TAXI created the poster campaign for this year’s TIFF The Toronto International Film Festival. The work was revealed to the press on Tuesday along with several of the Gala films and stars that will be attending this year’s festival. We worked with illustrator/writer Gary Clement to create the campaign.

Here’s the blurb TIFF put on their site to describe the philosophy behind the range of posters.

“Truly great films do a lot of things. They engage, inspire, and sometimes even reintroduce us to the world around us. But above all, great films spark great conversations; and that is the heart of this year’s TIFF: Toronto International Film Festival campaign. The cast of characters and their conversations show off the huge diversity of the festival audience. Each piece in the campaign is meant to highlight the different places, people and perspectives, that make up the world’s most accessible film festival. It is an experience anyone can tailor to their own interests. So, the only question is: What will you see?”

See more images from the press conference in our flickr gallery here

TAXI Vancouver’s Chris Zawada gets even more famous.

Check-out the story about his packaging blog.

Or, the blog itself, Lovely Package.

This is gorgeous! Have a look. It’s the best one i have seen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVT34-xQDUE

It turns out having a large network may not be as good for you as you think. The quality of the network can greatly influence your happiness.

Recent research from the Proceedings of the Royal Society showed that happiness and sadness spread in patterns similar to disease. Contact with someone who is either happy or sad can mean you are more likely to exhibit the same emotion. The not-so-good news is that discontent is much more contagious. Misery loves company. More info on the study via Wired

What about our online contacts? Do our online networks follow the same contagious patterns as our offline? If so, all it takes is a few unhappy people to steer others in the same direction. The study looked at the spread of emotions over years, we still don’t know the effects of short term contact or immediate shared events.

Sentiment for Old Spice

The recent Old Spice campaign is a great example of what we don’t know about the short term effects. The campaign is brilliant, but we don’t know how much of the positive sentiment around the campaign is based on pure brilliance, and how much is affected by the positive sentiment of others. If only we could track so easily.

If there’s anything in the design world seemingly more trendy right now other than fonts in lower-case, it’s infographics.  And I for one love them.

World Cup Brackets

They wonderfully appeal to my left-brain love of organizing things, and my right-brain love of beautiful design.  And for a change, they make topics with reams of tedious information now fun, digestible and visually awesome. What’s not to love?

But why are they so big right now?

Is it that Graphic Designers have become like hipsters, and now shun the expected and seek inspiration in the unlikeliest of sources – facts?  Is the latest measure of their skill the ability to make cool the uncool? Interesting the uninteresting – and that they’ve stumbled upon the Mecca of monotonous subject matter in the world’s encyclopedias, statistics charts and how-to manuals?

Or, more cynically, is there simply a need today for this kind of spoon-fed, picture-book information for a generation who can barely read more than a paragraph about any one subject before getting bored, but who still want enough facts to get them by in any passing conversation?

Either way, I’m ok with it because the end result is sweet.  And besides, what’s not to love when instead of trudging through Wookiepedia I can visually compare the sizes of the Millennium Falcon vs. the Starship Enterprise in a quick and graphically stunning way?

Science Fiction Space Ships

Here are some other keepers in the realm of infographics…

Song Lyrics (i.e. What Meatloaf would and would not do for love)

Where Americans Are Moving

Presidents

We all love the Old Spice spots and now there are so many more! This innovative approach to creating personalized video responses by the old spice guy is successful in part because the client had such trust in the creators. It is also due to a renewed team structure that saw the right people engaged at the right time ; a partnership of tech, creative, strategy and production. Really great work.

This is how they did it.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_old_spice_won_the_internet.php