'Fucking Summer'

In May Platoon launched the 'Fucking summer' / 'scheiss sommer'  promotional campaign for the Arena summer season 2009. The operation included a holistic campaign of posters, online, social networks, adds and more. Arena is a post-industrial complex on Berlin's river Spree, hosting creative businesses, bars, concerts, cultural events [recently international design festival DMY] and river-bound pool the 'Badeschiff' / 'Pool-Ship'.

For a while the area was battered with the thematic posters, which used an eye-catching blend of straws, piss, ketchup, condensation and cigerettes to put their point across. It's exemplary of the continental branch of rational photography and is preferable to silly indie shots of some gymnastic goth contorting 'to the beat'. And likewise preferable to the predictable graphical melodrama that promotions usually employ. They have a natural, dreamy depth and satirical 'truth' that lends depth to the environment they're pasted to. But they suffered for their art, as their collectibility became a problem for the campaign.

Double Standards

[Images: Record sleeves; Exhibition manuals; Letterheads; Shopfront design]

Double Standards. No, not like feminism, but more like a design studio from Berlin that I investigated after noticing a string of their posters hovering around. There's fairly sparse descriptive prose on the website, but judging from the pictures and menu sorting, it's principally a surface-based, visual communication/graphic design co, doing books, catalogues, posters and mixed campaigns etc. Using block colours and typography, the work is comparable to the contemporary school of rational Dutch design, and shares some of its clarity, unlike a fair amount of more cluttered communication around the city. Their strategies and mediums are also interesting and original, and worth a look.