… think inside the box.

The benefits to thinking inside the box are:

a)    Nobody else does it
b)    There are no distractions
c)    You stick to the brief
d)    You deliver what is absolutely necessary
e)    And then you get paid

Some of the best ideas are born inside of set boundries. That’s  all. Sorry rebel people.

USN (Ultimate Sports Nutrition) is an international sports nutrition brand that has its roots in the body building industry. The company’s rapid growth has spawned a vast range of scientifically engineered products that are perfectly suited for the general healthy lifestyle market. We all want a great body in time for summer, right? It was our job to remind the regular bloke that the season has just changed:

These double page spreads appeared in Men’s Health magazine.

And women do it too, you know. These ads where made for the campaign roll out in Shape magazine

This one didn’t make it to print. What would your call have been?

Red Bull Big Wave Africa celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. Red Bull approached us to create an anniversary logo. The only condition… don’t change the logo in anyway. Hmm. So we stuck a ‘one’ in front of it. The wave on the logo makes its own zero. One and Zero makes 10. See for yourself:

The Outstanding 100 is a new brand offering by Seasoned Productions. It’s a coffee table book representing South Africa’s top 100 destinations. The concept has international intentions. We have just started work on the edit and design consultation for the Dubai edition.

Our resident doodler - Quasiem (the part time street art punk) - has been bombing again. These illustrations appeared in Men’s Health Magazine:

Good Lord, we hired a homie. Three reasons to take on a street artist:

1. Nobody wants to be an aging rock star; at 25 the cat is our creative elixir.

2. He is bloody talented

3. Somebody has to do the work around here.

Quasiem started drawing long before he worked out which one of his fingers was best suited to depress the nozzle on a tin of spray paint. Later, unlike those who do not graduate past tagging their signatures all over suburbia, Quasiem excelled with majors in communication design and illustration. With a graphic design diploma stuffed in his low-cut back pocket he turned passion into an impressive portfolio of album art, advertising art, logo design and corporate identity.

We found him in magazines. After a stint at Cape Media, working on titles like Explore and Leadership magazine, Quasiem moved to Men’s Health magazine where he was charged with conceptual design, layout and illustration. The perfect rounding for TypeFace’s multi-media offering. So we dangled a fat salomie he couldn’t refuse.

Listen to him speak: “When I’m not doing all the work at TypeFace I love working on Fersyndicate, which is my street art, graffiti, illustration… whatever-self-expression-I-need label. I ride bmx and watch plenty of movies. I rhyme when I talk, thanks to the stream of hip-hop leaking from my headphones and oh… I do pro bono graphic design for my homies.”

Look at him work:
(A self portrait. The guns aren’t real. The Nike Air Jordans are.)

I grew up in a house where creativity was a means to an end. And by that I do not mean that we drew pictures and made money. I mean that we solved problems creatively which meant that everyday was different, there was no routine and no expectations. I enjoyed that. I didn’t enjoy school. School – my school – was designed to stifle creativity, it needed a more simplistic ‘checks and balances’ formula to weed out the good from the bad, to separate the first team from the drama class. Come that time when you made your subject choices I noticed that Art, Technical Drawing and Woodwork all fell into the same column. Pick one, not all three boy. Well obviously, art was for poofs, technical drawing for the ‘gifted’ children and woodwork, well, let’s just say he doesn’t need to worry about that Nobel prize. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bitter, the world needs more prop forwards. It’s just that you had to be successful at what they prescribed a successful skill. I disagree. What programme would you rather watch, one where a guy solves a life-or-death riddle by carrying the two and dividing by three or MacGyver? Ja. I’ll get to the point. Creativity is the non-conventional solution to a problem that can’t be solved. And what’s more you don’t have to be a woodwork student to have it. I’ve come across mathematicians who possessed more creativity than some of the leading ‘creatives’ in the industry. Buckminster Fuller. Check out his work. You don’t have to shave your head and grow odd facial hair to prove your creative wealth. Give it bash, it can’t hurt. Well, not much.