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The CGSociety is the most respected and accessible global organization for creative digital artists. The CGS supports artists at every level by offering a range of services to connect, inform, educate and promote digital artists worldwide.

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Volvo UK has launched LifePaint, a safety product designed to enhance the safety of cyclists riding at night. Developed in consultation with Swedish startup company Albedo100 and Grey London, the transparent safety spray is designed to light up at night under the glare of headlights. The spray can be applied to almost any fabric, including clothes, shoes, strollers, children’s backpacks, even dog leads and collars. It can be washed off and lasts for about a week after application. Volvo is giving away 2000 cans of LifePaint at six bicycle shops in London and Kent. If successful the project will be expanded across the UK, with the option of global expansion. The Volvo LifePaint campaign, online at volvopaint.com, is designed to Volvo’s new XC90 car, which is built with added safety features.

“Our job isn’t just to advertise our clients,” said Nils Leonard, chairman and CCO of Grey London. “It’s to help them make a positive impact on culture. With the creation of LifePaint, we’ve turned Volvo safety inside out, giving it away to the most vulnerable road users. What more positive action can a brand take than to try to save lives?”

Grey also used LifePaint to create “invisible” black posters that only reveal their message in the flash of a smartphone.

“This is the sort of work we want to be making,” says Grey London creative director Hollie Newton. “Properly integrated innovation. Design a valuable, remarkable product for a brand, and then launch it with the same level of craft.”

Credits

The Volvo Life Paint campaign was developed at Grey London by chief creative officer Nils Leonard, creative director Hollie Newton, creative team Jonas Roth, Rasmus Smith Bech, planner Wiktor Skoog, head of film Glenn Paton, integrated producer Francesca Mair, assistant producer Talia Shear, designer/typographer Chris Chapman, creative producers Helen Llewelyn and Glen McLeod, account team Cristyn Bevan, Sophie Critchley and Alex Nixon.

LifePaint was produced in collaboration with Albedo100.

Filming was shot by director Andrew Telling via Caviar with director of photography Jeremy Valender, executive producer Louise Gagen, and producer Adam Smith.

Editor was Matt Newman at GreyWorks. Colorist was Julien Biard at Finish. Post production was done at Gramercy Park Studios by VFX supervisor/lead Flame artist Mark Beardall, 2D artists Jamie Russell, Steve Miller, Kalle Kohlström, post producer Annika Gustavsson.

Sound was designed by Munzie Thind at Grand Central Studios. Music was composed by Adam Halogen at Wake The Town.

The microsite was developed by Paul Cackett, Piers Cleveland-Copeman and Johan Runge-Goransson at clear.as.

The award-winning graphic designer decodes why the simple shapes of a logo can have such great impact . “Design can be a lonely thing,” says Michael Bierut in the second part of this exclusive Design Indaba interview. “As you acquire that skill [in design] you are actually making yourself less normal than regular people.” Designers are sensitised to things other people don’t even notice, he says – the way the curves of a typeface echo each other, for example, or the subtle changes in a logo. Though the work of the designer is social because it requires the user to make sense of it, there is an element of solitude to the design process. “Because you are always in your head,” says Beirut, “and you don’t know what effect it’s going to have until you do it.” We tend to fixate on the power of logos in today’s hyper-aware consumer culture, which Bierut is quick to disarm. “I don’t want to overemphasise logos in the world. I think that if you act with intelligence and integrity and consistency you’ll develop a brand. Whether you are a person or a non-profit, a small organisation or a giant corporation.” What he does think of as particularly interesting about logos however, is the meaning that gets instilled in them over the course of their usage. “What’s fun about logo design, what makes it so interesting, why it holds so much power for all of us is that there is something very primitive about it,” he says. “Many of them are such simple marks. They are not much further evolved than hieroglyphics, or marks on cave walls from millions of years ago.” What happens with a logo, explains Bierut, takes place only partly in the symbol; the rest we do with our minds as we connect the symbol to all the associations we have with what it means. “What’s interesting, particularly about that kind of telegraphic communication is that it it is inherently participatory.” It is this interactive and social quality of design work that lends the profession what Bierut can only describe as “a kind of magic”. In Part 1 of this interview Michael Bierut talks about the process of writing his new book, How to: Use graphic design to sell things, explain things, make things look better, and (every once in a while) change the world, in which he looks back on his life and career in a series of amusing and interesting How to’s.

Music video by Living Colour performing Glamour Boys. (C) 1989 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT