An interesting ‘spirits of the age’ story from Russia.

Shoppers in a Moscow supermarket were left scratching their heads recently when a group of 30 activists staged a mass ‘lie-in’ in-store, remaining prone on the floor for some minutes. The activists, who are members of the group The Truth About Food, were protesting the number of harmful additives found in many retailers’ products.

This is only the latest manifestation of consumer dissatisfaction in a country where food prices have grown significantly in recent years. More importantly, perhaps, it reflects a growing awareness of the provenance of food, especially among young people, rather than its cost, as well as the growth in high-end food retail. However, not all shoppers are so concerned, as the unnamed organiser of the lie-in explained.

 ”I fell and closed my eyes. I could hear people grumbling that we were overdoing it. I felt someone kick me and opened my eyes to find a man standing over me. ‘Get out of the way, let me past,’ he said. A sensitive soul!”

- Thanks to Darya Buyanova at Moscow Metro for bringing this in front of our eyeballs.

Following a recent trip to Moscow, I was faced with the familiar hollow feeling that comes from a) drinking some of the finest wines known to humanity courtesy of a VERY generous, talented and above all handsome client and b) wondering what to do with the teetering stack of business cards I had accumulated.

After fighting off the impulse to discreetly tip them into the shredder and dust my hands, I stood up and declared There’s Gotta Be A Better Way! in my best infomercial voice.

Once the deathly hush that settled over the office had dissipated I sat down again to investigate. An app snappily named CamCard Free Business Card Reader (iPhone, iPad, Android, and BlackBerry) promises to make life easier by automatically capturing and sorting all the information on business cards after a quick scan using your phone’s camera.

The delicious sense of transgression at outsourcing this tedious task to a pliant robot is impressive enough that it feels churlish to point out a few areas for improvement for IntSig Information Co.,Ltd. So instead here are some ways you can make sure your business card gets noticed for the right reasons. For the most part it reads like a list of do’s and don’ts that concern only the most obnoxious business card features.

1. Don’t get too deep.

Heavily sunken textures give CamCard the shudders.

2. No silver bullet.

Shiny and otherwise reflective print is a no-no (technical confirmation of an aesthetic donnée, and a bitter blow for the *squints at dazzling typeface* Ukrainian Trade Guild).

3. ACCENTuate the positive.

Like many of us engaged in international commerce, CamCard battles valiantly but often unsuccessfully with foreign characters, turning the Turkish surname Gökçe into the frankly Balkan ‘Gbkpe’. Consider having an accent-free version on the reverse of your card for hassle-free recognition.

4. Size matters.

Font size that is! Because the recognition software uses the relative size of lettering to determine who a person is and where they work, people’s names and the companies they worked for were often transposed, as my dear friend Prime Global of Chet Bowling can attest. 2^nd floor became 2^nd Pnoor, V V became W (still, at least someone’s been reading my Twitter!) and General Manager transmogrified into the jolly-sounding Genelol Manager. My advice is to choose a sans serif font with judicious use of upper case lettering.

Churlish app review score: 8/10

As someone who has spent many painstaking hours in manual data entry in Salesforce.com, it was a delight to snap a business card and watch CamCard spring into action. However, the individual nature of business card design meant I had to scan the cards one at a time and peer closely at my phone to make sure there were mo nistakes in any vital field. They are now on my phone and email, with the unintended consequence that any call I make is followed by a Push Notification – Do you want to track call to “Mum” in Salesforce? YES | no. Thanks, Akvelon Call Tracker! So far this is the fastest way I have found to add these new contacts to Salesforce. Bet you can’t beat it.

I carried out a day long workshop with Narvesen convenience store managers from Latvia yesterday. The day was an interesting discussion with an audit we prepared on their stores and layouts and a presentation about trends and benchmarks in UK and European convenience retailing. Our Latvian guests were then accompanied on an excursion. A successful day of discovery for all.

Presentation is available at Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/SCGLondon/convenience-store-trends-benchmarking

Last month Bite the Ballot, with backing from the cabinet office, launched a new initiative “Rock Enrol” and embarked on a tour of schools across Britain to attempt to get young people enrolled on the electoral register. To help their efforts, we worked with a core team from BTB to design and produce an event pack, detailing activities for young people to assist them to make the association between what they care about and how they can play a role to positively influence the decisions that affect them.

We worked together with the BTB members to define a clear brief for the design of the pack, incorporating elements of graffiti/street art as well as devices and symbols derived from the Bite the Ballot identity, and developed a graphic language that was engaging, stimulating and appropriate for both the subject matter and the audience. The design also had to get approved by the cabinet office communications department, who had previously designed some materials for the tour themselves.

The pack contains all the information that teachers might require to run a 45 minute activity session, with instructions and tips for interactive, role-playing games, debates and help to get their students enroled on the electoral register.

To find out more, or download a pack for yourself, visit the Rock Enrol page on the Bite the Ballot website.

Google started it and now everyone’s at it, and quite frankly, for a while there we all got kind of bored of it. I’m talking about workplace design. The quirky, adult playground type. When images of the Google headquarters hit the Internet a couple of years ago we were all inspired to look at work place design from a completely different angle.

It was thought that contenting your employees with slides and swings and primary colours would boost morale and efficiency. This new angle provided stimulating and inspiring spaces that would, in-turn encourage harder, faster, better work.

And we loved it, it was a brilliant idea that seemed so simple yet effective – so everyone done it. We were bombarded with image after image of offices disguised as adult crèches and pretty soon the designers were running out of ideas for creative stimuli so things started to get a bit repetitive. But, every so often I come across a design that inflicts a spot of workplace envy. The most recent I found whilst trawling the world wide web was the new YouTube HQ in London designed by the PENSON Group who, I should add, also designed the Google Super HQ in London. The office features the usual playground-esque colour scheme with some areas stereotypically suited to nightclubs, but what I liked about this design was that it has a sense of humour. The design follows a ‘backstage’ look with quickly erected timber walls and stage lighting. I especially like the break out space modelled on Del boy’s living room from Only Fools and Horses. Check out the photos below.

I like it, a lot. And even if it doesn’t make the YouTube employees the most productive people in the world, I’m pretty sure they have a smile on their face when they step into the office every morning.

Maybe I should suggest a jungle gym for the SCG office? 

A few weeks ago I was out for a wander round North Soho and I noticed a crowd of people up an alleyway, gathered around a large sphere made up from pieces of old dolls, furniture, plastic ornaments, musical instruments, machinery and various other ephemera. A young woman came out of a doorway next to the sphere and invited me inside for a drink -  let’s face it, doll parts and free drink, you’ve just got to find out more, so I accepted her offer and entered the bizarre, bewildering, intriguing world of Lesley Hilling.

She is a genuinely fascinating artist who salvages objects and pieces of objects from other lives, other times, and re-imagines and reconstitutes them into something new, beguiling and utterly captivating. Her art manifests itself as huge monolithic towers beautifully constructed and meticulously crafted from thousands of tiny pieces of piano parts, driftwood, floorboards and furniture punctuated with lenses, apertures, tiny doorways which, on closer inspection lead to miniature scenarios, snapshots of imagined lives and experiences, forgotten treasures and souvenirs, old photographs, shells salvaged from the beach, pebbles from a long-forgotten trip to the seaside.

A few days later I bumped into Lesley in Brixton market and she invited me into her house – a veritable treasure trove of old photo albums, ancient comic books and instruction manuals, test tubes and sample jars from long-abandoned school biology laboratories. Her walls are papered with pages torn from ancient technical manuals and skulls, discarded toys and board games populate various niches and shelves in every room.

Her artworks allow you to discover you to places, events, people that you half-remember, stir up a nostalgia for a time you never experienced, all packaged in a way you’ve probably never seen before.

Sphere no. 9 (above) is now hanging proudly at the bottom of my stairs in Hammersmith – check out her other pieces at http://www.lesleyhilling.co.uk/ 

QR codes (QR stands for Quick Reference) have been around since 1994, but it’s only over the last few years that they have become commonly used in marketing and promotions. This is a direct result of the popularity of smartphones, where a quick scan of the code can transfer essential information in a couple of seconds. There is no need to physically write numbers, addresses or website details, which is a great benefit to both the advertiser and the consumer. More and more clients are now asking for QR codes to be included on posters, banners and even business cards, so it appears that for now at least they are here to stay. From a design perspective however, QR codes can be problematic as their rigid computer-generated texture must remain completely readable, which means creativity is very limited. One solution to overcoming this problem is to fully embrace the code and let it shine. Here are some nice examples where the boundaries have been pushed, allowing them to become an interesting feature in their own right.

I recently found the photography website of Richard Hooker, who is a London Designer/Art director. It was his ‘By the Bus Stop’ series that really grabbed my attention. 

The idea of taking photos of the bus stops he passes is very simple but effective, and really highlights the great diversity of culture we have here in London.

 You can look at the full set of photographs here —  http://rzhooker.com/busstop

On a recent visit to Saint Petersburg I came across an interesting sight in a backstreet courtyard – a makeshift graffiti gallery.

Local authorities had (not very successfully) whitewashed over some graffiti on the walls much to the distaste of the local tenants. Who, so impressed with the artwork had pre-empted possible intervention, took photographs, had them printed and framed then mounted them on the walls in the exact same location as the originals.