Here’s an utterly pointless post about the state of turn ups in our creative department. Draw from it whatever conclusions you want.

Ravi Sohanpal: Designer: 6.1cms

Mr Darren Hughes: Creative Head: 15.3 cms (ok, 7.2cms)

Adam Rix: Designer: 0cms

Lauranda Reid: Placement: 10.5cms (nice socks, btw)

Simon Griffin: Copywriter: 6.6cms

Stu Preece: Web Designer: 5.8cms

Matt Booth: Flash monkey: 3.7cms

So Lauranda has officially the longest turn ups in the department, with an impressive 10.5cms, but hers were hidden inside her boots. Darren takes overall winner with 7.2cms, although I think Dave P would have given him a run for his money had he been in today. I hope you can now sleep soundly tonight.

Round the world trips can be big and scary for young travellers. Monsters can also be big and scary. So it made sense to develop an online microsite for STA Travel where a monster stomps around the world breathing fire and causing havoc.Visitors to the microsite can control the beast and pick up some red-hot deals from STA Travel at the same time, making their whole trip just as big, but not so scary.

Sick of hearing bad news? Us too, which is why The Optimist is such a ray of sunshine. It’s a new website that looks on the bright side of life: spreading positive news and connecting like-minded organisations amongst other things.
The identity was designed by LOVE’s Emma Morton, who created a fun and light-hearted chirpy bird character. So the next time someone uses the phrase “a little birdy told me”, they’re probably talking about The Optimist - if it’s good news, that is.

 We had a very pleasant cup of tea and a chat with Iain from Poke this morning.  He’s up in Manchester doing some research groups so it was very nice of him to interrupt his schedule and pop in.  Apart from being a thoroughly interesting chap and one of the driving forces behind one of the most acclaimed digital marketing agencies, we also admired his honesty and humility especially when it came to a discussion about measuring and demonstrating the effectiveness of digital campaigns.Now that digital is fully integrated at LOVE, we dream of having just a fraction of the success that Poke have enjoyed.  What a top fella and a top agency.  If you absolutely insist on going with a London digital shop they might be worth a call….

Alex fulfilled one of his lifelong dreams recently when he finally got to meet Alistair Sim from LOVE. Alex was heard to gush “Alistair, I’ve always admired your ability to organise an unruly bunch of talented but over-paid premadonnas into a vaguely coherent team.” Alistair politely asked Alex to remove his hand from the backside of his female colleague.

A little message of congratulations and best wishes from LOVE to MUSIC, the new design consultancy set up by ex-LOVEster Dave Simpson. MUSIC wont need any of our support to be a brilliant success because Dave is a genius, but good luck anyway. We look forward to our invites to your launch party. When we get the MUSIC url we’ll provide a link to it. In the meantime, here is a picture of Dave Simpson, the Music critic for The Guardian who doesn’t look anything like Dave Simpson the founder of Music, the brilliant new design consultancy.

[got the url - designbymusic.com]

The Belgian League For The Blind are encouraging people to put their donation line number as the first entry on your mobile address book so every time you accidentally ring ‘A Blind Number’, the charity gets a cut of the cost of the call. Handily they also cut the call off after 30 seconds so the most it’ll cost you is Eur 0.75.

Maybe something like AAAARDVARK and a single number could become the default number that the worlds mobile users put in their handsets for such events. Then we could persuade the mobile networks to donate the full cost of accidental calls to this number to a central charity pot.Think it is worth pursuing?

At the end of last week we met up with Bob and Jamie, the inventors of the Sound Asleep pillow. It’s a simple but brilliant idea, the stuff of Dragon’s Den. It’s a pillow you can plug your MP3 into so you can fall asleep to your favourite tunes without the discomfort of headphones or the risk of strangulation from either headphone wires or a bed partner sick of listening to your music via the in-bedroom speaker system . We’re not talking Bose levels of sound quality or anything, but for £20(ish) it’s the kind of thing that anyone who likes music and sleep (i.e most of us) might enjoy.

Of course ‘musicsleep’ is one thing, but we’ve been pondering other potential uses. Apparently listening to ‘white noise’ when you’re sleeping stops people from snoring, so long-suffering partners of fog-horn snoozers should plug them into the Sound Asleep pillow immediately.

Interesting enough, but what else? Well, with a language course playing as you doze, is it possible to go to bed having only the scantest knowledge of Japanese and wake up finding you’re capable of ordering a beer in Yokohama? Or could you go to bed being a 20-a-day smoker and wake up repulsed by Regal King Size after settling down with a pillow, an ipod and a handy hypnotic cig-hating download? Who knows.

But the key question Bob and Jamie want us to answer is this. Can we create a famous advertising campaign for the Sound Asleep pillow that sells truckloads of this neat invention?

Congratulations to our friends at Zygo - the mobile social networking brand (ahem, shameless plug) - who have been shortlisted in the Mobile Marketing Awards 2008 and Mobile Rules! Awards. We promise to have your sparkling new Beta ready very shortly

An old friend of mine (that’s a friend from a long time ago, not a friend who’s got a pensioner’s bus pass) made contact again recently to tell me about his latest project - one page magazine.

He’s taken the exact location of logos in magazine ads and printed them ontop of each other - thus making a magazine in one page (the penny drops). A really simple idea, and beautifully done too.

Admittedly his motives for getting in touch weren’t quite the “long-time-no-see-old-buddy” that I might have been hoping for, but I hope he does well with them.

You can currently buy limited edition prints for The Economist (August 4-10, 2007), Wired (Feb ‘07), Vogue (French edition, March ‘07), Hello (31st July ‘07), OK (7th August ‘07), Time Magazine (17th Sept, ‘07) and National Geographic (March ‘07). Prices up to €50 plus postage. See here for more details.