My dear readers, I know who you are. I know how you think and how you act. I know when you get a new gadget or smartphone a manual is nothing more than a worthless unattractive obstacle, keeping you from your precious precious new toy. But what if it isn’t? Check this out and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Manuals, as it should.

You might have noticed that MTV changed their logo and with that, they got some new Idents and boy, oh boy, do I love them. My favorite is by far Closing & Caring, created by the German company Sehsucht. Other Idents were created by The Mill, blacklist TV & ilovedust! If you want a sneek peak on how this was created, check the behind the scenes

Happy 30th birthday, MTV! You still look smashingly awesome.

This piece was originally conceived as a part of CG set for a commercial spot about hamburgers throughout recent American history. However, the potential also existed for the set to be the stage for a visual exploration in lighting, composition, and cinematography. So the assets were repurposed to try and achieve that goal. The lighting was originally intended to evoke a sense of an old game show stage after hours, think Price Is Right Showcase after the lights have gone down. Although it did evolve, it should still capture that low-lighting feeling.

Loving the atmosphere here and the soundtrack is just amazing. Be sure to check out the full version of Straight Up And Down performed by The Brian Jonestown Massacre! You might recognize this song from Boardwalk Empire, the single most awesome show HBO delivered last year!

Everybody knows Skittles, even if they don’t sell it where you live, changes are you’ve probably heared it mentioned in a TV Show. Cousins made this hilarious fake comercial, giving a whole other meaning to “Taste The Rainbow”. This ad has explicit images so I wouldn’t recommend you watching it at work!

One of the most awesome benefits of this ever-changing multimedia landscape, is probably the fact that we have everything we could possibly want pushed into one device which we carry around all the time. This enables us to discover new areas in our life that we normally wouldn’t go to. One of those, for me, is photography. Having a camera with me all the time had made it easy for me to just capture the moment spontaneously. And with that, I can fall in love with that perfect image! Perfect images like those from the hand of Kim Akrigg.

If her images were made of food, it’d be one sweet, juicy fruit salad wrapped in awesomeness. Make sure to check out her site and the amazing photographic work she’s done! A picture is more worth a thousand words so I’ll let them do the talking!

Awesome video made by DIGITALKITCHEN! Made as a teaser for the new Real Life Series, The Hasselhoffs. ‘Is awesomeness genetic?’

Steven ‘Stoav‘ De Loenen is an all-round new media artist who has made some cool shit. With clients like 20th Century Fox, MTV Networks and Duval Guillaume, he owns an impressive portfolio. When I first visited his website, I initially thought it was a company, imagine my surprise when I learned he did this all by himself!

The intro you see here is an animation he made for the DVD release of the movie Watchmen! He made other animations and interfaces for big names like 24, Die Hard 4, Prison Break and the Johnny Cash-tribute movie Walk The Line.

Stoav doesn’t limit himself to one media, I wasn’t lying when I called him an all-round new media artist. He has a wide variety of platforms to work on. From animation to web and print, both using 3D and 2D, he even makes his own music! As a musician he goes by the name Yelloplast and be sure to check out his Soundcloud for some of his tunes. I can see it work nicely on some cool motion graphics!

We wanted to tease the consumer, we wanted to create a minimalistic, classy package that didn’t lose it’s original authenticity. We chose not to mention which beer was in the package and rather hide little clues within it. Every package has it’s color, these are all colors that are found on the label of the trappist beer. There’s a small curve at the bottom of the package that indicate the complexity of that beer.

What followed was an in-depth research about the rich tastes and history behind every beer. Who made it? How does it taste? That last question could not be answered by simple one word. Tasting a trappist beer is an experience, for example a Chimay starts out bitter and has a sweet after-taste. How could we give all that information while still keeping things clean?

By putting all that shit in an awesome infographic, that’s how! Too bad something went wrong with printing. On the back of that infographic was a (working) QR-code which brought you to the site where you could participate in an online community. A place where you could like a beer, make a comment on it, browse through recepies compatible with trappist beer or take a test which beer fits you the most. By doing so, we gave the consumer a total social experience while enjoying this fine piece of brewmanship.

I could keep on writing about the material and why we chose to name our brand “Disix” but this post is getting big as it is. Bottomline is : it was awesome to come up with a product that for once wasn’t completely related to media. I had a great time working with these people and I’m really proud of the result!

What you see here is an experiment Derren Brown, a famous mentalist, did on 2 guys from a creative agency. He gave them a project to work on for a couple of hours, and then he tried to predict what their ideas would be. Obviously he can’t see in the future and you’d think that geniune inspiration comes from within. The thing is, we are being inspired every day, at every specific moment without knowing it.

The reason why I’m writing a post about it, is because I recently experience something alike. I’m currently in a workshop for packaging design and we have a complete week to brainstorm and explore unknown territory in the packaging business. It’s all fun and games but yesterday I made a startling discovery. For the past week, while working on some ideas, we turned on the radio but barely noticeable, just to have some ambient noise. We were discussing and drawing ideas, constantly bouncing ideas back and forth. Mindmaps and moodboards are up on the wall and we needed a catchphrase. One sentence, bald and strong that would sum up everything we were talking about. Our idea is to get people to explore our beer in a gastronomic way. We started out with some rubbish sentences but eventually, we found it: Experience beer differently.

Yesterday I was talking to a friend of mine while she was driving, the same radiostation as before was playing in the background, there was a commercial and normally I don’t pay a lot of attention to those because they annoy me to hell! But I heard something earlier in that commercial and I listened more carefully. The commercial had a catchphrase: Experience music differently. During our mindmapping and moodboarding that commercial must have played and subconsiously it got stuck there. We could’ve been 100% sure that it was geniune inspiration, a result of bouncing off ideas to one another but now it was just a simple connection to a single commercial.

My bottomline is: we are constantly influenced by different visual or auditive elements that creating something new, is initially nothing more then taking certain elements around us and making a new puzzle with it. So whenever you feel like you have no inspiration, just go on a trip to a place where you haven’t been in ages! I’m sure it’ll trigger something!