A little while ago I blogged about Peter Root’s cityscape staple art after seeing it on Fubiz. Now, after exploring more of the Fubiz archives I’ve fond some more staples art that I think I might enjoy even more.

It took the French artist, Baptiste Debombourg, 75 hours and 35,000 staples to create the pieces and you can see loads more of his awesome installations on his website.

I can imagine using this technique to make a nice TV, Print or Guerilla campaign for a stationary brand or chain like Rymans (or Staples of course!). I can see a stop motion TV spot with quirky music and an artwork or logo being created with staples in this technique. 

This morning as I came out of Waterloo station there was a gang of glamorous looking women handing out what appeared to be free handbags. Of course all the female commuters crowded round trying to find out what was going on and if they were actually able to get their hands on a free handbag, which then attracted more attention.

Once my girlfriend managed to get her hands on one we quickly realised that these handbags were actually a wrap around Sex & The City ad for the Metro newspaper! Makes a change from the usual ink heavy wrap arounds that mess up your hands when you hold them.

Bon idée.

Just found these cool drawings from Ben Heine on the Daily Obsessional blog and thought that they were well worth sharing. I’m surprised I haven’t seen this technique used in some ads for an art shop or something. I think it’s a bit of a shame about the blatant Photoshop work though, I’d prefer if it was a little more subtle and realistic or if the pictures were actually being held up in front of those views.

Awesome art work from Erika Iris Simmons using cassette tapes. She’s got loads more awesome stuff using other recycled materials on her flickr profile. I love seeing art work using old or disused materials and have always thought there’s something quite nice and vintage about cassette tapes. Check out my previous post about cassette tape art too

Thanks to Fubiz for pointing me in this artists direction.

Skateboardanimation from Tilles Singer on Vimeo.

The most freaking awesome skate video I’ve seen all week. I’ve been talking about wanting to get back into skating, which I stopped doing about 5 years ago, and this video has just given me that little boost I needed to get my deck out the shed and go shred some park.

Since meeting a few guys and girls from Yelp recently I’ve become a (slightly addicted) Yelp user and enjoy writing reviews a few times per week. As a result I’ve begun to notice some areas for improvement and thought I’d start a blog post to list my ideas to see if any other Yelp users agree?

Filtering

- When browsing in map view I want to be able to filter the results by checking/unchecking boxes to show places with/without my specific interests such as cuisine type, price range, outdoor seating, WiFi, etc. They have a system like this at the moment but it doesn’t allow you to uncheck or filter out something you know you’re not interested in. This would make browsing easier.

WiFi

- Yelp should include an option to give a star rating of the WiFi for a cafe/bar/restaurant etc because the quality of WiFi at each place varies so much. WiFi sometimes comes up in the ‘Show more survey questions’ but it should also be one of the check boxes that always comes up.

Rating System

- When you write a review you get the option to answer a set of survey questions about what services the establishment offers (e.g. Takeaway? Delivery? Smoking Area?). This is good but without reading through all the reviews it doesn’t tell us about the quality of services. For example I’d like to see a star rating system for things such as quality of food, quality of drinks, quality of atmosphere,  good/bad music, speed of delivery, sheltered smoking area, quality of WiFi, etc

Writing more than one review per place

Sometimes I’ll check out a club or sandwich shop or wherever and I’ll come away feeling really happy, knowing I’ll go back at some point. But then when I go back it’s awful. I don’t know why this is, perhaps I was served by someone else or I just go unlucky.

Also, I’ve been to a bar before to have lunch and thought it was amazing with great service and good food but then when I’ve been in the evening for drinks it’s been slow service and poor quality.

Yelp should let you write multiple reviews for occasions like this because at the moment you can only update your previous review. This would give readers a better idea as to the consistency of a place, what it’s good (and not good) for and it would show how many times particular Yelpers go to that place (it must be good if they go a lot). For example, Tossed is unpredictable but Gaucho is consistently amazing and readers could see that I go there a lot.

Blog Synchronising

I think it’d be great if your Yelp reviews synchronised with your blog. So when I write a review on Yelp it gives me an option to publish the review to my blog also, just like it does now with Twitter and Facebook.

This would encourage people to put more effort into writing a good quality review, rather than just posting quickly without thought or care. It would also spread the word of Yelp further as each synchronised blog post could come with a link to the Yelp review, thus diverting more traffic to Yelp.

Embedding photographs and links

In the same way that I write a blog post with embedded photographs and links it would we good to be able to do this with Yelp too. Then you can use the photographs to help explain what you’re talking about and they’d help break up the text, making large reviews easier to digest. These embedded images could be pulled automatically from within the reviews and put in the photos section for each business.

If you have any to add, feel free to do so in the comments or mail them to me and I’ll add them in. Once there’s a decent amount I’ll send them to Yelp via their Feedback page.

There, that’s it for now. It’s not a rant at Yelp, because they’ve got great usability already, it’s just some idea of how it could be improved further. Apologies if I’ve said something that they already do, let me know if I have!

thedailywhat:

Amazing Ad Campaign of the Day: To creatively demonstrate their sound engineering capabilities, GGRP Sound sent out a mess of cardboard record players — designed by GREY of Canada — to creative directors across North America.

The cardboard record player is exactly what it sounds like: A record player made from corrugated cardboard:

Once assembled, a record can be spun on the player with a pencil. The vibrations go through the needle and are amplified in the cardboard material.

I don’t know much, but I do know this: Every single last record should come wrapped inside a cardboard record player.

[adsoftheworld.]

It’s not particularly new but I like the creativity behind making the music differently.

A pretty neat installation in a gallery in Australia using bouncy balls.

This would have made a cool stunt for Sony Bravia TVs back when their Bouncy Balls ad came out. They could have erected a huge Sony Bravia TV with suspended bouncy balls (as above) and viewing members of the public could have stepped inside and walked around the suspended, pixel-like bouncy balls. In fact, they should do it if they bring out 3D TVs with some copy that’s reminiscent of their pre-existing campaign…

‘3D. Like No Other’

They could even re-shoot the bouncy balls ad using 3D cameras and air it on telly and cinema after dishing out Sony branded 3D glasses.

There you go, Fallon, this one’s on me. The next you’ll have to pay for. And don’t forget to credit me, yeah.

Pictures from Fubiz blog

Photos from Booooooom Blog