b-uncut creative Cris Alex was inspired by Abarat: Absolute Midnight, the third volume in a fantasy horror series for children and adults. Abarat is a magical otherworld, an archipelago of islands populated by monstrous characters. Alex’s design depicts Christopher Carrion, also known as the Lord of Midnight, who’s out to capture the heroine of the books. We love how Alex manipulated the textures of Carrion’s face, he looks like a piece of ash made human. But how? Here’s what Alex had to say:

“The technique includes a plastic bald cap and two gelatin prosthetic pieces that I created from a sculpt. An alcohol activated make up was then applied, finishing with an ash powder for the dry and decaying feel.  As for my interest in horror, I’ve always been a bit of a gore hound. I enjoy molding unique characters that create a sense of unease or intrigue. I like to live outside of the box.”

“The picture is one of a series of pictures I made, the series was called layeroom. In this series I used layers from newspapers and publicity stamps and pictured my models behind them. The game was to build the scene with a certain reaction to this publicity messages. This photo is the last one, and I made it while taking the set apart. I posed myself.”

Photographers have the advantage and disadvantage of not being short of any images for their websites. But what do you do when everybody’s got a website full of photographs, and these days you’d be a fool not to spend some of their hard earned bread on a website. In the digital age it’s the best place to showcase photographs and, if it’s managed well, can easily earn back it’s cost in no time at all.

What do you do when all the competition all has great websites as well though? It’s not enough these days to simply be a good photographer. As well as doing great work you have to do a great job of showcasing and marketing it. The easiest way to stand out from the crowd is to have a website that compliments your style and your photography, to see what I mean take a look at these three photographers websites:

Andy Barter

Like Andy’s photography his website is very clean and delineated, it provides the perfect setting for his photo’s. His work is excellent though, make sure you check out his Kiss series.

Mihaela Ivanova

Mihaela Ivanova’s website is dark and moody, it doesn’t give the impression of someone you’d want to invite to a dinner party but it does provide the perfect setting for her dark and moody photography. The Old Works section is fascinating as it gives an otherwise missing insight into how her style has evolved.

Sam Robinson

Sam Robinson manages to incorporate an ethereal element into his photography, something that is expertly complimented by his minimalistic website. It might be stripped down to the bare basics but all that means is that there’s more space to show off his photographs.

If you need a website, or anything else, designed then why not submit a brief on the Creative Services Exchange.

Have the draconian new laws regarding ambush marketing claimed their first victim. With BMW the official car sponsor of the Olympics does the Honda: The Power of Dreams Team go too far?

Tim Crow, chief executive of Synergy – the sponsors consultancy, said “There is no doubt Honda is trying to create an association with London 2012 and as such is an example of ambush marketing”. Honda of course refute the accusation. Whilst this does seem like a case of ambush marketing, although Honda is careful to make no reference to the Olympics (talking instead about “a world stage”) it does have four Olympic athletes on it’s homepage, and when you click on their bio’s there is fairly extensive mention of the Olympics. Plus, because Honda’s just so darned nice, they’re also giving them all Honda cars to get to the games and carry all
their kit around in, and I expect that if they’d like to drive it to a press conference as well the that would be just dandy.

Things have certainly changed since Chevrolet bought Jean Claude Killy back in 1968 and competition organisers are clamping down to protect sponsor’s rights. This does mean that occasionally the consumer gets it in the neck. At the 2006 Football World cup supporters had to lose their distinctive orange trousers if they wanted to watch the match as Fifa decided that
the trousers (which were branded with the logo of Bavaria who weren’t an official sponsor) constituted an attempt at ambush marketing.

Although the 2012 Olympics has managed to please everyone so far, with the noted exceptions of the ticket debacle and London black cabs, can it continue to do so? What will happen when local businesses start getting slaps on the wrist for improper use of the words “gold” or “rings”? Will the Little Chef Olympic Breakfast, now with the prefix Our Famous, survive? Who knows what the future holds in this unsteady era.

Do you need to get a marketing campaign off the ground?  Submit a Brief!

By Luis D’Alkmin

By Fabrizio Raschetti

By Martin Varallo

By New Light Graphics

It’s like one of those classic montage scenes from The A-Team where B.A. Baracus & Co. are locked in a cell with little more than a spanner, a piece of string and a tin of baked beans. Yet they always manage to construct an armoured tank or a rocket launcher with the meagre tools at their disposal.

When limits are in place, creativity really does flourish.

But it’s not always necessity per se that breeds inventiveness. The inherent challenges of limitation often inspire humans to do great things, regardless of whether it’s of much real use to anyone or not.

When George Mallory and Andrew Irvine dedicated their lives to conquering Mount Everest, they were asked: “why do you want to climb Everest?” Mallory’s response went down in history: “because it’s there”.

This ethos translates into many walks of life, where the mere presence of limitation inspires the weird and the wonderful.

ASCII art is a million miles from the slopes of Everest, but it’s a great example of how creativity can emerge from not a lot.

Based on the English alphabet, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) is a character-encoding system for computing and communications. It was designed to represent text, associated punctuation and other non-printable characters.

From the 128 ASCII characters, 95 are printable. From A to Z, 0 to 9 and ! to }, ASCII artists have managed to turn a rather mundane coding system into some wonderful works of art. And some actually can serve a practical purpose too.

For those with time on their hands, we’ve seen masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa recreated in ASCII. Whilst fans of animation have paid homage to Homer.

“What’s the practical use you speak of?”, we hear you ask.

Well, any forum that’s restricted to plain text is the perfect place to get a little creative with your messages. With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, why not post an ASCII flower into your Facebook status update for the one(s) you love? On second thoughts, maybe a real bunch of flowers will be better.

The point of this post isn’t that you should offer creatives the shortest possible deadlines for next to no money – that wouldn’t work. Constraints alone can kill creativity too.

The point is that inspiration and innovation can grow from the smallest of seeds. Big budgets don’t necessarily mean great ideas, as we saw with the $500 Super Bowl ad. With Crowdsourcing you have thousands of seeds across the globe bursting with ideas.

So the next time you face a crisis, whatever you do, don’t let it go to waste! You might just find that’s when people are at their most creative. And don’t hesitate to contact the crowd.

Whilst the usability and look-and-feel of any website are key considerations throughout the planning and design stage, the invisible elephant in the web-design room is most certainly SEO.

This guide won’t make you an expert in web design or in SEO – it takes aptitude and years of training and dedication to master either of these arts.

No, this guide is designed to make you just that little bit more knowledgeable on the inextricable link that exists between how a website is constructed, to how it performs on Google, Yahoo!, Bing…in fact, any search engine.

If you’re a Marketing Manager charged with setting up your first website, this should arm you with enough facts to talk knowledgeably with your agency, or to the Crowd if you’ve really got your finger on the world’s creative pulse.

And if you’re a web designer, well, this will act as a friendly reminder that bells and whistles are great, but it’s traffic that ultimately counts.

Don’t be a Flash in the pan: search engines love words

Okay, we love a good Flash animation as much as the next guy, but building a website entirely from Flash isn’t a smart move from an SEO perspective. Search engines simply love words…in fact, they can’t get enough of them.

Any text embedded within a Flash file can’t be detected by search engines, so you’ll find it’s incredibly difficult to rank for any keywords. Flash is fine in moderation, but each page of your website should contain at least a few hundred words of normal text, with a smattering of relevant keywords to help search engines ‘discover’ your wonderful brand.

Oh, and avoid frames too if you can – they’re not cool anyway, but search engines in particular don’t dig them all that much.

Architecture

The relationship between web design and SEO is a natural one. By building a website to be easily accessible, this does help humans find their way through your site. But it also provides an easier path for the search-bots to index your website.

Search engine algorithms may change, but simple navigation and good site architecture with quality content (HTML) will always go down well.

Try and keep your key pages as close to the root directory as possible. Deeply-nested subdirectories can make search-bots’ lives hard, so try and avoid this. And humans don’t like to veer too far from your homepage either, so as a general rule of thumb, if you don’t think a human would like it, there’s a reasonable chance a search engine won’t either.

What’s in a name? URLs and domains

If you can manage to squeeze a keyword into your URL, fantastic. Though with a .com or .co.uk you may struggle to find a URL consisting of single keywords or even multiple keywords. There’s a good chance they’re all taken.

So if you’re an insurance broker, for example, you should ideally have the word ‘insurance’ in your company URL somewhere, even if it is accompanied by another word.

Logo.com recently sold for $500k, to be used by an online company selling logo design services. This helps to illustrate the value to some people of including keywords in a domain name.

As a slight aside, the word ‘Logo’ means the same thing in many languages, from French and German, to Italian, Romanian, Polish…and many more. This will help the company’s SEO in many languages.

Search is also affected by the country code top-level domain (ccTLD) you choose. So if you wish to rank highly in the UK, then a co.uk website will help your efforts. And if you’re seeking to optimise your rankings in Germany, then a .de domain is the ideal solution.

The host with the most: where does your website call home?

Search engines consider the physical location of the server(s) that host your website(s), both in local-based searches and general searches. So if you’re building a website for your local business and you expect people to search for it by location (e.g. UK/London, US/New York), find a web hosting provider nearby.

Content is king…

Okay, it’s a cliché…but content is king. Well, fresh content that is. Update your website regularly with original, fresh text and this will guide you some way towards SEO success.

We wrote yesterday about the winners and losers of this year’s Super Bowl ads, well this little news nugget has come to our attention today.

Whilst one of Doritos’ ads made our ‘miss-list’ for being, well, a little nasty, it transpires that one of the other Doritos’ ads (one of the company’s better ones from this year’s Super Bowl) was made by a fan for $500.

J.R. Burningham, a freelance editor and part-time web designer, entered the Frito-Lay Crash the Super Bowl ad campaign, which was an open-call to the crowd (fans…) to make their own commercial.

Everyone involved in the ad worked for free, including the actors and the dog trainer (a friend’s brother), whilst the main costs involved were renting a decent camera, lenses and provisions for the crew.

So this beggars the question: does this spell the end of the big-budget ad agency? Unlikely at the moment, but it does raise a big question regarding the sourcing and creation elements of the advertising process.

Whilst Doritos spent $3m airing the 30-second ad, and a significantly smaller sum of $2,500 to Burningham as the winning entry, this shows that creativity isn’t something that’s inherently expensive.

In the real world, the cost of making this advert would have been a bit more than $500, given that nobody likes to work for free, but it wouldn’t have cost that much more. The advert was cheap mainly because many of the additional costs normally associated with advertising were eliminated. Cut out the middle-men and go straight to the source of the creators.

If nothing else, this Doritos ad helps to show that clever ideas can generate a lot of international coverage – and sales, no doubt – with minimal upfront investment. That’s not to say a McDonalds-sized marketing budget wouldn’t help; it just means that creativity isn’t – by its nature – Earth-shatteringly expensive. So if you’ve yet to see it, here’s what a $500 advert looks like:

The designer in focus this time is Maxime Archambault, who has created some very cool, graffiti inspired designs. Good work Maxime!