Over the past few months, we’ve been having a bit of fun with animated GIFs in the studio.

Until fairly recently, the animated GIF was thought to have been consigned to the same dark corner of the internet as Geocities, AltaVista and the dreaded <marquee> & <blink> tags (anyone remember those?).

Invented in 1987 as a means of serving colour images to web users, the format has been making a comeback in a serious way recently.

The style and content of this new wave of GIFs covers a wide gamut, ranging from the photographic to the abstract. Here are a few of our favourites:

Jamie Beck & Kevin Burg’s poetic Cimenagraphs, which add a touch of motion to a single moment:

(‘The Neverending commute’, from their NYC series)

This series of simple, but fantastic ’3D GIFs’ created by photographer Jaime Martínez for MIA’s 2010 album MAYA:

We also love the more graphic ‘net art’ of creators like Mr Div and recurring studio favourite Rafaël Rozendaal:

Mr Div’s diamond_lines

An image from Rafaël Rozendaal’s Happy Mondays series, comissioned for AND Festival.

As we move towards consuming more & more content on our iDevices, the humble animated GIF has proven a great way of sneaking in a bit of movement into places where video either isn’t practical or just won’t run at all.

The format is undeniably digital, but also tends to be social – there is something about a well-formed, infinitely-looping sliver of movement that lends itself to being shared, reblogged, and retweeted.

For our part, we’ve been using them in recent EDMs for long-time client Campbelltown Arts Centre – if you didn’t catch them in your inbox over the course of the year, you can have a look at the recent work we’ve done for them, or view a few recent campaigns below:

• A Weekend of Music at Campbelltown Arts Centre
• Hi, Anxiety!!! | Curated by Tom Polo
• Ensemble Offspring: Music to Infinity
• Everyday Rituals: Performance in Our Midst

Or if you’d like to travel back to the golden age of the .GIF, have a look at this impressive collection of classic ‘Under Construction’ GIFs.

In 2009 we self-funded Trunk Volume One: Hair. It won awards and got great reviews. It’s nearly sold out and we made nearly enough money to cover costs.

We are determined to publish our next book — Trunk Volume Two: Blood, but it is a labour of love and we need your help.

How can you help bring the book to life?

Head over to Indiegogo and check out the goodies on offer in return for your kind support.

NSW Deputy Premier and Minister for Trade and Investment Andrew Stoner said Boccalatte’s appointment to the Creative Industries Taskforce will ensure the needs of design are addressed.

“The new Creative Industries Taskforce brings together some of the State’s best talent from a broad range of creative industries fields including film and television, fashion, publishing, the built environment, advertising, design and the performing arts,” Mr Stoner said.

“I am delighted to have Suzanne on the Taskforce – her passion and expertise in graphic design and advertising will be invaluable.”

The Creative Industries Taskforce will identify industry-led initiatives and Government actions to support the State’s creative industries. A draft report will be released in August, with the final 10-year development strategy, including two year and five year goals, to be presented to the NSW Government by September 2012.

Find out more about the NSW Creative Industries Taskforce.

See also… Sydney Film Festival 2012

Boccalatte designed and developed a solution to showcase over 600 beautiful people, stripping out the pagination and, for the first time, allowing clients to browse hundreds of Chadwick models at a glance.

The new design speeds up the process of selecting models, allowing the client to ‘select’ as they browse then ‘share’ a link to their selection with colleagues and Chadwick Models staff. Comp cards are printable direct from the website.

The project involved a large migration of data from the old bespoke database to the new WordPress installation, mapping model names, measurements, details and some 9000 images and saving Chadwick Models staff weeks of data entry.

Under the hood, the WordPress admin area received close attention to allow multiple Chadwick administrators to look after the model details, crop images and regain complete control over their website.

The before and after screenshots tell the whole story…

Thanks to Simon Walkom at the City for these photos!

Bowie is brave, driven and talented. With a career spanning over 40 years, few musicians have had such a lasting impact. Bowie spent most of his time pushing himself and his work into new frontiers. He influenced music in so many ways. His experimentation with voice, musical arrangements and his representations were ground breaking. From one of his first big hits Starman—the chorus apparently based on Judy Garland’s Over the Rainbow [1]— to Ziggy Stardust to Heroes and what is considered culmination of Bowie’s musical life Station-to Station.

Appropriation was nothing new during that time, think Andy Warhol, but he was the singer ready to declare, ‘I’m a tasteful thief’, as his biographer Paul Trynka said, ‘this defied a sacred convention —that rock ‘n roll was an authentic, visceral medium.’ [2]

One of my all time favourite songs is from the album Hunky Dory, Life on Mars, described by BBC as “a cross between a Broadway musical and a Salvador Dalí painting” (which interesting for me at least, as it featured keyboardist Rick Wakeman… of Journey to the Centre of the Earth fame…!). When I look at the film clip, which is now 40 years old, I still can’t believe it how progressive it was. It was after all 1971!

Given, he made mistakes—his tights in Labyrinth, capping his lovely crooked teeth, the song The Laughing Gnome. And can we ever forget with that terrible Mick Jagger duet, Dancing in the Street—what were they thinking? But we are all guilty of bad decisions— it builds character. We should encourage everyone to make mistakes, it’s the only way we can test things out, try them, push them. They may not work for us, but they sure could be an influence for others.

Didn’t Thomas Edison fail more than 1,000 times when trying to create the light bulb? Edison allegedly said, ‘I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb.’

Bowie certainly didn’t fail that many times, and what we can say he was an innovator and pioneer, he covered most music genres from most eras—psychedelic rock, to glam rock, soul and funk, goth rock, new wave—‘plastic soul’ on Young American to ‘lost soul’ on Station to Station.—new romantics, electronica to neoclassicism. Bowie defined what it is to live in the world at a given moment, his music an example of the evolution and articulation of ideas.

The intellectual depth of his work was one of subversion and transformation. He dictated trends as much as he has altered his style to fit—he influenced fashion and pop culture and he still does today. And like Bowie, designers have greater opportunities than most to watch trends grow and evolve, we can reinvent and assist society to better perceive and understand daily life and culture as a whole.

Even though some of the Boccalatte team might cringe at his sax solo in the song Changes… do try and go beyond this, listen to him, spend some time with him and his songs and I promise you too will fall in love. He had a technical virtuosity and he was also intellectually curious. Good ideas emerge by seeing what everyone sees, but thinking like nobody else. And innovation always occurs in the margins and by being brave.

Bowie has spent his career asking what if? ”What if you combined Brecht-Weill musical drama with rhythm and blues? What happens if you transplant the French chanson into the Philly sound? Will Schoenberg lie comfortably with Little Richard?” [3]

‘What if?’ is a fundamental question we need to ask ourselves as designers? We shouldn’t limit ourselves with narrow-mindedness and superficiality of design. More importantly, we need to create engaging, original ideas because in our time-poor, media saturated world; it’s the idea that speaks to us. We also need to think beyond design.

Identifying the indicators of change, experimentation and bravery should be at the core of design, music, artwork and one’s life. Bowie managed to combine all his influences, talent and drive and come up with something new. And this is why David Bowie is a true designer.

[1] Trynka, Paul, Starman: David Bowie The definitive Biography, 2011
[2] ibid.
[3] http://www.berklee.edu/news/1999/grad99.html

For more Bowie, see bowiesongs.wordpress.com.

‘FINALLY!!! A book on Australian contemporary art you actually want to pick up and read.’
—Kinokuniya

Thanks Kinokuniya… and a reminder: we are nearly sold out of this title. Buy it from us at Boccalatte Make Books (or at Kinokuniya, of course!).

We had the pleasure of working with Zecca to help them develop a bold new identity. The first stage of this was to design a logo that truly represented the confident personalities behind Zecca. Using strong, elegant and classic typography the logo communicates an established and trusted brand, a key requirement for the cosmetics industry.

The second stage of this project is the design and building of the Zecca website. Check our site for updates on this and in the meantime join their Facebook group to keep up-to-date with the latest developments.