Monday Vision: Playful Spontaneity
Monday, December 13, 2010
We’ve all been busy trying to upturn the downturn this year, so we’ve decided to end 2010 on a ‘bright’ note. Our theme today is Playful Spontaneity: simply just having fun on the spot. Monday Collective is celebrating creative freedom and lighting the path to 2011.
We’d like to thank our client partners, our Collective, our family, our friends and our followers for helping us get Monday Collective off the ground this year. We’ve been overwhelmed by your interest, feedback, support and generosity. The Collective We, Rochelle and Lisa, would like to thank you all and wish you a brilliant holiday.
We’re scooting off to England next week to overdose on Christmas carols, bad jokes, roast dinners and warm beer. Whatever you are doing, enjoy some Playful Spontaneity with friends and family. We’ll be back in January (several pounds heavier) with our resolution to continue demonstrating The Brilliance of Change™. What’s your resolution for 2011? Tell us your thoughts below.
Monday Vision: Word Transformation II
Monday, December 6, 2010
Today we are staying true to our word. Last week we said we’d post an image for you that builds on the theme of Word Transformation: how we can be smarter with the way we express words, bringing them to life visually. So here it is.
The Monday Collective flag reflects the ‘Best of Both’. The coming together of the American and Union Jack flags, represents our experience from living and working in both countries. The two of us, Rochelle & Lisa, at the heart of the business. Our individuality & impact of our combined experience. Us & our client partners. Us & our Collective. The colors are based on our identity, and the style represents fluidity, change, simplicity, substance, connectivity and optimism.
Our flag represents our identity and pride as Monday Collective. It expresses our individuality. It’s our stake in the ground, capturing our soul of The Brilliance of Change™.
We hope this inspires you to think about how you can use visuals to bring words to life in a meaningful way. As always, we’d like to hear your thoughts so please do contact us at change@mondaycollective.com if you have your own visuals to share. Or just let us know your comments below.
Monday Vision: Word Transformation
Monday, November 29, 2010
Nope, there’s no typo in our title. We’re not talking about ‘World’ Transformation (for a change), we’re focusing on something more specific – Word Transformation: how we can be smarter with the way we express words.
As brands are being forced to become more transparent, there are more words than ever floating around. Most of the time they are generic and don’t differentiate from others. More often than not, these words breed scepticism. Not enough thought goes into how words can be expressed more meaningfully so that they become a powerful tool to communicate what matters most.
We all know the saying “seeing is believing”, well at Monday Collective we’re on a mission to help brands change the way they use words to overcome some of the issues they are facing today. Words sometimes don’t quite say what you mean, we all know that. They can only go so far, and then it’s left for individual interpretation. But when words are brought to life visually, they can create a simple, interesting and powerful expression.
There are two challenging needs going on right now – the consumer wants simplicity to over rule bombardment, and businesses are battling with complexity in their quest for transparency. We’d like to share three very different case studies with you that we hope will get the dusty cogs turning enough to spark the imagination to explore more possibilities for changing the way we use words.
We are big fans of David McCandless, a London-based author, writer and designer. Nowadays he describes himself as an independent data journalist and information designer. His passion lies in visualizing information – facts, data, ideas, subjects, issues, statistics, questions – using the minimum of words. Check out his talk this year on TED and his web site. David’s approach to information design has certainly opened our minds to the possibilities for simplifying complex information by using more engaging visuals that help educate people in a meaningful way. We also like that he thinks about the bigger picture, rather than just the details, and ensures that the broader context plays a part in his visual solutions.
Examples of David McCandless’s work, he simplifies complex information and brings it alive in a visually engaging way.
We have worked with Absolut in the past and we can’t help but continue to admire their ongoing creativity and connection with artists (they have commissioned over 300 artists over the years). The way they express their brand continues to surprise and entertain us. With their latest launch, Absolut Glimmer, the brand ran a fun social media-generated street spectacle in Brazil that showcased an alternative art form “light writing” which uses the limited edition bottle as the pen. We like that the campaign engages participants to interact with words by getting them to answer the question “What unusual thing are you doing now?” One hundred answers will be selected and “written” by young master calligrapher Haruo Kaneko using the neon light filled Absolut bottle, while the images are captured by up and coming photographer Gustavo Ferri. The show called ‘Escreva com Luz’ (Light Writing) ran on Twitter and Facebook. Now that really is bringing words to life – with an empty bottle!
Absolut Glimmer’s ‘Escreva com Luz’ event showcasing an alternative art form “light writing” which uses the limited edition bottle as the pen.
We now want to share something about us. The concept of Word Transformation inspired our Monday Collective brand identity and shows how this thinking can be applied to a variety of design challenges – whether serious, fun or just meaningfully different.
Monday Collective is a different business concept for our industry. Our purpose is to collaborate with entrepreneurial thinkers to design meaningful change for brands and businesses. We are creating a movement to demonstrate The Brilliance of Change™ and our business model supports this, as a collective of diverse talent that fluidly connects to create new ideas for designing change.
We distilled our business concept and strategy into a simple design idea – Collective Connectivity (between us as founders, to our client partners, to their businesses, to their consumers, to the competition, to our collective, to the inspiration around us, to the outside world and how this is changing…). Our identity loops and links one letter to the next and connects the bigger words too. It’s not flat, but dimensional to look like you could jump inside and interact with it, if you like that sort of thing. We plan to use this as a foundation to express our creativity and change as we grow, with different versions to celebrate moments in time. So keep your eyes peeled for the next one, we’re looking forward to sharing more with you.
Monday Collective’s brand identity which fluidly connects, looping and linking one letter to the next to expresses creativity and the business concept of The Brilliance of Change™
Our identity expresses our creativity and difference without having to tell people “we are really creative and different”. We figured that if we couldn’t design our own brand identity to reflect our uniqueness, then we’d have a struggle convincing others to let us design theirs. We may not appeal to everyone, we are paving a new way, but we think it’s good to be polarizing. Either way, we are having fun embarking on designing meaningful change for those that see the value in what we are doing and the movement we are creating.
We hope this post on Word Transformation inspires others to think about the power of bringing words bought to life in a simple and meaningful way. The next blog posting is just going to be one fat image and we’ll leave it to you to figure out what we are trying to say. Until then, keep being inspired and join the movement to to demonstrate The Brilliance of Change™.
If this post triggers any thoughts to build on this theme, and you’re the sharing kind like us, please do get in touch: change@mondaycollective.com
