The heart takes an organic, not Valentine, shape to advertise a company that makes heart-monitoring exercise equipment and watches that measure athletic performance.
Lars Harmsen, artdirector of Starshot byke style magazine and most of its ads, found this raw stock photo to be just what the doctor ordered.
The image "says everything. Its pureness says power and health," Harmsen said. The image also is provocative - even shocking - enough to draw the attention of the extreme-sport-loving readers of the magazine.
Although the story of the ad's creation had a happy ending, consider it a cautionary tale with this moral: Be careful what you wish for.. your client my "get" it. Harmsen begins the design of each ad with the intention to make it look like a part of the magazine. "The previous ads of Polar were really boring and didn't fit into our concept. They asked us to do a product-related ad: 'please not too stylish.' " The clients rejected the first ad he mailed them.
"I was so angry because it took me more than half a day to have it done that I said: 'You hav no idea what stylish means.'" A half-hour later, he mailed the client the bloody-heart idea and his handwritten comment: "This is stylish!" "I never expected them to like it. It was more like a joke." Harmsen was already working on a more serious design when the client e-mailed him:
"Go for it! We love it." So did the readers, who added clicks to the client's Web site.
The employees of the german design firm Magma refresh themselves at lunchtime by talking, not about business, but about politics, art, and personal experiences. Some of those conversations envolved into chapters of a book the firm created to send to its current and prospective clients.
The firm found it interesting to work on a noncommercial project "were you don't have a client askin you for something." It was conceived to show the firm in a way most of its clients don't see, "not to shock, just to say: 'look, we are able to think'" and design differently, said Lars Harmsen, a principal of the firm. The book is "critical, often satiric; a lot of the stories deal with fear." Bound into it is "a patchwork of many different ideas, the cultural output of a generation." The designers hope it will result in new clients and projects that offer more creative freedom.
The book is called am rande ( which translates to "on the edge" ), a collection of illustration- and photo-packed chapters. One chapter, "on the edge of good taste" ( "des guten geschmacks" ), visually and verbally explores how cultural background affects one's interpretation of images. Photos include designs cut into skin, shich signify protest, criticism or self-destruction in the West, and status and decoration in some other parts of the world.
Another chapter, on the edge of the universe ("universums") looks at the strange worlds outside our planet and in it, universes within the universe. For example, it shows photos of the wall separating East and West Germany ( two universes in one world ); and scenes from Big Brother, the TV show that puts strangers into a house together for one hundred days, and "one by one, they kick each other out. The one who lasts is the winner... an edge. Stupid and crazy and funny," Harmsen said.
Other chapters focus on catastrophes , legibility, society, strain ( exploring how far things can go before they burst ), and truth ( a legend about the firm that it invented for the book; the employees dressed up in period costumes for the photos ). Madness ("des wahnsinns") is the most universally understood chapter. It packs one page after another of meat packages, the kind you get in the market. But instead of a slab of beef, it's the poor creature destined for the meat case that appears in the shrinkwapped tray.
