Leo was monumental in the creation and direction of Vancouver’s Winter Olympic brand experience for the 2010 games. It will be remembered as one of the best visual palettes ever created for the games, as beautiful and memorable as Athens and Torino’s visual identities.

Leo’s philosophy towards telling a story that is honest, simple, funny and most of all emphatically strong, has drawn great affection towards brand Vancouver.

Brief Explanation: Designed with a purpose for everyday use, these eraser/usbs are meant to serve as a constant reminder of Alzheimer’s New Zealand’s importance, as well as help New Zealanders realise how important our memories are, and how difficult life can be for those living with this disease.

Brief from the client: Design a memorable piece of communication that raises awareness of the disease’s early warning signs, like memory loss, as well as reminding everyday New Zealanders of the importance of Alzheimers New Zealand.

Final design: Actual working erasers were hollowed out and fitted with USB memory sticks. The message displayed on the top is: ‘Alzheimer’s erasers your memories. Save them.’ On the reverse side was the Alzheimer’s New Zealand logo and website. The place you can turn for more information and support. alzheimers.co.nz.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market: Alzheimer’s New Zealand distributed these eraser/usbs amongst the public, sent them to various local organisations, as well as distributed them to local politicians, with a letter, in an attempt to raise awareness of the charity. They have received positive feedback and they’ll hopefully continue to leave people with some sort of understanding of what people with Alzheimer’s go through everyday, and where they could turn for more information and support.

Advertising Agency: Colenso BBDO, Auckland, New Zealand
Executive Creative Director: Nick Worthington
Art Director/Copywriter/Designer: Lisa Fedyszyn
Copywriter/Art Director: Jonathan McMahon
Account Manager: Stefanie Robertson
Planner: Hayley Pardoe
Agency Producer: Phil Newman
Designer: Phila Lagaluga

Finally: Linkedin now let’s you display your portfolio.

It seems that all of us, and every designer we know, is on LinkedIn. Why? Its the defacto professional directory, and its where our peers, big companies, agencies, and clients connect with us.

But there has never been a way to showcase our portfolio work on our LinkedIn profiles.

For over a year, Behance has been working with the LinkedIn folks to develop a special application within LinkedIn that allows ANY creative professional to showcase their multi-media portfolio.

The new “Portfolio Display” application allows anyone to create a free portfolio, display it on LinkedIn, and keep it in sync across other sites like AIGA, the Art Director’s Club Young Guns site, and the Behance Network. (YAY!)

You can create unlimited projects (with unlimited images, videos, multimedia) and upload them, via the Behance Network, to display on their LinkedIn profiles.

The application allows the 70+ million LinkedIn members – as well as hundreds of millions of visitors – to ACTUALLY SEE your creative work (rather than just read your resume).

If you are a creative professional on LinkedIn, you should join the Behance Network and then sync your portfolio with LinkedIn.

If you are already a member of the Behance Network, simply install the Creative Portfolio Display application on your LinkedIn Profile.

UnderConsideration is starting a conference. Focusing on corporate and brand identity, the conference is a direct extension of the popular blog Brand New.

The inaugural conference takes place in New York City as it is undoubtedly one of the most important hubs of identity practice and, presumably, an allure to out-of-towners who might be inclined to attend the conference and make a weekend out of it. The venue for the conference will be the School of Visual Arts Theatre, in the Beatrice auditorium, which holds 266 attendees.

The speaker line-up is nothing short of impressive. I am not surprised. When Armin and Bryony do something, they do it right.

According to data from a recent study by Commtouch (Internet Threats Trend Report) published in April 2010 and referring to the first quarter of the year, every day we send about 221 billion email messages, of which 183 billion are classified as spam (85% of the total traffic globally).

United States lead the ranking of the “spamming” countries with 38 billion emails per day followed by India (13.7 billion), Russia (9.8), Vietnam (9.7) and Korea (7.6).

How much does all this junk mail cost the environment in terms of CO2 emissions?

Studies have estimated that each email message generates about 0.3 grams of CO2. Multiplying this value by the number of spam messages sent daily worldwide what we get is that every day around 54.900 tons of C02 are released into the environment: a number that translates into around 21 million tons of CO2 every year.

Just a curiosity, for the sake of comparison: the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption in April 2010 released into the air around 150,000 tons of CO2 every day.

So the kids over at the mayor’s office have unveiled the ‘iconic final design’ for the new Routemaster buses (here’s their press release on it, and another page with some video and pictures).

Back in December, it was announced that the design competition for the bus had been won by two teams: a collaborative team from Foster & Partners andAston Martin, and a team from automotive design firm Capoco.

Their designs were then passed to bus manufacturers The Wright Group, who have joined up with the Heatherwick Studio to work on the final design, which should be pulling up at London bus stops sometime in 2012.

It boasts three doorways, two staircases, and a pile of green credentials; interestingly the jump-on-jump-off platform is designed to be closed at ‘quieter times’. We’re guessing that actually means at night, once most of the passengers are drunk.

We’ll have to wait until 2012 to see if the design actually merits the term ‘iconic’, but that list of designers – Fosters, Aston Martin, and Heatherwick – that at least suggests that it might. Doesn’t it?

Hold tight please…