During his recent trip to Tokyo, Henki met up with many of our Japanese friends. But, as the above photo suggests, the one person he was most excited to meet was Stanley – his rabbit creation for Japanese TV channel NTV’s Friday Night Roadshow bumper campaign.

The usually cool and calm Henki couldn’t hide his joy when presented with the stuffed toy Stanleys. While the photo below shows him looking overwhelmed when faced with the Friday Night Roadshow stationery collection. After all that excitement it must have been a relief for him to come home and get back to work.

There is nothing quite like a toy version of one of our characters to get us eggs-cited at Easter. And how appropriate that the star of our NTV Friday Roadshow bumper campaign, Stanley, should be stuffed to immortality at this time of the year.  Though we’ll ignore the fact that the Easter Bunny and that death and resurrection malarkey doesn’t mean all that much in Japan.

Stanley was created by Airside for Japanese TV station NTV. He and the other characters we designed have proven very popular and already feature on these charming stationery sets. And now comes the stuffed toy treatment of Stanley, in both day and evening wear. We have no idea how to get our hands on them, though we do have our ex-intern Yoshi on the case.  Sort it out big guy!

Airside recently teamed up with Japanese mobile phone company, KDDI, to produce an illustrated booklet called Rangers. The booklet is a free gift for Japanese purchasers of a new KDDI phone, which comes with novelty USB plug attachments.  KDDI asked Airside to tell a story featuring these attachments, which include birds that sit on the USB cord like a telephone wire and firemen (known as rangers in Japan) holding it like a hose.

Our story saw a fiery cat, threatened chicks and some groovy firemen give a new twist to the old story of a cat being rescued from a tree. Written by Airside and featuring gorgeous illustrations by our former intern, Erica Dorn, Rangers is told in a sequential comic book style with accompanying rhyming text in both English and Japanese. Well, at least it rhymes in English.  Anyone know if the translation does?

When The Guardian called to see if we were available for a job, there was initial disappointment amongst certain Airsiders, that it wasn’t to help James Richardson write puns for the Football Weekly podcast.  Still, doing some illustrations and an animation to promote their Better Relationships supplement was a fine consolation – though we’re still waiting for that call from AC Jimbo.

Better Relationships is a two-part guide to getting along with your friends and family that came free with The Guardian and The Observer on Valentine’s weekend. Airside created a number of promotional illustrations that appeared in the newspaper, along with a TV commercial that features the return of the chest bump.  All right!  Watch the TV ad here.

The lovely people at FormFiftyFive asked me to do a sexy header for last week’s FFF blog. I had a think and came up with two headers and as they couldn’t decide between the two, they choose both. Fine with me!

So here they are for you to see : a day typographic naughty birds doing variations on an F. Below, a night more intimate 69. Just a fun thing to do for a nice blog to read.

If you look closer there is also a post on Airside on the page and a image of our Vitsoe stop frame animation which I love. Video interview of our very own Fred Deakin to come next week on FFF.

It seems that everyone wants a piece of our sexy Pin-ups.

Whether it is magazines, prints or cakes, you can’t turn around without coming across a hot naked lady (oo-er).

Most recently The Sunday Times came calling with flowers in hand, nervously sweating and desperately trying to flatten that irritating spiky bit of hair at the back. They wanted one of our girls to guide their readers through their revamped Style supplement and, as ever, they were very accommodating.

Even when the newspaper insisted that she be clothed and called Stylista. It’s not typical of the requests she receives, but hey, she is willing to try anything once.

Our latest film for Moblin is now being shown at trade shows. This time we’re demonstrating how Moblin’s Linux-based Operating System works on mobile devices.

We thought the best way to do this would be to have a giant cat roaming a city. OK, and have some explanation of how it actually works. But check out that cat here.

Last Friday Airside helped our good friends at the Design Museum celebrate their 20th birthday by baking them a cake. Our contribution to their Birthday Cake Bakeoff was this deliciously daring piece of fornicating food, designed by us and baked by the good people at Konditor & Cook.

Much like those naughty icing ladies, our cake went down well. Now who wants to lick the bowl?

When the Galapagos Conservation Trust asked Airside to produce a set of postcards featuring Boobies, we started thinking about those saucy 1930’s postcards.

But then we realised they were talking about the Blue-Footed Booby – a native of the Galapagos Islands.

As part of a campaign to help preserve the unique, native species of the Pacific Ocean UNESCO World Heritage site, the Galapagos Conservation Trust wanted to introduce the islands’ animals to children. They set up the Tortoise Club and asked Airside to create a set of postcards, stickers and badges to be given free to schools.

Ok so our take on the Blue-Footed Booby, Marine Iguana, Galapagos Sea Lion, Penguin, Giant Tortoise and Sally Lightfoot Crab might not be exactly biologically accurate, but they sure are cute. And somewhat more educational than a Carry-On style cartoon.

For more information on the Galapagos Conservation Trust visit www.savegalapagos.org.

The characters from our NTV idents now feature on a lovely set of stationery for sale in Japan.

Stanley and the other cinema-going woodland creatures appear on sticker set, plastic folders, mouse mats and ticket books.

All of these products are available to buy on the NTV website.

Though our poor grasp of Japanese prevents us from finding out where exactly you might find them.