We recently installed a webcam and an LED board in our office. But not just any old webcam or any old LED board…

Well, okay, it kind of is just any old webcam and any old LED board. But what interactive developer extraordinaire Jamie has done with them is what’s interesting. He has been slaving away on a clever application that picks up data from Twitter and translates it into LED speak. It sounds simple enough and it’s dead easy to use, but he showed me some of the code, and it looks like something out of Lost.

You can see the live feed on our homepage. Click the hashtag underneath the image (#LOVESTUDIO), compose a heartfelt message, hit Tweet, and it’ll magically appear on the LED board.

It’s a neat opportunity for you, dear reader, to interact with our office, fulfil all of your office/LED-based voyeurism fantasies, and see your tweets in bright lights. Have fun.

Ok, so we might not have been on The Apprentice, but we definitely, definitely will be at Design Symposium North next Thursday in Liverpool. At least Chris and Dave will, alongside Ann Rimmer from Clock Creative, and they’ll be talking about how to get your foot in the door at agencies like ours.

Or more precisely: The most effective brand solutions are based on impact, a clear proposition, striking personality and key differentiators. So how can you use these same principles when selling yourself to a potential employer?

There’s lots on for students and professionals alike. Check it out and get yourself registered.

Tune in to BBC 1 tomorrow night (Wednesday) at 9pm to maybe see us on The Apprentice!

The teams visited our studio to design identities for a fashion related task. It was our job to turn their terrible ideas into reality in about five minutes. So, naturally, the work isn’t anywhere near our usual standard. But we’ll do anything to get on the telly.

We’re not 100% sure that we’ll actually be in it. We might only be on screen for a few seconds. I suppose it depends if there was a lot of arguing or not.

The filming happened ages ago, so it’s hard to remember what happened exactly. But I’m sure it involved power suits, excessive use of loudspeaker and at least one person making a tit of themselves. Hopefully not one of us.

While we’re on the subject of the world’s toughest job interview, our search for an exceptional middleweight designer continues…

We won gold in typography for the University of the Arts London short course prospectus:

Bronze for our Modern China mugs, now available in the shop:

And our very own Ste ran away with the Chairman’s Award for The Most Inappropriate Attire to a Black Tie Event:

This is Umbro’s fastest boot and coming in at 238grams, it’s also their lightest ever. Aimed at the younger end of the market it comes in both a white/orange and a black/lime colourway.

We had a shared ambition with Umbro to produce a global execution that shied away from the typical OTT CGI stuff you see knocking around. So we went the other way and said ‘speed’ with cardboard, fishing wire, double-sided sticky tape and glue.

The pop art inspiration behind this was partly to do with the fast-consumerism, instant everything-ness of modern youth and partly to do with the ‘pop’ colours of the boot itself. Illustration by Chris Gray and Rob Bailey of Toy and photography by Tom Van Schelven.

We created 3 executions: Vroom, Kapow and Boom (with Darren Bent) along with a toolkit of assets and a series of digital banners and animated perimeter board executions.

And here’s some behind the scenes making of snaps c/o Chris. Just to prove it’s not a photoshop job.

If you want to find out more about Umbro GT click here:
www.umbro.com/#/changing-room/Umbro-GT/?locale=en_GB

We have just completed a rebrand of Umbro’s Teamwear offer aimed at the amateur football team market (Sunday leagues, pie eating pub teams, after work kick around etc). Umbro’s founding father (Harold Humphreys) believed that looking smart gives players a psychological advantage over their opponent and this insight is born out in these stylishly tailored football strips.

Our approach was to produce a game-changing piece of communication. Showing respect for the players who form Sunday league teams up and down the country by offering them product and communications that make them the hero.

47,000 of these large format brochures are now in circulation and have already started to cause a bit of a stir.

Thanks go to Steve Rhodes and the Umbro team, Tom Van Schelven, Tommy Cockram, Paula, Dani, Vicky, Harmsworth Print, Mum, Dad, Fabio, and Rooney.

Competition has been tough with local rivals Kebabish failing with their launch attempt last week when they tried to send their 3 man team and their rocket ‘Rice&3′ to the moon.

They are currently working on their latest rocket which “will be ready in about 5 minutes” revealed the guy behind the counter.

Best wishes from us all here at LOVE.

Are you an experienced designer of top (shelf) digital stuff?

Do you pump out web/digital design like there’s no tomorrow?

Do you get all hot and bothered over ideas getting it on with concepts?

Do you want to push hard into the digital design envelope till it begs for more?

Can you hold your own with the big boys?

Good, good. Well, we’ve got a senior digital design position that needs a good filling. Send your CV, website or whatever to hello (at) lovecreative (dot) com.

*sorry. don’t know what came over me.

Massive congratulations to one of our clients Umbro who won Sports Brand of the Year at the Sports Industry Awards last night. All the good and the great of the British and International sporting industry were there including Fabio Capello, Sir Alex Ferguson, Will Greenwood and Alastair Campbell (who apparently plays tiddlywinks).

Well done Umbo folks, take the next two days off on us.

To celebrate their big 5-0 on April 1st, Dr. Martens got 10 artists to cover 10 classic tracks and made 10 videos:  Noisettes cover Buzzcocks, DāM-FunK gets the Human League and The Duke Spirit do Sham 69, all with great videos by the best directors. So to show them off, we’ve built a website to be absorbed into Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Clipfish in Germany and Tudou in China. We wanted no barriers to it going global socially.

A week later, it’s got nearly 4,000 fans on Facebook and 50,000 people have watched the videos on YouTube, with lots more videos to come as the year goes on. There’s a blog written by passionate music journos Nina Manandhar and Nendie Pinto-Duschinsky, who just love their DM’s and want to see this go far, as well as the best-selling author Martin Roach and DM’s product designers.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.