welcome to optimism

DAY 24: Good bye for now…

Sadly today is the last day of our advent calendar. Hope you have enjoyed our 24 festive street decorations as much as we enjoyed decorating our neighbourhood.
 
Merry Christmas and Happy Streets from Wieden + Kennedy
 
Special thanks to elf Bjorn and elf Natasha for all your festive help and emotional support.
 
 

To open the very last door go to www.adventcalendar.com

 

Wieden + Kennedy workshop now ready for use

 

The W+K craft workshop is now all tooled up and ready for action. It's in one of our 'garage' rooms.
This space is for everyone to use, to play, experiment and build in.

The workshop is fitted out with all sorts of kit to help take people's ideas to the next level.  Or just give them some room to play and think away from computers.

Just to give you a taster this is the sort of kit waiting to be used:

Make your own posters with screen and lino printing kits.
Large studio easel, paints and brushes to go to town on those 'new joiner' self-portraits.
Sewing machine and threads so you can run up a nice new pair of Junky Styling-style slacks.
Power tools - jigsaw, sander and drill for those tricky W+K window installations.
Fabric pens - ideal for designing the next W+K T-shirt.
Massive tool kit for customizing your brand new fixed wheels.
Saw horses and workshop bench for the big stuff.
Lomo cameras for some shooting-from-the-hip Lomography.
Multimeter and soldering iron for a bit of Arduino practice, get your computer talking to your lunch.
Cutting mats and glue guns for building prototypes for your product design projects.
An A2 light box for those complex layouts or illustrations.

It’s a great space and it'll be interesting to see how people use it.

Users will need to have a short health and safety induction with one of the W+K Health and Safety officers before they can get stuck in. And we've prepared a handy safety tips reference poster:

Finally a big thanks to everyone who helped get the space up and running, especially Ronny, John, Bronwen, Donna and Sam and to Nicole and Yuki for the Craft Workshop Dos and Don’ts poster.

Happy hammering.

DAY 23: Red Telephone box injuries

A red telephone box is much bigger and slipperier than I ever imagined. First attempt of climbing the phone box. Failed. Sore elbow. Second attempt, failed again. Almost broke my chin.  We had to go back and get a ladder in the end. Yep, we are trying to be secret, subtle elves when it comes to creating these decorations…I’m sure it would make Banksy very proud.
 

Yes, it was very complicated installation using a bottom of a bin bucket and spray painted camping ropes. No expense spared! Now all we need is a BIG tree.

We are getting slightly sentimental now…it’s just one more decoration to go. It’s been crazy, fun and we are constantly facing unexpected problems with this project but now we know we will definitely miss decorating the hood. East siiiide.
 

Open today’s door at www.wkadventcalendar.com

 

DAY 22: Snow, snow, go away. Come again another day.

I never thought I would actually say things like this but PLEASE stop snowing! Especially when we planned to do a ‘street’ installation…and this one was quite literately on a street.  We were already running about 9 hours late as we had to wait until the snow melted. Tragedy strikes! we had to put a placeholder image on our calendar over night to avoid disappointment of opening the blank advent calendar door. Gutted.
 
Well, the good news that came from this decoration was that people kept coming up to us during it’s installment telling us how much it made their day! Hopefully it was worth 9 hours of waiting.
 
Special thanks to WK elf Jill and WK elf Miles.

To open the door go to www.wkadventcalendar.com

Nutcracker Dan Reaches Africa

  Platform's holiday stress buster, which features His Excellence, Nutcracker Dan, has managed to relieve the stress of Christmas for 413 people, in over 35 countries, including Africa. Well done to everyone at Platform and to Nutcracker Dan for helping these people de-stress.

 

Wap Wap Wow Acoustic Set

 

Last Friday, Platform invited the very talented ‘Wap Wap Wow’ to record a live acoustic set in our specially decorated event space.

 

 
‘Wap Wap Wow’ is fronted by Rose Dagul; her band, James, Penny, Duncan and Kate, all hail from Peckham and lead singer Laura Vent currently works for W+K London.

 
The band played a beautiful acoustic set around the Platform Christmas Tree whilst drinking cups of tea. With the voices and cellos echoing around the space, mesmorising the lucky few who were there to watch.

 
Over Christmas they will be heading down to Oxford, to record at their friends Foals' house, with producer Hugo Manuel from the band Jonquil. Keep an eye out for more exciting gigs coming next year.

a merry christmas to all our readers

Time to close up Welcome to Optimism for the holidays. Wieden + Kennedy London will also be closed for business from lunchtime tomorrow (Christmas eve) until January 4th. Merry Christmas and a happy new year to everyone. Have yourselves a festive beano. Ho, ho, ho, etc.

nokia N900 hackerbox 'best unboxing ever'

Wieden + Kennedy's Nokia UK team have been slaving away for the past few months on creating a rather special hacker box to promote the new Nokia N900 and Maemo platform to a select group of tech leaders. The boxes went out on Friday and the response has been incredible. Geeks have gone crazy for the mysterious black box; it's all over Twitter.

We did all the audience profiling work, created the box with Atom and sourced all the personalised goodies including, as you can see on the video, a small plastic fox.

To top it off and deliver us and Nokia a rather nice Christmas present it has been described on Engadget as the best unboxing ever.

wieden + kennedy advent calendar in today's Metro

You can experience the full festive joy of the wieden + kennedy advent candar at http://www.wkadventcalendar.com/

DAY 21: C-c-cold even by WK elves standard.

This is the last week of our advent calendar. Since London is literately frozen over, today is a perfect opportunity for some urban snowflake magic.  Have you ever noticed that those unassuming water drain filters have a snowflake on them? Well, look out next time they’re everywhere. Now every time I see them, all I can think of is snowflake! 

To help us spread the Christmas love at www.wkadventcalendar.com