Rick Astley T shirt

Never to be one to miss an internet trend (and have a bit of fun) I decided to design and print a Rick Astley T shirt. Currently on sale at my T shirt website Facebook Tshirts

[Click the below for a larger image]

What a load of bollards

I did this project last year as a way of improving ugly traffic bollards. This design was drawn in permanent marker. I'm currently looking at a way of reproducing the design so that I can apply it to more than one bollard. I also want to create a website that encourages artists in London to use the bollard as a street light box - why graffiti a wall when you can use these :)

I remember when I was in Brisbane, how wonderful it was that all of the signal boxes had been decorated by artists, this is actively encouraged by Brisbane city council and it adds so much to the city. London still has a lot to learn.

Pre emptive seeding

So I work in viral marketing and a big part of my job is getting as many people as possible to view, share and talk about our virals. We created the Rick rolling monkey video in response to the trend on the internet. Credit to PG Tips: my boss had the idea on Thursday, we sent it to them Friday and on Monday we filmed it.

It's low low fi marketing - you can see the puppeteer (that's my fault for filming it so badly.) Today I see that there's going to be a flash mob this evening so I have change the title to Re:Liverpool street station rick roll so that when people start searching for this on youtube our video will come up as a related rick rolling video. So essentially I'm pre-empting what's happening on youtube and positioning our video so it's ready for it. Crafty. Bloody marketers.

Rickrolling

Rickrolling still continues to take the internet by storm:

Angel Art Market exhibition

I spent the weekend at the Angel Art Market at my first exhibition of my canvas prints. Despite a closed tube station and snow there was a decent turnout and I was really pleased with how it went. It was really nice to see the reactions to my work and to talk with other exhibitors. I sold two prints which is excellent and I'm planning on returning to the market in the summer after next term of uni. Here's a photo and in true digital marketing style I've made a short video:

More Font goodness

For sometime I've been looking for a decent font site on the web and on Friday I came upon Da Fonts An excellent site and I've already started pimping my mac with lots of fonty goodness.

So within two minutes i have these:



the fonts are on donateware, so in the event I go ahead and produce these I can let the designer know and give him some royalties. Lovely stuff.

Decapitator

Great stuff from the
Decapitator

Spell with Flickr

Try it at http://metaatem.net/words/

Ad not required. Just take someone else's and slap your brand on it

For April Fool's day the BBC created this very successful advert which has been high in the viral chart this week:


Today, I see this other ad doing the rounds:


This new one, although not created by Linux, creates an interesting situation. A lot of the blogs that are posting it do not know about the BBC ad which makes this Linux ad the original penguin flying video in their view. They congratulate the video maker on an excellent job, "Linux - where everyone can fly, it's such a good advert" they say. This is a classic way that the web takes content, copies it, and loses the original context and meaning. It pisses me off to be honest, as all the hard work of the BBC ad is lost when someone with imovie comes along and makes it their own. And who the hell are Linux anyway?

Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the ugliest politician of them all?

After the inpiring use by Darryl over at Brandflakesforbreakfast I thought I'd try and put the app to another use. Basically you upload a picture and it says how attractive the person is. So I thought I'd do a few and see what it came up with. First up I thought I'd try Sloth from The Goonies. He rated surprisingly highly:

According to the app John Prescott is an ugly bastard. No news there. But according to the app he's uglier than Sloth from the Goonies.

And low and behold Mr George Bush himself is considered to be quite handsome. Outrageous.

The application is at http://apps.facebook.com/niptuckgoldenratio
I'd be interested to see who how other politicians rank, and whether Jabba the Hut is more attractive than John Prescott (I suspect so.)

Why I love living in London

I've lived in London for a little over three years now. I find it an extremely exciting place to live - there's always things going in and it's always changing. An interesting mix of old and new, glass and concrete, shit architecture, good architecture, super clean, super dirty and always surprising.

An art project on the beach of the Thames. I later found out from It's nice that that it's by these guys


Paddington station, Brunel's masterpiece. There's somthing about the hazy light in this station that I love


A temporary structure that's going up outside the Architecture Association near where I work.

Twitter

So I caved and joined it. It just seems that everyone's jumping on it. As much as I like to think of myself as an early adopter I'm just not. I sit there and sit there and suddenly I think, shit everyone's getting on it, it's time I did. I guess it's because I can't be bothered to waste time on something that's not going to take off. Even twitter may not, but it's time to get on it and see what the fuss is about.

You can see my twitter page here

Maybe I need to make a YOU TWIT Tshirt before it really takes off like Facebook did.

Indentally I thought I'd try and see when the first mention of Facebook online was. Quite tricky as google only let you go back so far but this entry is from 2000.

Google gets sense of humour

Click here