The Australian Ballet: A Year of Beauty

Brilliant and gorgeous campaign for The Australian Ballet's 2015 season. Dance is beauty, powered by athleticism. 

Light-Based Rube Goldberg Machine

Fantastic ad for auひかり (au Hikari), a high-speed optical internet service in Japan.

Robert Brunner: What All Great Design Companies Know→

What’s the secret to becoming a legendary design company like Apple or BMW? In this 99U talk, designer Robert Brunner deconstructs his creative process revealing the stories behind products like Beats by Dre headphones and the Polaroid Cube.

First, he says, recognize that a brand belongs to your customers. ”You don’t own your brand. A brand isn’t a logo or packaging,” he says. “It’s a gut feeling. And when two people have the same gut feeling, you have a brand.” Secondly, most people view design as a part of the production chain, you get requirements in and out comes a product. But design is the chain, and for the best products it permeates every step. “It should be a topic of conversation constantly,” he says. “Thats how you make great stuff.”

How To Be Different

Bernadette Jiwa on differentiation: 

The reason it’s not easy to copy a truly great brand is because they have put so much of themselves into the work— that there is no substitute. There is only one Banksy, one Dyson and one Disney. They each show up uniquely as brands in the world by being more of who they are.

Restoration Hardware’s Mail-Order Extravagance

Amy Merrick, writing in The New Yorker, explores why Restoration Hardware mailed a 17-pound catalog: 

Why do we still have catalogues? Web and mobile browsers have improved dramatically in the past decade. It’s hard to argue that catalogues, like books, are objects worth preserving for their aesthetic value; they will be obsolete within months. Yet Americans received nearly twelve billion catalogs last year.

Marketers say that people who browse catalogues buy more than those who shop only online. The U.S. Postal Service works hard to promote catalogues, which have become an increasingly important segment of U.S.P.S. business as people mail fewer first-class letters. The online retailer Bonobos, which began shipping catalogues last year, told the Wall Street Journal that twenty per cent of its new Web customers placed orders after receiving their first mailings, and spent more than other new shoppers.

Those incremental sales are accompanied by enormous waste. Industry surveys from groups like the Direct Marketing Association estimate that catalogues get average response rates of four to five per cent. In the case of Restoration Hardware, that means that for every sixty thousand pages mailed, approximately three thousand pay off.