SPINNING AROUND: SEVENTY SEVEN THINKING OUT LOUD

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... PHOTOFUNIA

One from Caroline this week as we salute the lovely Photofunia.com as part of our latest Seventy Seven Loves ...

The site basically enables you to upload a photo and apply a whole series of daft effects to it. What's fun, though, is that it enables you to create your likeness as though it featured as a Times Square billboard poster, really giving full reign to your ego. Marvellous for a bunch of PRs, I thought.

Personal favourites are the effects that enable you to turn yourself into a Polaroid dress (hmmm ...), impose your likeness onto Angelina Jolie's chest (I kid you not), create a situation in which two cats stare at you (and you thought that Angelina thing was weird?). Oh ... and you can even appear in Paris Hilton's hand apparently on the front cover of her album.

Caroline's own effort is here ... and relative to some of the things that she COULD have done to herself, it's a pretty tame effort all of a sudden ...

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... JR

JR is a photographer of some reknown. His website is 28millimetres.com.

Most recently, he created images like this one in the favellas of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil ...

He photographs people across some of the poorest regions of the world - most particularly, women of Sierra Leone, Kenya, Liberia and Sudan.

He then creates really quite remarkable installations of the images - using buildings, buses, streets, the works - and photographs these creations to make some of the most amazing images going.

There is no reason for this post. Other than that we love his work very much and think that we should do our small bit to share it ... Oh, and JR could use my house any time that he fancies!

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... ETSY

Alan and I have been doing a lot of work with Wolff Olins of late ... which is a good thing as they are a client. Now, Wolff Olins have done some work on what they believe will be the features of the brands of tomorrow ... they call it Brand Next.

One of those beliefs is that one of the characteristics is the Brand as a Platform. Which means that brands don't sell stuff or create things, but they do provide platforms that others can use to network and create amazing things for themselves.

So eBay is a platform for the buying and selling of more-or-less anything, Facebook a platform for socialising online with friends new and old, StreetCar a method by which people can share a car, BookMooch a way to trade old books.

This week's Seventy Seven Loves ... is another brand that typifies that "brand as platform" proposition in Etsy.

A marketplace for crafts and makers, Etsy offers the chance for people who make beautiful things - from hand-covered and bound books to textiles to T-shirts - to sell them to others through the interweb. Etsy takes a cut of each sale. What a lovely, lovely idea, I think.

And what's more, you can happily lose several hundred hours of time browsing through the virtual shelves to find all manner of ephemera, hand made loveliness and some totally awful tack (which is almost as entertaining as the good stuff).

Well worth a happy poke around for an hour or three.

A personal favourite is the ever-lovely Bombus, a young lady who makes things from - and covers things with - bits of old map, magazine, book, whatever she can lay her hands on from what would appear to be a never-ending collection of ephemera.

Oh, and for a really handy guide around Etsy's finest sellers have a look at the Decor8 weblog and the ever-excellent Take Five Tuesdays. Decor8 highlight and link to five of their favourite Etsy sellers (one of which is illustrated above - Bound To).

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... JAMES MERRELL

Hmmmm ... for some reason, Seventy Seven Loves seems to have become a bit of a collection of our favourite photo sites of late. Once this latest one is out of the way, we'll find something else. Promise.

In the meantime, however, James Merrell is a man that I really want to find a good client-related reason to work with. His portraits are just lovely.

But the fact that he shoots interiors as well as people means that all of his portraits have a strong design aesthetic in their backdrops.

I've haven't seen other photographs that have such a strong aesthetics of their own, but which still enable the personality of their subjects to shine through.

Well-worth fifteen minutes of your browsing time ...

Oh ... and while I am writing, you might also like to check out Books Online. A French-based site that has various projects in "books" that you can have a quiet browse through for the princely sum of no pennies. How good is that?!

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... I TOOK PHOTOS

itookphotos is a weblog by Australian photographer, Joshua Monaghan.

And as photo blogs go (there are a LOT of them), I reckon his is one of the best and most consistently interesting.

It is also the one with the most irritating design ... the whole of the "July" photos (this month at least), which make up three quarters of the page, comprise part of the header of the site - which means that the top three quarters of the page looks the same every time you click on a different month.

ANYWAY, that warning aside, Joshua, as I say, takes consistently really interesting photos.

Some of them are incredibly beautiful and some of them are just really good holiday-style shots of things that are attractive. And it is that combination really makes itookphotos work.

The most recent shots are of Vietnam and Cambodia - and shots of various far east destinations dominate the site - and some of them are simply stunning ...

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... LE COOL

Le Cool is an online culture, arts and entertainment magazine. And a very groovy one it is too.

Sign up and you get a weekly, day-by-day guide to the hottest club nights, exhibitions, theatre, bars. It ranks right ip there with Time Out, buy is somehow a bit easier to digest - and gives an edited version of all that London (or Paris, Milan, Madrid) has on offer.

Now, there are plenty of good newsletters online - I'm a big fan of Daily Candy for food, drink and retail and of Urban Junkies for everything else. However, of you want a great one-stop-shop, you won't do much better than Le Cool.

It's particularly excellent if you're heading on a city break to one of it's cities and need to know what's not to be missed. As you can tell, we like it.

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... GANGSTA BABIES

These are mental, to be honest. Someone, somewhere, thought that it would be a really good idea to make a limited edition set of vinyl toy babies dressed as gangsters.

They aren't out yet - they're released in October 2008 - so if you want to get your mitts on them, you might have to wait, but I was thinking that we might have to get some in to adorn the office somewhere.

By all accounts, there are four of the little fellas: Rey Rey from around the way way, a playa who is #1 with all the  shorties; Big Deuce who, according to the website, everyone knows is runnin things; Pookie the green-eyed baller; and Benjino a carrot-topped homey who is holding the fort down.

What with US exchange rates being what they are, at about a tenner a go, these little chaps are looking cheap at twice the price as a novel desk adornment.

Quality.

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... PHOTOJOJO

Photojojo is mad and a bit weird and I love it. They do one thing and they do it really, really well.

In this case, they deliver photo tips in weekly emails.

But not just any old tips. This week's was a rap video about Photoshop shortcuts. Which was a bit barking, to be honest. Last week's was the fabulous My M&Ms.

The great thing about the web is that it allows small groups of interested and interesting people to find each other and do things that are ... well ... Interesting. And Photojojo is a refreshing reminder of how great that can be.

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... PENGUIN

This week, a big shout out to Penguin. The brand has managed that rare feat in modern marketing by using new tools to continue their drive to tell stories to everyone in new and innovative ways.

You just have to look at a handful of their work in recent months to get a sense of how the publisher has worked and re-worked both its back-catalogue and its new writers.

From the launch of "Devil May Care" - the new James Bond book by Sebastian Faulks - to the re-launch of the complete Bonds with re-designed covers (see below - aren't they lovely?), the brand has managed to blend the old and new in the marketing and design.

But it doesn't stop with new books and stunning design.

The recent "We Tell Stories" online activity was a stunning piece of marketing and story-telling combined. With six authors in six weeks writing stories for the web - using everything from blogs to Twitter and Google maps.

Over six weeks writers including Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, popular teen fiction author Kevin Brooks, prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller authors Nicci French will be pushing the envelope and creating tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible. These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.

They even created a seventh story as an Alternate Reality Game that was hidden on the web - they worked with Naomi Alderman, author of Disobedience and lead writer on pioneering ARG, Perplex City (there is a piece about the project on the Penguin weblog).

All of those set piece campaigns along with their own young reader social network, weblogs, podcasts, online tasters, Facebook Groups, Twitter feeds mean that the brand is keeping itself true to its mission, while staying modern, engaging and relevant in a world where books are more under threat than ever.
 

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... PEEPSHOP

The (currently) twelve-strong collective that is Peepshow have worked across illustration, fashion, animation, film-making and art-direction.

You might have seen their work most recently knocking about on the BBC - they made the trails for the Culture Show that feature various luminaries (and Piers Morgan) talking about what they think culture is.

However, they also do lots and lots of self-initiated stuff, some of which they sell in their online store, PeepShop.

Amongst all the bits and bobs (from Tees to keyrings), they do a lovely set of illustration-led limited edition prints. Well worth a look (though do try and keep your wallet in your pocket - they're lovely, but at £50 a pop, it's a bit easy to spank a couple of hundred quids with a couple of clicks).

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... THE CR BLOG

I have long-loved Creative Review - Centaur's advertising and graphics monthly.

It has that wonderful mix of visual arts and balances the creative with the craft and technical to rather wonderful effect. One of the few magazines that can be read cover-to-cover, month-after-month.

So when they launched the CR weblog, it could only be a good thing. An almost daily combination of the best of the magazine and original, just-for-web content that highlights great work from around the world.

What's more, they have allowed the web content to lead the magazine stories - a piece on Aussie ad and design collective, the Glue Society, sparked a profile article, such was the strength of positive feedback from blog readers.

But the best thing about CR Blog is the fact that it is such a rich source of good things from around the web - and always has content on it that is professionally useful and personally engaging.

Some recent picks include ... Adam Buxton's (of the C4 Adam and Joe Show) BUG night, an exhibition of posters at apeloig.com and coverage of an exhibition of posters from the collection of Paul and Karen Rennie at Central St Martins (which is just up the road from Seventy Seven).

Enjoy ... we do ...!

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... IT'S NICE THAT

It's Nice That is a blog created all the way back in 2007 by designers Will Hudson and Jez Burrows.

Will works at brand designers Third Eye Design and also has his own site - WillHudson.co.uk - while Jez is part of a design collective, Evening Tweed.

ANYHOW, INT is celebration of lovely stuff. It exists, the boys say, "to locate, collect and share nice things within the creative world".

And an eclectic collection they have created indeed. Graphics, art, products, illustration and photography form the rump of the site's writings, but there are few areas of design that escape INT's roving eye.

Why do we (I, actually) love it? Because there are so few blogs in the world that you can take a wander to on a weekly basis safe in the knowledge that there will be SOMETHING interesting to look at. This is very definitely one of them.

Loving the work, chaps ...

Previous Loves ...

Seventy Seven Loves ... This Ain't No Disco
Seventy Seven Loves ... KnickerPicker
Seventy Seven Loves ... 10x10
Seventy Seven Loves ... My Deco
Seventy Seven Loves ... The Sartorialist

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... THIS AIN'T NO DISCO

A site that we have perused from time-to-time and have always enjoyed when we have done so ... This Ain't No Disco, It's Where We Work.

Everyone knows that marketing agencies have the best offices. Don't know why, maybe it's because there are plenty of of creative people in them with lots of bright ideas. Maybe we just don't work hard enough. Who knows?

Anyhow, TAND,IWWW is a showcase of the coolest work spaces from around the big wide world.

Some familiar names in there get the chance to show off their spaces to the masses (think Poke, Jack Morton, Karmarama) but as if not more fun are those agencies that we had never heard of, but who work in some fantastic places.

Favourites are the restaurant counter feel of Cooks Inc., of Qube and of The Apartment. Most popular at the moment is Tangible Worldwide - and very lovely the nest they have created for themselves is too ...

Previous Loves ...

Seventy Seven Loves ... KnickerPicker
Seventy Seven Loves ... 10x10
Seventy Seven Loves ... My Deco
Seventy Seven Loves ... The Sartorialist

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... KNICKER PICKER

A Seventy Seven-er who wished to remain anonymous suggested this one: KnickerPicker.

And to be fair, we think that it is a "Seventy Seven loves ..." to be proud of. The site basically allows you to take a look at lingerie modelled by real women. You can a pretty wide variety of pants on three differently-sized ladies, get them to spin around and come up to the camera.

What a lovely piece of online retail, it has to be said.

Now, we would love to have a crack at the PR for this one (if anyone from KP is reading ... pretty please, you know you want to!). Apart from anything else, the challenge to find new models for the site with one of the lad mags (or women's mags, for that matter), would be too much to turn down.

Previous Loves ...

Seventy Seven Loves ... The Sartorialist
Seventy Seven Loves ... My Deco
Seventy Seven Loves ... 10x10

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... 10x10

One from Alan for the latest love ...

10 by 10 is "an interactive exploration of the words and pictures that define the time".

Created by a chap by the name of Jonathan Harris, it takes a series of RSS feeds from images and words from leading news sites and displays them as 100 cells with click-thrus to the news of the day.

We could try and describe it, but it's much easier to go and have a play. For those who really want to know more, we nabbed Jonathan's words below ...

Every hour, 10x10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour's most important words.

The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories. At the end of each day, month, and year, 10x10 looks back through its archives to conclude the top 100 words for the given time period.

In this way, a constantly evolving record of our world is formed, based on prominent world events, without any human input.

It's a wonderful representation of all that is happening around the world. Often shocking, sometimes funny, always somehow engaging. Well worthy of a 77 Loves ...

Previous Loves ...

Seventy Seven Loves ... The Sartorialist
Seventy Seven Loves ... My Deco

 

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... MY DECO

One from Michelle this time around ...

Her latest love is the new site launched by the Lastminute founding duo. Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox have made their return to dotcommery with a new interiors site that has kept her quiet for hours since its soft-launch last week ... MyDeco.com.

According to our resident design-insider (Michelle happens to run the Ideal Home Show account, so she is the one in the know), the site has got a whole series of 3D design tools that help you to plan your room to the exact measurements, placing into it products from the likes of Laura Ashley, John Lewis, Tesco and Argos. 

It solves the age old issue of whether a particular piece of furniture will fit in to the space you have.  You can view it from a number of angles too and even try out different colour schemes and flooring. You can also create your own design profile, create groups, blog and tag stuff.

Though still be in beta, Michelle tells us that the whole thing is really rather good.

NB ... for those interested in the story behind the site, happened to notice that Brent Hoberman is profiled in yesterday's Observer talking about it.

Previous Loves ...

Seventy Seven Loves ... The Sartorialist

SEVENTY SEVEN LOVES ... THE SARTORIALIST

A new, soon-to-be regular, post for Spinning Around is going to be 77LOVES ... in which one of us shares something that we love from around the world of media and the internet.

In this case, I'll go first and nominate The Sartorialist.

The man himself, New Yorker Scott Schuman, says of his labour of love ...

"when I worked in the fashion industry (15 years), I always felt that there was a disconnect between what I was selling in the showroom and what I was seeing real people (really cool people) wearing in real life."

And so he has.

Hundreds of photographs (particularly from Paris, New York and Milan) now adorn the site of real people putting together their own, real styles. Many with running commentary from the former stylist and boutique-owner.

Always worth a read, the site has spawned a regular page in GQ in the US and a regular appearance on Conde Nast site, Style.com.

What's more, we read, a gallery show has also been spun off. Put together with gallerist James Danziger (who writes the fabulous The Year in Pictures blog), it'd be well worth a visit if it weren't on the other side of the Atlantic ...