Design agency VBAT has won a golden Graphis Award with its retail design for the Dutch SNS Bank. We’re not too familiar with the Graphis award, but the website looks pretty distinguished. And if we judge the design, it does look…uhm…very, very colourful. So we definitely believe that this new retail environment will do a great job in separating the bank from its competitors. It might even be able to make SNS the sexiest bank in the Netherlands – though personally we’d rather go for reliability these days. One thing we would like to advise SNS though; please do create some matching advertising, cause if you ask us what the SNS brand is all about, we wouldn’t have a clue. In our mind, the brand is fairly insignificant.

Last night Amsterdam won 2 golden design Lions. Amsterdam Worldwide for its Onitsuka Tiger Tansu sneaker (picture) and FHV/BBDO for its black Mars packaging (almost) without the iconic Mars logo. Consumers received a sheet of letter stickers to create their own text on the Mars bar. The jury was charmed by the fact that Mars dared to change its world famous packaging so radically. In Cyber Amsterdam won 2 bronze Lions. Achtung! with ‘Public Polo‘ for Volkswagen and Kong (again) with Stanislav for the Ministry of Justice. The day before yesterday we got 2 silver outdoor Lions. Again, one for MINI Christmas box by UbachsWisbrun/JWT and one for Interbest, created by Y&R Not just film. Indie won bronze in radio for Dance4Life.

Source: Adformatie

KesselsKramer is known for every now and then creating stuff that is not necessarily made to sell products. It just makes its employees – and the world around them – happy. Take for example this website, called ‘All the banners of the web’. It was sent to us by Zack McDonald from KK, with a little note: “Unless you are a newborn baby, a prisoner of war or a pet rock, banner ads are an inescapable part of your life. You see them every day, yet you don’t know anything about them. Not really. Now is your chance to get to know Vertical Rectangle, Wide Skyscraper, Micro Bar and the rest of the gang. Learn about their fears, their desires, their ambitions, their fetishes. See them as the unique individuals they are, rather than the anonymous annoyances you imagine them to be”. So when you click on a banner, you can read about its personality. For example the rectangle (a banner we sometimes – but not very often – use on our website) is described as: ‘Rectangle likes to party hard’. Apparently it’s a female, cause ‘sometimes she kisses a stranger’. And if you think that is a bit trashy, you don’t have to worry, since ‘she rarely goes all the way with someone she just met’. Besides, ‘her friends are just catty little prudes with sticks wedged way far up their butts’. And this is just one of the banners. If this site is to sell anything, it is KesselsKramer’s creativity.

Amsterdam design agency DAY won two red dot Awards this year for the in-store design of the Van Gogh Museum shop here in Amsterdam (click on picture to enlarge) and a Nike Store in Paris. Both designs also won the additional honours of ‘best of the best’ and ‘distinction for high design quality’, respectively. We’ve checked out the red dot design website and if you see how many categories and awards there are, it’s hard not to win any. Having said that, we very much like what the design agency did with the Van Gogh shop. And, while we’re at it, recently Dutch interior design agency UXUS has been appointed to design the shops for the Tate Modern. That is, both for the existing Tate Modern as well as the impressive Herzog & de Meuron extension.

Between 1966 and 1986 Californian sports brand K-Swiss sold only one model tennis shoe without ever changing it. Today K-Swiss reverently calls it the ‘The Classic’, because every other tennis shoe that followed was derived from it. And 44 years after its launch, and with the help of Amsterdam based agency Lemon Scented Tea, K-Swiss shares the shoe’s rich history in a story of 8 chapters. Under the campaign motto ‘You gotta know your classics’, every chapter highlights one of the unique aspects of the white leather tennis shoe. On top of that K-Swiss asked 8 designers across the globe to graphically interpret the ‘chapters’ on a poster; Mario Lombardo (Berlin), Value and Service (London), Cobbenhagen & Hendriksen (Amsterdam), Mark Owens (Los Angeles), Non-Format (US), Grand People (Bergen), Fabian Jenny (Zurich) and Sung Min Choi & Sulki Choi (Seoul). Only 400 copies of each poster were printed to give the whole project limited-editionesque exclusivity. We chose to share chapter ‘K’, since we guessed most people would like to learn where the letter ‘K’ comes from. The artwork was done by Sean Murphy at Value and Service. Here’s a passage from the copy that accompanies it: “K is for Kalifornia. We know, it defies all logic, deliberately misspelling the name of our home turf like that. But to the two Swiss brothers who designed the first Classic from their L.A. garage, calling their company Kalifornia-Swiss was the most logical thing in the world. It was their way of paying homage to a place that had welcomed them with a progressive, creative and playful culture – and limitless tennis courts”. You got to love this kind of designvertising that adds heritage, profile and sophistication to a brand.

Here’s a teaser for the new Onitsuka Tiger campaign made by Amsterdam Worldwide (AW). What a cool brand to work for. First of all Onitsuka always seems to give its agency carte blanche with respect to coming up with truly creative stuff. Secondly the brand proposition ‘made of Japan’ allows AW to draw inspiration from the rich Japanese culture. Every year the agency creates a giant sneaker with a special Japanese theme. Last year it was the Zodiac calender. This year the agency created an integrated campaign around the traditionally crafted ‘Tansu’ (a chest with box shaped drawers). It took a team of Tansu masters four months to handicraft the shoe shaped ‘Kaidan’ (step) Tansu, using techniques that date back from the time of the Samurai. Back in the days these chests were used both as a cabinet as well as a hidden ladder that made upstairs lofts look inaccessible – and thus not taxable – to the tax collector. But there’s more; the Onitsuka shoe works like a puzzle; the boxes must be unlocked in a specific sequence to unveil its hidden treasures. For those who cannot admire the real chest – on display in Onitsuka’s flagship stores – AW made an online version that invites the consumer to solve the puzzle. The project is topped off with special instore Tansu-themed materials. Talking about craftmanship…

Already since 1924 Holland has a tradition of Kinderpostzegels (children stamps). The stamps are issued once a year by TNT Post, distributed by school children throughout their neighborhood and sold with a surcharge. The money of this charity goes to projects that focus on the welfare of vulnerable children. Every year the stamp has a different theme and this year it is ‘let the children learn’. The distinctive and clean design of the stamps and this commercial was done by Christian Borstlap and brought to life by director Paul Postma. And the catchy music by Hopkins and Kenjamin tops it off nicely!

Already in January we called this commercial about the Big Bank Theory by Dawn ‘state of the art storytelling’. Last weekend the beautiful animation, made by Postma Graphics and Motions, won a Dutch Design Award for best motion design. A good excuse to show it again.

The Makelaarsvereniging Amsterdam, MVA (professional body of real estate agents), is organizing a house crawl – obviously inspired by the pub crawl. Especially for young urban professionals a busy job is hard to combine with the hunt for a new house. Thanks to this house crawl, invented by New Message, it is possible to see several houses in a single evening. And you even get a drink and a bite at every house you visit. How’s that for insightful efficiency! And we very much like the design of the sign that will be attached to the houses that join the MVA house crawl. No more explanation required; simply brilliant.

We are very proud to introduce our new visual identity. It is created by Meneer de Zwart. The reason why we wanted to change our previous logo, is that it looked too much like the city marketing logo of Amsterdam: I Amsterdam. We kept the original colours red and black, because these colours represent the Amsterdam coat of arms. The lettering in the logo is inspired by the Amsterdamse School, an architectural style from the 1920’s that is very dominant throughout Amsterdam. Many bridges still display the Amsterdamse School font. With the new identity we’ve also added two new sections to our blog: interviews and jobs. For the interview section we will ask Amsterdam creatives 9 questions about creativity, advertising and Amsterdam. The job section will display vacancies in the Amsterdam creative industry and give tips for expats that (want to) move to Amsterdam. In the next few weeks we’ll start to upload content to these new sections. And there are still some design changes to be made and technical bugs to be fixed, but we hope you appreciate our new design and would love to hear your comments.