Ever since those three guys turned up at the birth of Christ the world has been shaped by wise guys. (Wise girls, too. But for the sake of this post we’re focusing on wise guys.) Other wise guys of note from history include Genghis Khan, Oliver Cromwell, Wyatt Earp, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, Bill Gates, Daley Thompson, and let’s not forget the wisest guy of all, Paulie ‘Walnuts’ Gualtiere. Well if you head over to Umbro’s blog you’ll get your chance to prove you too are a genuine, bona fide wise guy (or girl) with their caption competition.

Please don’t leave a caption on here. This isn’t our caption competition. Leave your wise-guy comment on their blog.

I’ll say it again, don’t leave your caption here. If you want to comment, perhaps you could just suggest other wise guys from history.

Thank you.

Fortunately the man himself is alive and well, but NY agency Cliff Freeman Partners has now closed its doors, as reported on ITIABTWC and Ad Age. I don’t think I knew an ad creative in the early 00s that didn’t want to work there. Personally I liked, but didn’t love the outpost.com spots:

but Alan and Jerome were the real superstars. These ads are over 8 years old, but wouldn’t look out of place on TV today. In fact, if you’ve seen the Ford idents on sky sports recently you’ll see what I mean.

OK the effects could be a little better, but the writing’s top drawer. Or bottom drawer depending on where you like to keep your good stuff. “I’ve got the flava that you sava, watch my Kobe Bryant no-look confusion maker.” Genius.

Then there were these great commercials for The X Show:

But it turns out Fallon McElligott actually did these. Still, I’m sure Cliff could have done them, if he wanted to. Cliff could have done them blindfolded. With one hand. And no ears.

Thanks for the memories Cliff and good luck. (Not that you’re ever likely to read this.)

Spin. Those in the advertising and marketing world should be no stranger to it. It first seemed to enter the public conscience with Alistair Campbell, PM Tony Blair’s very own ‘Spin Doctor’. That Max Clifford chap had something to do with it all too. There’s no situation so bad these men can’t turn it into something good with a bit of positive spin.

Sadly Max and Big Al (to his mates) are currently out of the office, and the only spin I can think of to put on our two silver awards at Friday night’s Roses Design Awards comes from the popular playground rhyme:

“First the worst, second the best.”

As memory serves the lyrics make no mention of nominations and how they sit in this ranking system.

One Silver was for the A-Z books for The University of the Arts, London.

The other silver was for our own website, which you shouldn’t really need to see an image of. Click the button marked ‘WORK’ in the top right corner of this page.

Still it was a good night, and congratulations to everyone from Manchester who managed to survive the two hour train journey to Nottingham without dying from asphyxiation.

And congratulations to Uniform for collecting Design Team of the Year and True North for picking up the Grand Prix. (Bad choice of words, there, perhaps.)

Here are the Top 10 Facts about The Liverpool Design Symposium according to the September edition of Design Symposium Magazine, available from all good news agents:

1) The Liverpool Design Symposium takes place on Wednesday 4th November.

2) The Liverpool Design Symposium is in Liverpool.

3) The Liverpool Design Symposium includes talks from Ian Thompson, Andy Chambers, Deborah Dawton, and Peter Mills.

4)  The Liverpool Design Symposium will also feature a D&AD President’s Lecture by Michael Wolff. Tickets can be purchased here.

5) The Liverpool Design Symposium’s website can be found here.

6) The Liverpool Design Symposium takes place in the LJMU Art & Design Academy.

7) The Liverpool Design Symposium has 27 letters. That’s one more than the alphabet.

8) The Liverpool Design Symposium doesn’t really rhyme with anything, making it almost completely useless in a limerick.

9) The Liverpool Design Symposium is the only time of year that Tamsin Valentino ever contacts me, to check that we’re putting something up on the blog about it. Not even a Christmas card.

10) The Liverpool Design Symposium is brought to you in association with Liverpool John Moore University, D&AD, dba, The Drum, Merseyside ACME, Design Initiative, Liverpool Design Festival, Uniform, Smiling Wolf, Black & Ginger, the letter F and the number 8.

As some of you will have already read our joint-MD Richard Hall left us on Wednesday to go traveling. He’s off to Peru, where, quite possibly he will see some stuff. Peruvian stuff. Although Rich has only been with us for a little over a year, he’s made a big impression on us, and he’ll be missed.

But we couldn’t let Rich leave without a few drinks and a nice card.

Good luck Rich and Katherine – we hope all your travels will be good ones.

Some things in life are so bad, they’re actually good.

And some things are so good, they’re actually bad.

And other things in life are so bad they are genuinely bad, but then over time they actually become good.

And then some things that are actually bad, seem good at first, but then go bad, only to come good again for a while, but then end up going back to being bad again.

And some things that are really, really bad, can be rescued by the use of a really, really good copywriter.

The film below is one such example. It was created on the premise that people would actually have a party in their own home to celebrate the launch of MS Windows 7.

Which is a bad premise.

It’s filmed with a group of really bad actors, and have been ’cleverly’ picked to  represent as many different groups as possible. (Male/Female, Black/White, Young/Old, Bespectacled/ Unbespectacled, etc) I couldn’t really work out if anyone from the LGBT community is represented here, but I’m sure it came up in the Pre Production Meeting. I figured the guy with the glasses might have been, but there’s a moment at 3.06 which makes me think he’s got something going with the old lady.

It all sounds like the proverbial recipe for disaster that our parents warned us about when we were younger. But what they haven’t overlooked here is the quality of the writing, which, in my humble opinion, like… totally saves this film and… y’know… gives it a natural, genuine feel.

It makes the unbelievable seem believable.

Perhaps it wasn’t scripted at all – they might have been ad-libbing – it’s difficult to tell. I think my favourite line is: “Oh my gosh, when everyone was there and settled I led an overview of some of my favourite Windows 7 features.”

Developer Rich commented that: “It looks great. Possibly the only way to better it is by beating each of the actors in the face with that laptop.”

I fail to see his point.

Two things of varying degrees of pain happened over the weekend.

Firstly our Finance Director Mr Paul Chorlton completed the Great North Run in a more than respectable 2 hours nine minutes, raising £855 for The Together Trust. If you’d like to add to that total you can do so here. Well done Paul and sister Emma. (Paul’s sister is  called Emma. She’s not a nun, to my knowledge.)

And secondly Freelance legend Mr Matt Booth had a baby boy, Oscar. Or at least his Mrs did. Many congratulations to all. Here’s a photo of Oscar in all his 6lb 3 oz of glory.

Rumours that toweling is covering a large tattoo are yet to be confirmed. But they haven’t been denied either.

In other news, Stephen Owen watched some telly at the weekend. Well done Ste.

Over the last eight months we’ve been doing a lot of work with Umbro. Sadly much of it we cannot show you, except the outside cover.

Inside is a ten year global brand plan that we’ve helped develop for them. That’s a plan, for a brand, that will be used all over the world, for approximately ten years. So while it might not be much to look at, there’s gold in them thar pages. A neat detail that I’ve been told to bring to your attention is the use of boot studs to bind it with. See what we did there?

We could show you more, but then we’d have to kill you, but unless you left your name and address in the comments section we wouldn’t really know who you are or where you live, so actually we wouldn’t be able to kill you. Fortunately we were also asked by Umbro to help “articulate this new direction to all the staff at their Cheadle offices: we needed to bring football culture to their workplace in an engaging and meaningful way.” And we can show you some pictures of the work we did there.

Those are genuine, bona fide, authentic, original Wembley seat backs on the wall there. You can see more of the work we did at their offices by clicking here. And a big thank you to the illustrators at TOY for all their excellent work.

There’s plenty more to show you, but let’s save some for another day.

Dear Abby, Adam, Alex, Alex, Andy, Andy, Andy, Andrew, Amit, Anna, Anthony, Anthony, Ashley, Ben, Ben, Becky, Charlotte, Christopher, Christopher, Chris, Clint, Daniel, Danny, Dany, David, Dean, Dominic, Edward, Elizabeth, Ella, Fiata, Ganella, Grace, Helen, Helen, Howard, Jade, James, James, Jamie, Jenny, Joanne, Karl, Kate, Katie, Kedarnath, Kirsty, Kooi, Laura, Lisa, Mark, Matt, Matthew, Mayu, Meera, Michael, Nicola, Nilesh, Olga, Phil, Phill, Rachael, Raphael, Richard, Ross, Ryan, Sally, Sarah, Sarah, Sarah, Sara, Selina, Simon, Sophie, Steven, Steve, Tom, Tommy, Tony, Victoria, Will and William.

Firstly, thank you for all the excellent work you sent in.

Secondly, thank you for your patience – we’ve been pretty busy here and it’s not always easy to find time to fit all these things in.

Thirdly, we’ve finally looked through all the portfolios (at 79 there more than a third as many as last year. If I had more time I would work out the exact percentage increase, but it’s nearly time to go home) and we’ve drawn up a shortlist of ten grads to come into LOVE for a few drinks. We did this last year, and I think people found it useful – even the nine who we didn’t pick. It just gives us a bit of time to see all your work and check you’re not a total axe murderer.

We could announce them all on here, but it doesn’t seem like the done thing. So I’ll email you all over the weekend to let you know. If I was more important and powerful I would have someone to do all this for me, but I’m not, so I don’t. but I’ll be as quick as I can.

Have a good weekend. Here’s a funny link for you. (It’s not really that bad.)

Taking the LOVE 2009 wedding count to three at the weekend was our designer Mr Rory Sutherland and his lovely bride Eleanor. Here’s a picture of the happy couple:

Congratulations guys – hope the surf’s good in Bali. This also gives us the perfect opportunity to show Rory’s wedding invite, which has been nominated for The Roses Design Awards.

Best Use of Jigsaw or something. Everyone knows this is the only real reason creatives get married – to do a fancy wedding invite to show off to their friends. If you’re currently engaged to a creative you should probably sit down and have a long chat together. I’m looking at you Jennifer Keating, and you Sarah Edmonston. Just be careful, that’s all I’m saying. And if you’re already married to a creative you better have got a decent wedding invite, otherwise everyone’s wasted their time.

LOVE not only leads to marriage, but also to babies. (Ironically babies lead to a distinct lack of love  for the following weeks/ months/ years.) Whilst Mr Jon Humphries doesn’t work for us, The Neighbourhood don’t have a blog, (I know, I know… they are like soooo lame.) so congratulations Jon, Lorna and Darragh on the arrival of Flynn. Happy sleepless nights.

And finally here’s a song dedicated to our ginger friend who left us for the world of freelance on Friday.

Good luck Adam, and thanks for letting me have your pen organiser, even though you wouldn’t wash it out for me before you left. I’ll take good care of it.