welcome to optimism

the edible teaser poster

Yum.

snapping you snapping us

We photographed a passer-by photographing the installation in our Hanbury Street window. It's a giant pop-up book by Karolina Kling.

DAY 4 : A tyre is H E A V Y .

Today is the day 4 of our street advent calendar project.

I wondered to myself today, “When was the last time I lifted a tyre up with my bare hands in a junk yard?” Mmm, I never have because they're MASSIVELY HEAVY. Yep.  Today’s mission was made more interesting as we had to tip-toe around the yard to avoid  the many delightful deposits left by local street dogs …. Anyhow, the tire wreath turned out  to better than we expected considering we never made a wreath in our lives. Phew! In fact, Mrs Whiteley thought it was convincing enough to be a real gigantic wreath.  DAY 4 done. Dusted. 

Don't forget to open the 4th door at www.wkadventcalendar.com

 

Merry Christmas and Happy Streets

Today is the first day of our gigantic street advent calendar which is also our agency christmas card.

Each day, we open a door in the calendar to reveal a new festive street decoration that we've put out into the neighbourhood. Every idea takes something pretty mundane and adds a Wieden + Kennedy Christmas twist. The calendar fills an entire window of the agency and is also a beautifully illustrated map, so finding the street decorations is part of the fun.

Come down to 16 Hanbury st to see the installation and to open the doors online please visit at www.wkadventcalendar.com.

Here are some of cheeky behind the scene shots from the install last night.

Happy first advent calendar day.
 
Team Christmas.

become a more personable person

Strange things happening in our windows, courtesy of Wimbledon College of Art.

 

 

Part of our ongoing project 'This is why we meet'. For more info, see here.

pop me up ads

Some of the ads placed in W+K's Hanbury Street window as a result of the Pop Me Up installation developed by students from Camberwell College of Arts as part of our 'This is why we Meet' project.

Christmas Card Making Machine - Open Source

In December of last year we created a Christmas themed interactive installation in our Hanbury St window. If you stood in front of the window, it would grab your face and in realtime it would place this on a random illustrated Christmas character. All of this behind the scenes trickery of face tracking was created by Joel Gethin Lewis who explained it was all possible because of a free, open source software called openFrameworks.

openFrameworks is really a way for creatives and artists to get computers to help them realise their visions. You still need to be able to program and write code but it hides lots of the complicated parts and opens a much simpler interface to programming -  If you need face tracking you just 'plug in' that part of the system and so on.

openFrameworks is developed and maintained by Zachary Lieberman and Theo Watson and the other inspiring facet is the community that is there to share code, improve the software, give advice, form partnerships and collaborate.

In a nod back to the community, Joel and Wieden+Kennedy are open sourcing the Christmas Card Making Machine and perhaps this Christmas there might be more inventive and entertaining uses of the code.

Download the source.

openFrameworks teaser

For those interesing in learning more about creative coding then also take a look at the excellent Processing, initiated by Casey Reas and Ben Fry.

There is also a fantastic TED talk by Golan Levin who has used OpenFrameworks in many of his pieces.

window X

For more info on the 'Idea X' competition, see Selfridges website.

role reversal

Someone outside our building today making a picture of our imaginary friend. Not a very great picture, it appeared.

There's an interview with our phantasmal rabbit at Amelia's Magazine here.

The live feed for our imaginary friend is now up and running for those of you not in the neighbourhood of Spitalfields. You can watch it here.