Over the past few years we’ve seen a slew of limited edition variant/packages from the Jack Daniel’s Sour Mash Tenesse Whiskey distillery. Interestingly, when Jack Daniel’s are aiming for a more premium product they tend to dial down the overt branding whilst utilising subtle brand queues such as  the squar bottle and the cut glass rose detailing around the neck. Look forward to see more in 2012.

Some really nice branding/identity work from Kady Jesco, a graphic design graduate from Central Michigan University. Kady’s portfolio demonstrates a passion for typography and a leaning towards condensed faces and muted photography. You can see more of her work here or follow her at @heykadyje.

Velcro Suit is the alter ego of Adam a hill, a graphic designer/illustrator with a rich portfolio of vector led, textural pieces. He was given the opportunity to design the cover for Design Indaba’s Youth Issue (Quarter 2, 2011). The result is a typographic interpretation of the famous George Bernard Shaw quote: “The Youth Is Wasted On The Young”, with the words crafted out of than candy canes. See more of his work here.

Last week More 4 rebranded itself in order to aid a larger repositioning of the channel. A sneak peak of the logo was released late last year (2011) and was met with the usual chorus of internet “rubbish” and “pointless” jibes. I decided to hold out until I saw the finished product before making my judgment, and I’m glad I did! Although I liked the previous Spin designed marque and animations the channel always felt a little annexed on to the Channel 4 family, like an awkward uncle at a get together. It verged on the being a little too flat and stiff. Man vs. Machine‘s brand refresh lightens More 4′s brand presence, allowing the channel to let its hair down somewhat through a deeper, three dimensional, more emotional aesthetic. The new quirky photographic idents help connect the brand to its parent channel and offer a broad spectrum of possibilities for future executions. In short, this time the internet haters were wrong.

We’ve recently noticed a trend for innocent, stripped back covers of rock songs in TV advertising. So what’s the reasoning behind the choice of track? Well your guess is as good as ours but here goes…

Many of these ads are targeted towards adult females with children. The tracks may trigger memories of this audience’s younger days viewed through a soft, hazy filter. Paired with the imagery the ads invoke warm, nostalgic feelings typically associated with special events (e.g. holidays, Christmas) whilst not alienating the secondary audience (fathers).

Thompson TV advert – Cover of ‘Where is my Mind’ by The Pixies

John Lewis advert – ‘Please, Please, Please’ by The Smiths

John Lewis advert – Cover of ‘Sweet Child Of Mine’ by The Guns and Roses

Twinnings advert – Cover of ‘Wherever you Will Go’ by The Calling

Vision Express advert – Cover of ‘Waterfall’ by The Stone Roses (around 50 seconds)

Robert G. Bartholot is a photographer and art director whose work often features bold blocks of colour and anonymous human forms. His self-initiated project ‘Geometric Homicide’ acts as triptych with a simplified, constructivist aesthetic. Find out more here.

Alan Segama is a graphic designer and illustrator who often mixes a coloured texture background with clean vector imagery. Shown above is his piece “Ain’t always Gonna be Gold” but we also love his Wes Anderson tryptych. Find out  more here.

One of our favourite things about the new year is the abundance of ‘best songs of the previous year’ playlists that get published. So after listening to a few of them over the last week or so, we had an idea; combine them all and delete the duplicates. The result is 15 hours of tracks pulled together from playlists published by Pitchfork, NME, Time, Wired and The Guardian.

Open and subscribe to the playlist here Songs of 2011.

A month or so ago Information is Beautiful and The Guardian Datablog held a competition to design an infographic based on a given data set. Daily Slandered gave it a go and spent a few hours burning the midnight oil just to make the deadline. We then got the news that we had made the final 12 and started to get excited! In the end we lost out to a worthy competitor but energised and full of enthusiasm. Looking forward to the next competition.

Following our post on chick flick poster design we began looking for similarities in the film posters of other genres. We headed straight for horror and skipped straight past the theme into a cliché. It took a few people less than an hour to think of 24 film posters and DVD covers which focus on an eye.  More posters themes to come…