Top 5 Archive — 12
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Before our Tip 5 there was our Top 5. These are the archived pages from our 5 weekly hot tips from yesteryear.
1: Beautiful appetite engineering
In our professional field there are a number of legends. As chauvinistic Dutchmen, we could keep that list fairly short. But chauvinistic Dutchmen we are not. To be honest, most graphic adventures have taking place outside our borders for decades… We have grown up with the digital tide in design and initially looked up to giants who rode the post-modern graphic waves of anything goes (David Carson, Neville Brody, Rudy VanderLans). But the work of Martin Venezky (and his Appetite Engineers) always stood out from the rest through its poetic visual approach and naturally loose compositions. Falling in love with his spectacular work for Speak Magazine in the late 90s, it’s a pleasure to see he has perfected his sense of composition over the years in the short documentary Beautiful (then gone) by Practice.
2: Shoot
Henk Loorbach is a buddy of ours who makes film. Most Dutch folks see his commercials for the Dutch tax authorities, banks, insurance companies, cookies and DIY shop on a regular basis, but there’s a also a more obscure and fun side to his practice. Henk divides his time between commercial work and free work, where he makes fun nonsense like Kodog, or extremely time consuming videoclips like this, this or this. Just wanted to let our sun shine a bit on Henk in this Friday’s top 5 : )
3: Thom the ultimate talent scout.
Thom Yorke is one of the most respected and relevant musicians of this time. After huge successes with his band Radiohead, he’s shown a nose for partnering with extremely talented people from all over the globe in the fields of music, live visuals (Tarik Barri) and of course music videos. His Netflix art venture (which is basically a 15 minute commercial for his latest album Anima…) is worth checking out, but be sure to watch this one by Brooklyn based studio Art Camp as well!
4: Bonjour! Quoi?
It seems a thing from the past: commercials that made waves for being hardcore pieces of art (or at least for being bad-ass concepts). But gems still get made. And more often than not the really good stuff is by contemporary giants like Spike Jonze (check that making of!!), Wes Anderson and our favorite Frenchmen Michel Gondry. Gondry made a lovely commercial for HP, see it here (yep, also cool making of!). HP made a complementary campaign website to top it off, with 250 hours worth of holiday activities as an alternative for wasted screen time. Yawnnnn… Apparently every major company still feels the need to function as our moral compass.
5: Dreamscapes in the air.
There’s a hint of kitsch to this, but still: it looks f*cking amazing! The Poetic Kinetics collective are taking over international public spaces by storm, installing artworks from LA to Berlin to St. Petersburg. Their site is full of colorful, somewhat esoteric installations, but if you ask us, the magic happens in a minimalistic one color approach.