid liability for infringement of the creator’s rights in the underlying works. It may actually increase Williams’s liability by demonstrating his willful copyright infringement.

We believe the most powerful response we can make as a community is to demonstrate the profession’s outrage and the threat of clients’ legal action, if the rights to the design belong to the client. Several legal actions are already in process.

Your course of action, immediately:

1. Check logogarden.com for your own work using the “try it free” button.
2. If your creative work has been misappropriated, contact Williams (see below), contact your lawyer, contact your client and have your client contact his/her lawyer to make it clear that this is a violation of copyright law.
3. If your work is on the site, contact Williams to make it clear that this represents illegal, unethical behavior; that it fails the basic test of decency, common sense or business acumen; and that it also exposes his customers to liabilities for copyright infringement.
4. Send a copy of your correspondence to copyright@aiga.org.

Three possible addresses to use for your correspondence:

LogoGarden, LLC
1011 Centre Road, Suite 322
Wilmington, DE 19805

John Williams
230 Halmerton Drive
Franklin, TN 37069

Email: service@logogarden.com

This is an issue that affects us all and is such an egregious case of violating creative rights that we must take action.

Sincerely,

Richard Grefé
AIGA executive director

I stumbled across the Coca-Cola Freestyle Machine today and am so excited to try it out! First, I have to find one, because unfortunately, there aren’t any machines in my area. You can, however, go on Facebook and request that one be put in your area, so I just might have to do that.

The Freestyle machine is revolutionizing the way restaurants and shops provide soft drinks. With over 100 flavors and the touch screen option, you can customize your own drink. Data, such as top flavors will be sent back to Coca-Cola for  analysis.

Imagine, all of your favorite drinks and flavors in one place—the possibilities are endless. Read more about it!

How cool is this? The consensus at Studiothink is this is a designer’s dream pen. All you have to do is scan the color in your real-world environment that you wish to duplicate and, ta-da! You can now draw with that color. Read more about this awesome color picker pen here!

-Britni