Here’s another book we’ve done.  Thanks to Serif for posting about it the other day.  We thought we’d write a few words about it.  Basically it’s the habit of sportswear manufacturers to create descriptors to describe the technology that goes into their gear.

The technologies are given names like technofit, hydroblast, microsplodge etc. Truth is, it’s all a load of mumbo-jumbo most of the time and no-one in the stores has a clue what each bit of gizmo technology does. 

So we worked with Umbro to produce a book that bursts the bubble of myticism and talks in plain basic english about the ‘control technologies’ that go into Umbro gear.

Erm, that’s it really.  We did the book as a conversation between a ‘control freak’ character and someone who knows nothing about the subject.

We worked with Paul Davis to do the illy’s and it’s going down a storm apparently.

Like Russ, we were very pleased to receive a copy of the W+K Book Of The Year 2006 - proof that a physical book version of a blog is better than a blog version of a blog (if you catch my drift).  It made us think about another aspect of corporate blogs.  If a blog is a web log of things that happen, shouldn’t they contain all the bad news stories and the unfortunate events throughout the year?

If you’ve followed the Weiden’s blog, you’ll remember that they covered a couple of crap events - like the pitch losses in June.  We’ve done the same a couple of times, but I wonder how long we’d carry on blogging if every day at LOVE was crap instead of joyous, euphoric and brilliant fun (ahem).  Is a corporate blog really heartfelt until it’s a warts and all account of what’s going on?

Oh what fun you can have with other people’s desks when you have to work late…

Posted by two ‘hilarious’ LOVE pranksters

Cool T-Shirt by a French designer called Rachel Plefger and not just cos it has the word LOVE on it.  We’ve tried to provide the obligatory link to Rachel, but none of them seem to work. Find lots of good t-shirts here if you’re interested.  One day soon we’ll get round to putting some of our own designs on the blog…

Hot on the heels of our work for James, we’ve been asked to create an advertising campaign for Creamfields 2007, the UK’s leading dance festival.  We’re going to do a book for Creamfields as well, which we’re aiming to publish in March.
Clearly fate has deemed that we’ll be mostly working on music-related projects for a few weeks.
We hope that after that we’ll be mostly asked to work on beer and chocolate projects.
Fingers crossed.

Posted by LOVE.

Here’s a post about another of our recent book designs.  This time it’s for Urban Splash - an increasingly influential property developer in the UK.  Urban Splash have a very clear identity.  Their book formats always follow the same spec - tall and narrow like this Annual Report we created for them a couple of years ago.

The design helps Urban Splash to be distinctive, but sometimes it’s a difficult format to work with.
We were working on a book for a set of exclusive rooftop Penthouse apartments that were in an Urban Splash development called BudenbergHausProjekte in Altrincham, Cheshire.

Dave S wanted to produce a book that worked in a smaller, handier format with lots of pages of interesting little facts and light-hearted moments, but we had to work within the set format.

So he developed two books, 101 reasons why you’ll love our penthouses…

and 102 pages of details/facts…

that were the flip sides of the same book…

Neat.

The 101 reasons you’ll love our rooftop penthouses is a light-hearted read.  My favourite reasons are 099 "you’ll get snow before anyone else…" and 100 "…and it stops raining sooner".

We also went for lots of photography rather than too many words in the pages of details/facts (thanks Tim).

Posted by Jonathan Rigby

"Can I sit at the table and wait for him to come in, then beckon him over and say, ‘Oh sit down, oh sit down, oh sit down next to me’? Please? I’ll do it really dead pan - and no-one will ever have done it to any of them ever before." "It’ll be the shortest meeting you’ve ever had," replied the eternally responsible Alistair, with a vision of that Father Ted episode where they meet Victor Meldrew down in the caves.

So, in came Larry from James, and I stretched out my hand and said, "Hello, I’m Adam. Pleased to meet you."

James are re-forming, doing a nationwide tour, re-releasing their greatest hits album, and recording some great new material, so what with the fresh start and all, they quite fancied updating the James brand. It’s pretty simple really, a hand customised typeface and a nice modern take on the iconic james flower. But because the boys are so passionate about design (Larry’s also a furniture designer) they understand what we do, and want everything to look ace, which makes working with them very, very enjoyable. So watch this space for more James stuff soon - in the meantime, bookmark we are James.

With a bit of fiddling and registration, you can also vote whether you like the new James design in "The New Logo - What Do You Think?" General Board section here.

Posted by Adam Rix

Last week four of us were in Moscow working on a secret assignment.

A crack squad was assembled and we were air-dropped into Russia.

Our first objective was to recce the lie of the land and blend in 
with the locals, quickly grasping their culture and traditions.

Then it was onto further briefings in the capital (told you we did some work…).

It was clear from Phil’s eyes as he waited to fly home that it had proven to be a very tough mission..

Posted by Alistair Sim

If you know us already, you’ll know that we love creating books.  It’s probably a throwback to childhood; all the best treasure is buried in books.  We’re always being asked to send people copies of our books, but we always run out.  So we’ve decided to write a series of posts on here about some of our favourites. It’ll never be as good as sending you the real thing, but it’s the best we can do.
Here’s the first one we’ve chosen.  This is a book we send out to say hello to clients we’d love to work with.

As the touchy feely name suggests, each page is tactile - the woolly beard…

The ’sticky, grabby’ hands…

The ‘cloth’ ears…

And finally, the lovely, rubbery, feeling of touching LOVE…

Clients seem to really like receiving this book (Yorkshire Tea put us on their pitch shortlist after receiving one).  Maybe it’s just a little bit different from the tons of other stuff they receive every day. Maybe it’s because it doesn’t ram the agency "sell" down their throats. 

Posted by LOVE

We’re planning a LOVE outing to see Rocky Balboa next week, so we thought we’d post about a slightly more cerebral film first.
The Last King Of Scotland.  What a superb film - brilliantly acted, tense as anything, gruesome in parts and really unsettling - it took me a few hours to compose myself afterwards. I can’t believe that the IMdB voters are only giving it 8.0/10 right now.
Maybe we should all start a little movie buffs set of posts?  Our blogging colleagues over the Atlantic can even give us advance recommendations on films that have broken over there before they come over here.  Anyone else seen anything good recently?