Living Creatively

A Hermès parade with a difference...

Hermès, the prestigious design house that gave us the Birkin bag, silk print scarves and orange packaging, don’t merely have an impeccable line of fashion; they also have a top notch advertising campaign to match.

A recent standout is this creative collection of print ads that have recently appeared in magazines such as Vanity Fair. Elephants take centre stage and replace models and celebrities for most of the campaign. The Elephants are no less preened and pampered though, with each beast beautifully decorated in what appears to be hand painted designs. From their trunks to their toenails, their bodies are a canvas for splashes of colour.

One obviously obliging and über stylish elephant sports fuchsia pink and Hermès orange toenails! The intense colour of her nails draws eyes into the image, and it’s only then that you realise this cheeky pachyderm is trying to squeeze her gigantic manicured foot into a delicate Hermès sandal – we can’t blame her for trying! While she couldn’t quite get the sandal to fit, other elephant divas were able to experience Hermès luxury by carrying the brand’s signature handbags through an explosion of pink and orange petals.

The fact that Indian ‘model of the moment’ Lakshmi Menon also appears in some of the ads is a clever choice in the Indian inspired campaign that succeeds in interweaving creativity, culture, style and fashion.

For anyone starting a business who’s yet to produce business cards, Moo Cards are the perfect solution.

This cool idea lets you make your own high quality, professional slimline business cards simply by choosing or designing your own images and uploading them online. You can also select from an extensive list of designers’ work in a collection on the Moo database. A week or two later (depending where in the world you live), the cards will arrive in your letterbox. Too easy!

Pick the same image for all cards or choose a mixture of designs – the possibilities are endless, and you can also use this nifty service to create tags, greeting cards, stickers and notebooks. The best part is that they’re an extremely cost-effective way of marketing your products and business – at only US$20 per 100 cards, anyone can play.

Using Moo when starting your own crafty business will mean less time and money spent on marketing and more time and money spent on creating – and we know you’ll like that.

What would you do with a piece of white paper? Whack it in the printer, put it in the recycle box or scribble notes on it? Pretty common uses but not very interesting when compared to some of the work pictured here.

Danish artist Peter Callesen uses white pieces of A4 paper to create classical fairytales and things that take him back to his childhood. He doesn’t write a single word, instead telling a story by transforming the paper into a 3-dimensional piece of art. Callesan’s ability to make extraordinary and unique sculptures from a single piece of paper – one of the most common and consumed forms of media – is truly inspiring. He describes his work as “obvious magic” because the process is obvious and the figures and objects he creates remain part of the page, with no way of escaping.

Many of Callesan’s pieces have an aura of romance about them too. One such piece is the Impenetrable Castle, inspired by The Steadfast Tin Soldier, a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale that tells the story of a tin soldier who falls in love with a paper ballerina, living in a paper castle. One look at the Impenetrable Castle takes you back to the fairytale and allows you to visualise the romance and purity of the characters’ emotions.

“I feel that I have found a material which, on one hand, we all are able to relate to, and which on the other hand is non-loaded and neutral and therefore easier to fill with different meanings. The thin white paper also gives the paper sculptures a fragility which underlines the tragic and romantic theme of the works,” Callesen says.

Callesen also refers to some of his work as “small dramas” – scenes where small figures are lost within or overwhelmed by nature or threatened by objects that are made using the same piece of paper. The artist’s ability to play with paper and make the figures turn inside out, front to back or meeting at some point shows how the characters are often faced with impossibility, illusions and reflections. Very cool indeed!

If you’ve been thinking of compiling your own book but have been scared away by the extravagant costs and high minimum order quantities that publishers quote, look no further.

Blurb Book (an internet site dedicated to making books) enables people from all walks of life to capture their memories, wedding pics, favourite recipes and ideas as well as their blogs – anything, really – in a hard or soft cover book that can be valued forever. It’s extremely affordable and the end result is remarkably professional.

The coolest thing is that what you include in your book is totally up to you, as you have creative control to design it exactly as you want it. The book can be yours to keep, give away as a gift or sell in the Blurb Book online bookstore.

Whoever built this fence is a creative genius worth giving credit to, even though we don’t know their name.

After coming across this image on several design blogs recently, we couldn’t resist adding it to our cool finds. It’s so fun and eye catching with the colour spectrum it’s arranged in, not forgetting the obvious fact that they’re giant pencils! It brings back fond primary school memories of opening a perfectly packed tin of Derwent colouring pencils!

Denim has been synonymous with cool ever since Bavarian peddler Levi Strauss and Latvian tailor Jacob Youphes (Davis) created the first pair of heavy-duty cotton jeans for coal miners, more than 100 years ago.

But despite the fabric’s versatility, a lamp probably isn’t what its inventors imagined denim would be used for. That’s where Beirut firm PSLAB (a talented group of architects, designers, engineers and craftsmen) beg to differ. Capitalising on the extremely adaptable fabric, they’ve used it to make these intriguing lights.

Suspended by a diagonal metal beam, the lamps do more than just light up a room – they also form a dramatic feature and talking point and, as these images show, add a modern twist to vintage ceilings.

And just like a perfect pair of jeans, these denim lamps can be teamed up with just about anything, anywhere.

Ahh, the creative things you could do with this tape and Photoshop.

Talented French-born designer Benoit Lemoine has experimented with what seems to be Photoshop and InDesign, placing this black and white tape in interesting and novel spots to create these quirky images and giving us a million and one crazy ideas to pursue.

Who would have thought that adding a zip to a tree, brick wall, garage door or light pole could be so much fun? The creative possibilities are endless, and we think adding this tape to other landmarks, roads, office doors, art projects or even advertising billboards could be amusing too.

A winter’s afternoon spent working on a giant jigsaw puzzle with the family shouldn’t be underestimated.

Besides the occasional hissy fit they induce, leading to abandonment midway through, they’re fun! Especially when your jigsaw puzzle then becomes your living room rug.

Katrin Sonnleitner’s innovative idea resulted in The Persian Puzzle Rug. It looks just like an exotic Persian rug but unlike traditional rugs, it comes in over a thousand pieces that you need to put together yourself – with the added bonus that it’s a fraction of the price of an authentic Persian rug! There are more than 70 colours to choose from, and other specialty colours can be ordered on request. It’s made from cut outs of recycled, natural and synthetic rubber, which makes it durable and a cinch to clean.