ECD, CCO, CEO, COO: the ad industry is awash in three-letter jobs. But beyond the acronyms, what is the role of senior teams in shaping creative work and establishing agency culture today? BBH’s Alex Grieve and Helen Rhodes discuss...
A new exhibition captures West Africa in a period of cultural transformation
David Hill Gallery in London has opened a new exhibition of work by West African photographer Rachidi Bissiriou, titled Gloire Immortelle. It presents a selection of images taken by Bissiriou in his home country of Benin as it underwent crucial changes. Born in 1950 in the village of Kétou, Bissiriou set up Studio Plaisir, a local photographic studio, when he...
Anna Haifisch’s illustrations offer up a warped version of cute
Anna Haifisch has a beautifully singular, surreal way of discussing and sending up artists, art, and the ‘art world’. Strange, animal-heavy, and sometimes tear-jerkingly pathos-laden, her work has long explored the nuances, trials and tribulations of what it means to create. Haifisch’s book The Artist was published in 2016, having previously been serialised in comic form on Vice… Source...
A playful new visual identity for Pret
Pret has come a long way since opening its first shop in London in 1986. By the 2010s, the café chain had become the to go-to source of expenditure for harried and hungry office workers, spawning what seemed to be a Pret on every corner of central London. Despite a challenging time during the pandemic when city life effectively ground...
Wolff Olins overhauls GSK’s identity
Wolff Olins has created the new brand identity for global healthcare company GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline), aiming to better express its focus on innovation. The agency was brought on board around 18 months ago having won a competitive global pitch to help GSK develop its new purpose, voice and identity. According to David Stephens, executive strategy director at Wolff Olins, GSK...
Is originality an outdated concept?
We talk to the Public Domain Review’s Adam Green about his new book which draws links between 2,000 years of visual culture, and examines why we’re obsessed with originality...
The many faces of William Klein
The photographer and filmmaker’s exhibition at the ICP in New York celebrates the multifaceted nature of his practice over the course of nearly seven decades...
This animated video for Century Egg takes us into a miniature world
In general, stray hairs on the floor are pretty icky. But not in this video for Halifax, Nova Scotia-based band Century Egg, which tells the story of a little piece of hair that falls off the head of the promo’s protagonist, while also documenting the changing seasons and the passing of time. The stop motion animation is created and directed...
New animated campaign advocates for a four-day working week
A slow drumbeat of enthusiasm for the four-day working week has been growing for some time now, and this week the UK sees one of its largest trials yet as over 3,000 workers at 70 companies begin a six-month pilot where they work less days for the same pay. The premise is that we can work for 80% of the...
Exposure: Justin J Wee
After getting his first commission for the New York Times in lockdown, photographer Justin J Wee has created a mix of editorial and commercial projects, including powerful documentary work addressing the impact of anti-Asian hate crimes in the US...
2022 art and design degree show guide
After several years of disruption to live events, in-person degree shows are back in full force across the UK. For many universities and colleges, it is the first time they have been able to display graduating students’ work in a physical setting since 2019. We’ve assembled a guide to UK undergraduate shows taking place in the next few months, with...
Identify as an artist to help your creativity thrive
‘Art’ is an evocative, emotive, subjective word. Debates have raged for centuries about what deserves to be called that: it may be up to the beholder to define beauty, but art doesn’t have to be beautiful. It must stimulate an emotional response; make you feel something. The boundaries between art and design are likewise open to some interpretation. In many...