Date: Thursday, 2nd October, 2008

Time: From 6 30pm

Venue: The Northern, Tib Street, Manchester

Attending: TBWA, CB/JWT, Brahm, LOVE, Public, plus anyone else interested.

More specifically, these people here, here, here, here, here and here. Sorry if I’ve missed anyone off.

Do come along if you’re in the area.

Thanks to everyone who’s applied to CLASS so far – we’ve been pleasantly surprised by the quantity and quality of work sent in. Deadline for entries is this Friday – as in Friday 3rd October, 2008. We’ll draw the line at midnight, although you should really have better things to do at midnight on a Friday night. We’ll be looking at all the work in the week afterwards, and post details up here. (We’ll also email you if you’ve applied. It’s the polite thing to do, and my mother reads this blog.)

Some people like awards for creativity. Some people don’t. If you’re the latter, please click here now.

For the rest of you, we’ll keep this as short as possible. Last night was the 5th Fresh Creative Awards in association with Campaign and Design Week. It was held at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester. It was attended by over 350 people. We were lucky enough to win a total of five Golds, three Silver and six Bronze awards. We also had two pieces nominated for the Big F. But The Chase’s calendar won that. If you haven’t seen it already, it’s really quite good. Below is our work that featured.

Silver Cross: Gold: Packaging

Silver Cross: Gold: Writing for Design, Bronze: Promotional Brochures

STA: Gold: Writing for Design, Best use of copy. Silver: Art Direction

National Year of Reading: Silver: Direct Mail. Bronze: Writing for Design

Skeggy’s mate’s sisters hairdresser’s uncle’s Rugby Tournament: Bronze: Low Budget

Bruntwood: Bronze: Business to Business

University of the Arts, London: Gold: Print. Silver: Promotional Brochures

Microsoft: Bronze: Writing for Design, Best Use of Illustration

Special thanks must go to the excellent Ian Stevenson for his illustrations for Microsoft, and to Ben Wedderburn for his equally beautiful photography on the Silver Cross Packaging. Apologies we failed to mention you before.

Well done to everyone who worked on the projects, and thanks to all the judges and Fresh. See you next year.

It’s probably a little late notice for anyone who doesn’t have a ticket, but the new D&AD Book launches tonight at Urbis. We’ll be there, perhaps you will too. Maybe we could even have a drink together. Simon Waterfall will be speaking, as will Garrick Hamm, who’ll be taking over from Mr Waterfall as D&AD President this year.

The book’s been designed by Neville Brody book has attracted a bit of controversy for the fact that the ‘&AD’ (as in advertising) is left on the back, with Design featuring on the front. Apparently Big Nev’s not a massive fan of adland, but on further investigation it’s actually about ‘Digital & Anti Digital’. Hope that’s cleared that up. This post has also given us the opportunity to shamelessly re-plug Gre’s beautiful work for University of the Arts, London which features among its pages somewhere.

There’s been a bit of Post-It tomfoolery around the office in the last few days. Some of it creative, some of it not so creative. But then I found this on Gui Seiz’ blog which is kind of special. Sure it won’t be long before someone rips it off for a client (if they haven’t already)

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

And a few more examples I found on the web…

And a few more…

With all this talk of CLASS, it seemed appropriate to post these examples of lateral thinking from the world’s classrooms, some verging on genius. Yes, they’re all old, but they’re all goodies too.

More here and here.

OK, maybe we should start with an apology to all those who have been sending us your work in the last year, asking for placements. You know who you are. We’re sorry.

We know we’ve been a bit slack, but that’s about to change. CLASS is launching to give graduates the chance to come and work along side us for three months, and yes, you will be paid. Obviously we won’t be able to give everyone placements, but it’s a start, so bear with us.

CLASS is not specific to design or advertising or digital or illustration or copywriting or photography. It’s just specific to class. And by class we don’t mean middle class/ working class, or what class you were in at school. We mean class as in class act. What the dictionary describes as ‘Admirable skill or excellence in performance.’

So, if you think that sounds like you, and you fancy joining us for a while, email your portfolio to class@lovecreative.com, or post a copy of it to the address on the top right. First or second class is fine. Because of the length of placement, we’re only accepting portfolios from grads. If you’re a student out there reading this and thinking that’s a bit unfair, then, well… you might be right. But that’s the rules. You can still come in and show us your portfolio – you just won’t get a placement.

We’ll be spending the next couple of weeks looking through the work, and hopefully we’ll announce who’ll be joining us on 10^th October.

(I’m not exactly sure why I’ve included so many images of 80s highschool movies in this post. Think I just got carried away.)

Congratulations to our very talented Mr Chris Gray, who’s just had another T-Shirt of the week produced by Howies. Here’s the first one he did:

Nice. Here’s another:

And another:

And another:

But here’s Chris’s latest T-Shirt:

Now personally, I can’t help but think Chris really wasn’t trying as hard as he could do with this effort, but he assures me it took him several hours of intensive scribbling to get it just right. So what do I know? Unfortunately, I was meant to post about this on Monday, when Chris’s T-Shirt was still for sale, but it’s not anymore. Sorry. That’s why it’s called T-shirt of the week, and not T-shirt of the month, or even T-shirt of the year. If you’d still like a copy, get in touch and I’ll get my two-year-old daughter to draw one up for you.

Well done Chris. More where that came from, please.

Ben Wilson is an artist who works in London. Muswell Hill to be precise. Whilst most artists prefer to use canvas or paper for their work, Ben uses chewing gum that’s been squashed into the highstreet.

Ben’s been creating his miniature masterpieces full time since October 2004, and the trend seems to be finally catching on here in the north too. Here’s one effort we found outside our local boozer:

Thanks to DHM for the story and pictures (minus the last one). There’s also a short film about Ben’s work here.