The visual project is very light and open for design possibilities.

Here you can see the pdf version of some issues of the newspaper.

Jornal MDS Especial

Jornal MDS December 2008

Jornal MDS January 2009

Jornal MDS February 2009

I hope you like it.

The thing that really caught my attention, was something that involved my work. Branding. BP have rebranded itself in 2000, claiming they were “Beyond Petroleum”. While less than 1% of their business were actually not petroleum and natural gas. They painted all their buildings in green, changed the logo to a nice greeninsh flower ( WTH, a green flower for a oil company?) They spent 600+ million dollars in this rebranding ( including ads, painting their building, etc. ).

With an expensive brand like that and a huge ambiental mess to clean up, I decided to help them, and I rebranded BP for free. It’s just a small change on their logo, I think it now reflects better their business. I hope you guys like it.

Recently the world is seeing a big trend for greener companies, and environmental care in all areas, but what we are seeing is companies paying huge branding bills so we, designers, can make them look green, instead of doing the right thing. Looking green won’t solve our problem. I don’t believe we will be able to revert the situation on planet, nor I believe we are the only cause of the global warming, but I do think we can slow it down and gain some time. But if the world doesn’t do things right, we won’t even be able to postpone our problems, and the world won’t be a nice place to live soon. Yes, I’m that pessimist, when I see lies all around us. And I couldn’t agree more with this Greenpeace activist. ( I don’t know who exactly said that to BBC UK, but I’d be happy to update this post with the right name.)

“This is a triumph of style over substance. BP spent more on their logo this year than they did on renewable energy last year, ” the environmentalist group Greenpeace said.

“BP doesn’t stand for Beyond Petroleum. It stands for Burning the Planet,” it added.

from BBC News UK

EDIT: After reading a bit more about the BP disaster, I found out that there were 3 safety valves in deep horizon. BUT none of them worked. So we need to ask a different question. Why none of them worked, and why there aren’t 20 safety valves since they aren’t that safe afterall.

You can see a timeline of BP’s tries at NY Times

Here you can see pictures of BP’s the disaster

One of the things that really amused me on this video was the fact that it wasn’t actually filmed. It was photographed, with a Nikon D90, and then edited on Premiere.

They used some light painting that we have been experimented together a few times before.

The end result was quite fantastic and entertaining. Congratulation guys!

What do you think about it? I’d like to hea

Credits:

Direction and Screenplay: Letícia Uesugi (I don’t have you website, please send it to me)
Actress: Alessandra Carneiro
Photography Direction: Bernardo Carneiro de Mendonça Chagas Ribeiro
Art Direction: Letícia Uesugi; Thales Leite and Bernardo Carneiro de Mendonça Chagas Ribeiro
Special Effects: Letícia Uesugi; Thales Leite
Costumes and Cenography: Alessandra Carneiro
Sound Effects: Letícia Uesugi

Sarsur & Séder is a newly created company for consultancy in real estate laws and taxes. They provide a very specialized service to help their customers to have the highest security and lowest taxes possible, when you are comercializing real estate propoerties.

For the logo, my client asked me for something sober, yet modern. He asked me to give it a tiny girly touch, since there are women at the company too. And of course, I’d never do an uber designish logo for a lawyer office, cause it just doesn’t fit. Working only with type, seemed to me as the best option, and the result was quite nice. Here follows 2 options for the card. I hope you liked it.

Tanãn is a brand new fashion company, that will reach the market soon. With the concept of chic, yet confortable clothes for women, I bet they will be rocking soon.

To work with fashion clients is a very nice experience, in my opinion, since people are very open to new and different ideas.

David Airey, made a nice post at his blog today. He posted this video of William McDonough, talking about the responsible design. I really liked it, and since I do love this subject, I decided to contribute to the discussion. The problems of human development have gone far beyond acceptable, and a very tiny part of the population is doing “green” things. In my opinion, being “ecologically correct” is a life style. There are tons of small thing we can do on our daily life that makes things better. But you won’t see any difference by doing it, cause what we can do is very small, but it contributes.

Things you can do to help the world:

• make your shower 10% faster
• use your air conditioner 1 degree hotter ( I’m in Brazil, so I don’t use climatization apparel to make raise the temperature, but those who do, could put theirs 1 degree colder, and wear a sweater )
• always tear paper, cause when you crumple paper, you break it’s fibers, causing it to be unrecyclabe.
• don’t leave the lights on, unnecessary ( this will be awesome to your pocket too)
• if you are like me, and likes to sleep with the TV on, remember to set the “sleep function”, so it will shut itself down, after you have slept.

This are some small things that we can do on a day-to-day basis, and it doesn’t kills you. If everyone did these simple things we would have a huge impact on power demands around the world. This is a practical approach to the cause.

I started thinking like this, about 3 years ago, when I read Massive Change, by Bruce Mau. I think that nowadays, Bruce is one of the big guys that adopted this cause, and he is doing very nice work.

After researching about this subject, I understood one simple thing about how stuff will work. Green things must be cheaper. I am a designer, and I do like to think about this ecological subject, and try to make my work more ecologically correct. I can offer my client a recycled paper instead of a chouché, but if my client gives a shit about the trees, I can’t do much but print it on the couché, and screw the trees. I’m talking about a tiny minority of the world’s population that have money to spend on things other than food. And in this small parcel of the humans, there are a lot of people that doesn’t care about environment either. If we, as “rich people” with money to have computers, and time to blog and all this, aren’t all worrying about the planet, how can I ask for a laborer here in Brazil that earns 250 US dollars a month to worry about the planet? He has more important things to worry, like food for him and his family, for example.

From what I see, we gotta invest on 2 fronts for this battle.

The creative/logical front, that needs us, designers, architects, engineers, and other professionals to think logically and creatively to create good looking, cheap and ecological options, like the green roofs for example, that William showed on the video, and Bruce shows along his book. This way we can show to the people, the governments and the private companies that we have options, and good ones to help solve this problem.

The other front to take action, is to make our existing recycling processes cheaper. Making recycled paper cheaper and as good as non-recycled paper, will cause a lot of people start using recycled paper. I don’t care if the people are ecologically conscient, as long as they are doing the right thing, I don’t care what they think.

What about you? What do you think can be a good option to make our planet a better place to live, or at least postpone the problems we already know will happen?

UPDATE:  Nov. 04

Here is a nice blog I found today about recycling. Worth a visit. It’s in portuguese.

Alien

This is the first part of a collection of very well designed movie posters. They were selected by their design and the value of the movie itself. I am hugely influenced by movie posters and we can notice how much the movie industry is investing more and more in posters recently. A few years ago, movies had just one or two posters to publicize the movie. Nowadays, as we can see in the Batman – The Dark Night campaign, they invested in a variety of posters, very well designed and appealing, by the way. I really wish I’d have so many walls to have them all at home.

All the images were taken from Allposters.com, under the movie category. I hope you like it. If you have some poster that you really like, please say so in the comments section, I will be glad do check on that.

Batman – The Dark Knight Posters – Some of the posters created for the lauch of the movie.

Batman – The Dark Knight

Batman – The Dark Knight – Joker

Batman – The Dark Knight

Batman – The Dark Knight – Joker

Batman – The Dark Knight – Joker

Back to the Future

300

Band of Brothers

Blow

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Chales Chaplin – The Great Dictator

Clockwork Orange

Coraline

Easy Rider

E.T.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Dr. Gonz

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

The Godfather

Gremlins

King Kong (2005)

Labyrinth

The Lion King

Lord of the Rings (1978)

Matrix

This just caught my eye at Webdesigner Depot. In my opinion, the Jack of all trades will always be a great professional, since he can see things from different perspectives. A designer that can code a little, will design things thinking if the coding if possible. He doesn’t need to be an Ace in 4 different languages of webcode. He just needs to know his way around some HTML/CSS and PHP, for example, and his layouts will be more solid than from a designer that knows nothing about code.The other way is also true. A master coder, with a little knowledge of design and layout will pay attention to the details of the layout, and not make the mistakes usually seen when a designer sends a layout (PSD ) for the coder, and when the site comes back, it is a bit different, with things not precisely aligned, different font sizes and so on.

A lot of things can be improved with a a little knowledge. I’m ultimately driven by knowledge, and that’s first thing a Jack needs to have. Do you consider yourself a Jack?

David, from Dache.ch have written the 3rd edition of the 100 Brands of Interest, where he lists 100 great brands from designers around the web. He has done a nice work on his blog.

My studio’s logo is featured in this selection. Thank you for that David.

I hope you like his post.

100 Brands of Interest – 3rd edition