Mediacircus | Art & Design news collected from NZ & beyond

We're All Gonna Die - 100 meters of existence

Photographer Simon Hoegsberg shot this 100m x 78cm (yes that is metres!) work over the course of 20 days from the same spot on a railroad bridge on Warschauer Strasse in Berlin in the summer of 2007.

There are 178 people in the picture, only a few of which seem to know their picture was being taken.

From the Road - Robin Morrison

NZ On Screen documentary on Robyn Morrision - photo journalist. Robin Morrison's photographic work was popular and accessible - he affectionately presented New Zealanders to themselves. The 1981 publication of The South Island of New Zealand from the Road cemented his reputation for this kind of work, when it featured ordinary New Zealanders in the environments they'd created. This documentary, however, explores Morrison's earlier work - the gritty Bastion Point and Springbok tour series, and the projects that documented communities on the brink of change.

Endemicworld.com - New Zealand’s online design store

www.endemicworld.com offers New Zealand design in an accessible, fast, reliable and secure online environment. They have progressively built a virtual community around their website through a blog and the chatterati newsletter. Customers and designers are supporting by spreading the word about New Zealand design and endemicworld.com.

Why? A desire to make New Zealand design accessible worldwide and help designers build their businesses and brands. Future plans? Sign-up to the chatterati newsletter to be the first to know or get the blog feed. Are you a New Zealand designer? Read the become a supplier page and get in touch. endemicworld.com was designed by Studio Alexander.

Kiwi company The Hyperfactory dominates Webby nominations

Kiwi mobile advertising agency The Hyperfactory is up for nine Webby Awards and four honoree selections, more than all New Zealand finalists combined and second in the world.

And to cap off a great start to the international awards season, the Auckland-based global agency has two nominations in both the Ad-Tech and One Club awards.

The Webby Awards are held in New York in early May and are regarded as the Oscars of the online and interactive marketing community. The One Show is also New York-based while The Ad-Tech Awards are held in San Francisco. Via Geekzone.

The Designers Republic story

Great article from the Creative Review about one of the most original design companies of the modern era. As a company name, the Designers Republic was a masterstroke. This mysterious entity sounded big and well organised and it had the air of being an outfit with a purpose and a plan. There was nothing modest or retiring about such a moniker and 1986, the year they started, was a good time for a designer to make this kind of statement.

Back then, mainstream design groups tended to have prosaic, ad agency type names such as Smith & Milton, Lewis Moberly and The Partners. Designers calling themselves Assorted Images, Rocking Russian or 23 Envelope invariably worked for the music business, their handles as weird and unlikely as the rock groups their cover art represented.

The Designers Republic went a step further, the very name a declaration that in this territory design was the administration, the ruling party, the occupying power. Wherever or whatever this republic might be, it sounded like a bolt-hole for people whose one true purpose and satisfaction was design.

Finding out that tDR were based in Sheffield only thickened the mystery. They had no plans to leave the city, they said, and they stuck to their guns. People still asked them about this long after it had ceased to be an issue, but in the late 1980s there were few designers with national reputations operating outside the capital. Attracted by Sheffield’s thriving music scene and bands such as Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League, Ian Anderson had left London in the early 1980s to study philosophy at Sheffield University. He liked the pub and club culture, made friends and put down roots. Read more.

Also see this other Creative Review article: The Designers Republic Remembered.

Typography Mega Inspiration

Via Abduzeedo

Some of the most controversial album covers ever

It’s amazing how times change. What would be considered absolutely unacceptable 40 years ago is the norm now. Here are 30 or so album covers that were either banned, changed to appease an overly prudish public, or sanitized to keep a retailer happy.

A Radical Collection of Vintage Skateboard Advertisements

Skateboarding first came into prominence in the late 1970s, as was portrayed in the film Lords of Dogtown. However, it was not until the 1980s that skateboarding would begin to become the sport that it is recognized as today. This decade was the coming of age era for many of its legendary personalities as well - Hosoi, Hawk, Vallely - and symboled the first theme in which skateboarding as an industry began advertising both more as a lifestyle, than a sport. Pro models were being produced, and brands were being created and grown on the backs of these young skateboarders.

Here are 15 skateboard ads from the 1980s. The article is full of typos and the ads are scanned in by some slacker at haphazard angles but that's what it's all about.

Dell Adamo Laptop

The new Dell Adamo hopes to compete directly with the fashionable MacBook Air, but a snazzy marketing campaign and lighter casing might not translate into a market monopoly while Mac continues to excel with help from its cult following. Via Adamo by Dell. Not bad for a PC.