paper: Apple trees & honey bees | pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

i have a real love for quality advertising. not all advertising by any means, as i am reminded whenever i visit a place with a television or i leaf through any martha stewart publication, trying to separate content from adverts for cling film. but advertisements you remember for ages, or that give you some sort of inner peace. the boy and i were talking about this last night…how proportionately, there are so few good adverts, and how that makes the good ones even better. i still can’t look away from the honda cog. i think of the vw golf every time i see a chair put out with the rubbish. and some days, i really would like to buy the world a coke and keep it company.

{actually, during the last school year i got to sit in on a seminar led by the team that create the honda ads—the cog, as well as ‘what if?’ and ‘hate something, change something’. they shared their process, going from a grumpy engineer and a music video to their animated advert, and so on. these people are just fascinating. it’s no wonder they make good stuff. i try to think of the mix up of their team whenever i am in one of those ‘if you want something done, do it yourself’ moods. which is too often, i must admit.}

anyway, i’ve been keeping an ad related thing a secret and today i found out i don’t have to keep schtum anymore, so i’m not. fiskars make things that cut. lots of things that cut lots of other things in lots of shapes and sizes. obvious things like scissors and paper trimmers, but also the not obvious things like paper drills, garden gadgets and things that make primary school teachers smile all day long. {i’m thinking maybe we should bring back a bit of old fashioned cut and paste to secondary school though. especially in administrative meetings.} last year fiskars started this print&web campaign, wherein crafters of the paper and fabric varieties along with gardeners shared their views on creativity with others via a journal. some individual pages made it to the big time to become glossy print ads. but you can see a gallery of these journals here.

so if my excited and gushy praise of thought-provoking advertising hasn’t made this completely obvious, i filled in this over the summer:

they pick some people (and i have no idea how) and if you say yes, they send you a blank book and some questions to prompt your responses. some i knew the answers to straight away. some took ages to think of anything that would work. the page i like the most looks like something out of a comic. well, a comic that’s in pink and black and has no people. but i’ll post more later in the year, when it appears on the fiskars site. yay.

in other news…there are new things afoot for the website. classes are just the start. i’ve been working SO HARD this week! fabulous. and very pink, i must say.

xlovesx

Read more about:

16 August 2006

Next post: Keeping it real
Previous post: Another slow train to the coast