Airside’s Granimator talk at Apple this Thursday

August 25, 2010Quick reminder for you that Airside is speaking at a Granimator special event at London’s Regent Street Apple Store this Thursday evening.

The event is hosted by design magazine Creative Review and will feature our Airside's Interaction Designer, Guy Moorhouse discussing our experience designing an illustration pack for the innovative new application, which allows you to create sound based wallpaper for your iPad.

Airside’s Granimator pack is called Eyejazz and along with visual design by Airside, it features new music by Fred Deakin, of Lemon Jelly and superstar DJ fame.

Other speakers at Thursday's free event include David Henckel and Kate Moross and it all kicks off at 7pm.

MeeGo Characters Get To Work

August 20, 2010What was once Moblin has now become MeeGo – an inventive new operating system for netbooks, smarts phones and tablets from Intel and Nokia.

What hasn’t changed is that Airside continues to design characters and other assets for the system's software and marketing material. We’re currently hard at work on a film about the benefits of MeeGo on tablets, but meanwhile our characters have started their own labours.

Head to the official MeeGo website and you’ll find Airside-designed pirates, penguins and paddies all doing their best to promote the open source software.

The green-clad loudmouth Irishmen and walking pints of Guinness were created to spread the word about the forthcoming MeeGo conference being held in Dublin in November.

Every Message Brings Us Closer

August 19, 2010Airside has produced two brand new animations to help launch Nokia’s latest mobile handsets.

The campaign Every Message Brings Us Closer demonstrates how the new models can be used in a lifestyle situation to bring people closer. Each film is based around a different central character and aimed at a specific consumer group: Daisy (youth market) and Karim (prosumers, or early adopters).

Working with advertising agency R/GA, Airside designed and produced the films with the help of a fantastic team of animators and background artists.

The music on each film is composed by Airside director and Lemon Jelly music maker Fred Deakin.

Watch Nokia: Every Message Bring Us Closer.

Where are you Airside Shop?

August 18, 2010Where are you Airside Shop? We used to have so much fun.

In between doing the do and not dancing to that music you’re playing, early 90s pop star Betty Boo summed up our feelings about Airside Shop, which has been the site of an Under Construction notice for so long it must feel like Nicole Kidman’s face.

Well fret no more all you Airside Shoppers and pop/rap stars, for we can now reveal the plan for our beloved t-shirt and print emporium. Drum roll please…

Airside Shop will shortly become Airside Play, a place where you can throw off the shackles of the work-a-day world and indulge in some serious playtime with the Airside crew.

Airside Play will bring together our most fun Flickr pics, Twitter updates, Blog posts and other social media shenanigans. It will be a place where you can breathe in the Airside vibe and get involved in our world.

And of course, you will also be able to shop, but the Airside Play retail experience is going to be very different. We are only going to sell an ever changing, small number of seriously limited edition stuff, from t-shirts and prints to one-off art pieces and demented late-night weaving experiments. The plan is to change the stock every month and once something leaves the shelves of Airside Play, it will never come back.

So that’s the idea, now it is time to implement it, which means giving the current Airside Shop site a complete redesign and starting work on our first products. We’re hoping to have everything up and running before the winter.

If you are an Airside Shopper, we’d love to know what you think, so please email us your comments and suggestions.

Airside at Apple Store Granimator event

August 11, 2010Design magazine Creative Review is hosting a Granimator special event at London’s Regent Street Apple Store at the end of August.

CR has asked Airside to speak about our experience designing an pack for ustwo's innovative new app, which allows you to create sound based wallpaper for your iPad.

Airside’s Granimator pack is called Eyejazz and along with visual design by Airside, it features new music by Fred Deakin, of Lemon Jelly and superstar DJ fame.

Eyejazz gives the Granimator user creative freedom that is guided by certain rules to ensure any arrangement they come up with looks amazing.

Our Interaction Designer, Guy Moorhouse will be talking about how it all works at the free Apple Store Granimator special event, which takes place on August 26th 2010 from 7pm.

Stick It On Gumtree

August 10, 2010Classified ads website Gumtree has made its first foray into the world of television advertising with help from Airside.

We teamed up with ad agency Beta London to create a wonderfully simple 30-second piece about the ease of buying and selling in your local community via Gumtree.

Beta London came to Airside with a brief that required “a crude, drawn animation style”, so we immediately decided to work with former Airsider, Dick Hogg to create the Gumtree community.

Dick’s happy-looking cast of characters recalls his classic designs for Lemon Jelly’s Shouty Track promo video, as produced by Airside.

Gumtree’s ‘Tree’ commercial first aired on August 09th 2010. Watch it online.

Coming Soon: Airside Nippon

August 09, 2010This is a photo of Henki showing his love for the good old British pound.

Sterling is just one of the things Henki will be leaving behind when he departs these shores in September and heads for the mysterious lands of the Orient in order to start Airside Nippon.

Given our affection and connection with all thing Japanese, opening an Airside studio in the land of temples and technology is an idea that we have long ruminated over.

As our Japanese client list – which includes NTV, Sagawa and Rie Fu – has grown dramatically over the past few years, so the dream became a reality.

Henki will be teaming up with our good friends at Hybrid, as well as Hiromi, our former Sony Japan agent, while legendary Airside intern Yoshi will also be involved in the creation of Airside Nippon.

The official launch of Airside Nippon is set for October during Tokyo Design Week. We’ll keep you up to date with news and information as soon as we have it.

Airside Artwork On New William Orbit Album

August 03, 2010William Orbit has made a sequel to his critically acclaimed 2000 album Pieces in a Modern Style, where he created ambient cover versions of classical music pieces like Samuel Barber’s Adagio For Strings.

Ten years later the sequel features electronic takes on Elgar, Bach and Tchaikovsky, as well as artwork by Airside.

Airside’s design takes the form of a circle, or an Orbit if you will, that presents a series of worlds evolving from the classical to the modern.

We’re also working on a 30 second promo piece based on the artwork, which will animate this evolution from the big bang to rocket launch. This will be broadcast on TV and online towards the end of August.

William Orbit’s Pieces in a Modern Style 2 is released on 16 August 2010 on Decca Records.

eco:Drive In Creativity Top Five

August 02, 2010One of the most recent Top Five lists from Creativity featured Airside’s animation for Fiat eco:Drive.

Last week’s number two in the online magazine’s weekly best-of list was the news that Fiat has expanded eco:Drive to use on entire fleets of vehicles, helping transport businesses become greener.

The Creativity video plays the entire Fiat eco:Drive Fleet ad in full so if you fancy saying ciao to Merv and his buddies again, watch the Creativity Top 5 here.

You can also marvel at the presenter’s pronunciation of “eco” as “echo”, whilst trying to avoid looking at her rather disturbing t-shirt.

Oh, and that iPad ghetto blaster at number three is stupidly cool.