Friday Favourites

I stumbled across a couple of interesting Lego installation things this week: The first was one from the Lego company itself, which is celebrating 50 years of Lego in Australia with a ‘festival of play’. The people at Lego have created a life size forest of Lego trees and flowers, which at first was in the centre of Sydney, and has now been moved to Broken Hill, a desert area in New South Wales.

They also created this cute stop motion video to tell the story of how Lego came to Australia, and to introduce the Festival of Play. Found via Design Taxi.

The second Lego installation was this playful idea from street artist Megx, who last year transformed the underside of a bridge in Germany into Lego, brightening up a dull disused train line. Found via Colossal.

Thanks to Chris for sharing these amazing designs for trainers (or sneakers, depending on where you’re from), created by 21 year old designer Daniel Reese. He takes Nike trainers and transforms them into themed versions, from comic book heroes, to Michael Jackson. He closes down his store when he has enough work on, and then reopens when he’s finished that batch. He must be busy because at the time of writing, it was indeed, closed, but apparently you can buy them (when it’s open) here. I love the Mario and Pac Man ones, and I can think of a few people who’d be interested in the comic book hero ones (I’m looking at you Graham Shearsby). Found via Bit Rebels.

These incredible 3D sketches, created by Japanese artist Nagai Hideyuki were doing the rounds on a few sites this week, and were shared around our studios by Clarence. Drawn mostly in pencil, he uses light and shade, angles and positioning to create an illusion of things jumping out of the sketchbook. Found via Design Taxi and featured on a fair few other sites but you can see the best selection on his website.

Nick found a great example of a brand using UV inks in this aluminium bottle design for Heineken, created by Iris. It’s a really nice and simple way of making the pack part of the night club experience. It won Iris a D&AD award this year, check out  the case study on their website here.


As it was 4th July this week, I thought we had to include these vintage firework labels which were featured on the Aesthetics of Joy site. They are from Steve Johnson’s Firework Heritage Museum collection, which is apparently in Plymouth in the UK. Some great names amongst these: Flambo Jambo, the Tinkers Tent and the Wonder Dazzler to name a few. Not to mention the fabulous 50s style packaging and instructions to ‘use a woollen glove’(!). Not sure you’d get that on firework packaging nowadays…