For all your airline branding needs get in touch at info@weareyourstudio.com

The major focus of 2012 is, of course, the Olympics Game in London! The Olympic Park Legacy Company is commissioning a design team to create the public landscape within the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Divided into the North and South park, two teams has recently been shortlisted as the winner.

The South Park links together 4 points of attraction: the 114m tall ArcelorMittal Orbit sculpture, the Aquatics Centre, the Olympic Stadium and the London 2012 Gardens. The flexible urban space will be used to host activities, events and attractions with free access to both local Londoners and tourists; as well as being an important point for visitors arriving at Stratford International and via the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre.

The winner appointed for the south park is the James Corner Field Operations team.

Whilst the North side would include the Hub and Playground. This side of the park would include flexible indoor spaces for visitors to gather for events and celebrations, with cafe for refreshments, a playground to draw the attention of children (to be located next to the housing development that is family-orientated), open space where the public can walk, cycle, enjoy the natural surroundings and have a nice time playing sports with their friends and family.

The team chosen for the North park is the erect architecture team.

Also for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, members of the public

has been invited to design on the reverse of 50-pence coins to represent the

29 sports. The designers range from policeman to delivery driver to

schoolgirl, which goes very well with how the coins are in circulation to be

used by the genereal public.

For the historical event, a range of beautiful coins has been produced by

The Royal Mint’s Olympic Coin Programme, including the first ever coin in

the UK that weights 1KG. The London 2012 Gold and Silver Kilo Coin are both

designed by members of the Royal Academy in collboration with the Royal Mint

(by Sir Anthony Caro and Tom Phillips respectively.)

Samsung Galaxy Skin to launch in 2012
Now smartphones has been taken to another whole new level with the flexible

Samsung Galaxy Skin. The newly developed smartphone employed new materials,

allowing the bendable screen to be 0.3mm thick, which can be rolled up into

a wrist watch as well as endure being smashed by a hammer. Some reports has

suggested that the Samsung Galaxy Skin will be released in the second

quarter of 2012, so watch out for the advance of technology in the coming

year!

TouchScreen Madness – a magazine is an iPad that doesn’t work

As technology becomes more and more advanced, its reach towards the younger

generations is beyond anybody’s expectations. Now even young toddlers can

think that a magazine is an iPad that doesn’t work, what is the future for

the younger generations in the future?

Philip’s Bio-light

One of the concept lightings that Phillips developed recently: Bio Light. By

feeding methane to bacteria to emit a soft green glow, a wall of glass cells

filled with the living micro-organisms can potentially be the next light

source in your house, involving the microbial community into our living

environment in a more pleasant way…until someone breaks that glass.

We wish you a fantastic New Year in 2012 from YourStudio!

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The Hamburger wrapping paper by GiftCouture – a graphic design project in New York by Sarah Fay and Justin Colt – consists of 5 elements – the bun, hamburger, cheese, lettuce and tomato, in high-quality photographic printouts to construct the ‘hamburger’ present. The aim of the project is to create unusual wrapping papers that fit together in specific themes and sets. Now we wonder what theme they would go for next…

A more convenient option for busy people – Wordless – a universal wrapping paper designed by Fabio Milito and Francesca Guidotti. Simply wrap up the gift and circle the occasion it is for out of a choice of 20 in the word search puzzle. Saves you the trouble to buy different wrapping papers for each occasion, wrap your presents in a clean and simple way as well as conveying your message.

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Similar to the Hamburger wrap, this Fruit Wrap, produced by Swedish design agency Happy F&B, includes banana, orange and watermelon wrapping paper. Happy F&B also published a set of stickers along with the wrapping paper that allows the user to build houses and even a whole town with the presents!

The wrapping paper that incorporated the use of QR codes – QRistmas – has been designed by UK-based studio, the chase. When the QR codes are scanned, gift ideas are suggested – seeing as there is always someone on the list that we just can’t think of anything to buy for them. Recipients can also scan the QR codes to take part in a twitter QRistmas quiz that might win them one of the gifts featured on the wrapping paper; other than that, the codes have been created in coloured versions to produce a visual seasonal poster.

Japanese artist/illustrator ‘BAKU’ Maeda, recently began an art project, Ribbonesia, with a more three-dimensional approach – using colourful ribbons and other fabrics to create expressions of a wide variety of animals. Perfect addition to a simply wrapped but important present for this Christmas!

Now go on, wrap your presents and enjoy a lovely Christmas with your friends and family!

(Right) 1965 Christmas Tree Hat

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Les Sapins de Noël des Créateurs is an annual event in France, where they gather the top-famous fashion designers, architects, artists etc to produce their own eccentric versions of the Christmas tree, which would be showcased at a renowned venue during the first week of December. The exhibition allows free access to the public, and the creations would be auctioned off at this event for a child-focused charity – this year they have chosen Association pour la vie-espoir contre le cancer. Designers that have previously participated or are currently participating are: Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Olivia Putman, Ora Ito, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Chanel, Stella McCartney, Christian Dior, Gucci, Sonia Rykiel, Louis Vuitton, Les Garcons and Pierre Hermé.

Louis Vuitton – 2008

Jean-Paul Gaultier 2009, 2003

Les Garcons and Sonia Rykiel 2011

Jean Claude Jitrois, Pierre Hermé 2011

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Famous chocolate maker – Patrick Roger, for the 24th edition of France’s annual Telethon, created a chocolate Christmas tree that stood 10 metres high and weighted 4 tonnes in Paris, 2010. He thought of his creation as a piece of architecture, and as part of the charity, citizens can exchange donation with a part of the chocolate tree.

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The tallest Lego Christmas tree ever has been built at London St Pancras station! Not only is the tree itself made out of Lego bricks, even the bauble decorations are made of Lego. David Buxbaum, marketing director at Lego told Toy News: ‘The Lego brand is all about play and creativity and Christmas is the time for celebration and fun. The tree has been put together by children from Edith Neville Primary School (Camden) and Copenhagen Primary School together with Harpenden Explorer Scouts, it took them two months to build this structure that stood 10 metres high using 600,000 Lego bricks.

Now go on and grab some chocolate, sit back and enjoy a lovely Christmas! With Best Wishes from YourStudio!

We, at YourStudio, absolutely love it when we see something creative in the commercial realm.  And this week, we were equally inspired and made to laugh by Chanel’s amazing new Christmas windows in the Parisienne department store Printemps.  Little mini-Karl Lagerfields dance up and down like Thunderbirds puppets, each multiple perfectly dressed in the staple black skinny jeans, high-collared white shirt and pussy bow-tie.  Wonderful!  Here are a few of our favourite Christmas windows of the season…enjoy!

See Karl in action here, replete with cute French accordian music:

Fame Monster Lady Gaga has been the sole inspiration for Barney’s New York with their ‘hairy’ window made entirely from wig hair to represent her different bouffants over the past seasons.

Hairy but true….Gaga’s Boudoir, just one of the Lady Gaga windows created by the visionary Nicola Formichetti.  This one made entirely of wig hair.  Novel!

Barney’s extend the window theme online where you can join Gaga’s Workshop and spend countless hours seeing whether you’ve won a prize…

Liberty’s of London dazzle with these gorgeous taxidermy swans.  I wonder if the Queen knows they’re missing!

Staying on the bird theme, although these windows are not this year, and are not Christmas windows, we just had to put them in, as they follow the theme and are one of our all-time favourites.  Terence Koh for Lanvin, Madison Avenue, New York.  A snow-filled window with two beautiful albino-white peacocks.  How lovely…

H&M’s Oxford Street store, London has Lanvin-esque mannequins and a white winter wonderland with flocked deers and stags and white silver birch trees.

We will be continuing to collect our photos of our favourite windows this year and will bring you more as we get them!

Happy Christmas shopping from all at YourStudio!

If you would be interested in us sending you some information on YourStudio’s Retail Visual Merchandising and Wow Window Trends, please contact us here.

You can see some of our window work here.

The YourStudio Creative Team

People talk a lot about ‘consumer engagement’, and it’s true that on every level, more than creating a ‘space’, as an interior designer, there’s more of a necessity to create an ‘experience’.  As brand interior designers, we design environments that will make people enjoy being in, but also spaces that convey messages and instill an attitude that is a reflection of the ethos of the brand we’re working with.  A space that feels good to be in will encourage return custom and build up customer loyalty.

When we work on projects, we always put the customer at the heart of the creative process.  We look at the kinds of processes that a customer may go through in order to get what they want and need.  As much as practical and physical needs, this includes the emotional needs to fit with the mind-states of customers at different stages of their journey.

YourStudio’s Creative Thinking into the Customer Experience

In a retail environment such as a coffee shop or a beauty store, the customer’s journey is called the ‘path to purchase’.  This refers to the journey that the customer goes through in order to get the product that they are looking for.  In the course of this journey, the customer may encounter a variety of obstacles, or influences, and need to do a number of things.

It is the skill of understanding how the mind of the consumer is receptive to change or influence at different parts of their journey that marketeers have capitalized on from the ‘50s onwards.   The famous scene from Madmen when their ‘world display of beers’ at the end of a supermarket aisles boosts the sales of Heineken for housewives.  As interior design agency creating the next generation of customer experience, we want to ensure that everything we design has a positive effect on customer behaviour.

We start by auditing our client’s current consumer journey, looking at what happens, what works and what doesn’t.  It’s suprising how many retailers make simple mistakes which can hinder and detract from their service, such as blocking sight-lines to staff at counters with too much product.  When we worked with Costa Coffee, we created diagrams to show how some of the best of the independent coffee shops delivered such good service.  This research helped us communicate what needed to be change to the client and helped us to design a new ergonomic counter which optimised staff sightlines and views to the product.  Costa have gone on to be the UK’s most successful coffee retailer, knocking Starbucks off the ‘No. 1′ spot this year.

YourStudio Audit of Coffee Retail Service

When we are working with one of our clients from the airline sector, the process of mapping the customer journey may be more complex.  In the airport, a set of procedures such as checking in luggage, and passing security checks, add to the complexity of transactions that the customer has to go through in order to get what they want.

Some of the Numerous Airline Passenger Touchpoints

Brands talk about ‘touchpoints’, and these are the points at which those customers encounter a brand through interaction.  In a coffee shop, the brand touchpoints may be a touch-screen where a customer can find out information about their products, or a counter where they may be served.  These points are the most important ‘peaks’ along the customer’s journey that can really affect their perception of whether they’re being treated well and whether it’s easy for them to find out what they need.  It’s essential that they’re designed to be as good as possible, and also, as interesting.

Easing Stress-points along the Airline Passenger Experience with Digital Technology

With the advent of new technology, there are also a whole series of ‘digital touchpoints’ which take the ‘path to purchase’ way out of the bounds of the stores.  This migration is referred to as ‘from bricks to clicks’.   This can range from schemes to encourage people from online to in-store such as web promotions and loyalty schemes such as N.Dulge which we created for beauty retailer Space NK.  But the fascinating area which really ties this back to the interior is the way in which the digital and the real spaces merge.   There is a phrase ‘realtime’ which means the relaying of information live, as it is happening through social media sites such as FaceBook and Twitter.  Retailers and airlines have realised the importance of building up a relationship with their customers in a sociable as well as a functional way.

The N.Dulge Loyalty Scheme for Space NK Designed by YourStudio London

The most fascinating evolution of retail and airline design that we are working on now, is designing concepts for the points at which the integration of digital and realitime experiences into the customer journey will really help consumers.  For example, imagine those points where you feel like you need help or assistance, being able to contact your friends easily?  In our Vantage concept store, consumers are able to change in the comfort of large changing rooms where they are able to post photos of themselves to selected friends on FaceBook to ask for realtime opinions.

New Retail Concept Integrating Realtime into the Path-to-purchase

As well as these ‘touchpoints’, the layout of space, much like in nature, will affect our feeling of well-being and the ease with which we experience a space.  It’s very much like we would navigate our way around in nature.  As David Ferrabee, director of management consultancy Able & How explains: “In studies, it has been defined that in open countryside, we are most happy when we know we are adjacent to water, and when we have an unobstructed straight-ahead view of our destination in front of us”.  In interiors, long axes and vistas towards something we need to get to will make orientation easy and our mind’s reassured.  When we’re at rest, we won’t expound unnecessary energy trying to find things out .  In the design of spaces within an airport, putting this concept at the centre of the design-process is essential.

A YourStudio Mood-board looking at Seasonal Colours, Textures and Creative Themes

A further addition to our customer auditing is the Trend Research that we put into every project.  We present this information to out clients in the form of books and presentations which excite people about the future possibilities within their sector.  To lead with customer experience, it’s essential to look beyond your sector to see what innovation is delivering the next generation of experience to your customers.  This is where, as we say ‘your customers will be going next’.

We started YourStudio with a simple statement: ‘we create spaces that are memorable from the first encounter to the final touch’ and we aim to see this through with all of our projects.

For any information about YourStudio- if you’d like us to map your customer journey, or help design a new customer experience, please contact us here.

The full magazine article is here- scroll to page 18, or see it here:

Virtual retail will definitely be a big hit, with the rise of smartphones and m-commerce, this was first trialled in South Korea by chain store Home Plus, co-owned by Tesco and Samsung. The result was a virtual supermarket in a subway station, where many Korean shoppers who are unwilling to spend more time than necessary to do their grocery shopping, can now make good use of the waiting time for trains during their travels. A wall-length billboard displaying conventional shelving with images of products labelled with a QR code has been installed, customers can simply scan the code with their phone to access further information, put the item into their virtual shopping basket, check-out, pay and arrange for their grocery to be delivered to their house, at their own convenience. This virtual supermarket has helped Home Plus increase their sales by 130% and the number of registered users by 76% within the three-month trial period.

Our virtual world extends beyond shelves and products. The Japanese game on NintendoDS, ‘LovePlus’, is a dating sim game, where the player can have a virtual girlfriend, which actually requires effort to maintain the ‘relationship’. The retailers in Atami, Japan, a resort town that was perfect for honeymoons, have targeted these gamers as business has declined due to cheap flights abroad. Now, in 13 locations in Atami, there will be 2D barcodes, which can be scanned to see your virtual sweetheart and to take photos with them on iPhones or iPads – bringing the virtual world into the real one.

Diesel Spring/Summer 08 fashion show featured not only real life models, but also CGI holographic characters created by Spanish animation studio DVein and Danish company Vizoo. Titled ‘Liquid Space’, the 3D animation was created so that it could be viewed from both sides, swimming around the models, as well as allowing them to interact with and walk through the holograms made in an underwater landscape.

Sebastian Merchel made use of Augmented Reality very well in his AR Tees as they can become alive when viewed through a webcam!

AR-Tees first augmented reality tv-shirt from SebastianMerchel on Vimeo.

If you are interested in how any of digital technology can be fitted into a retail concept…

If you would like to request YourStudio to put together a Digital Experience In-store trend report…

If you have an interesting retail proposal that you’d like us to create a digital retail proposal for, please get in touch:

info@weareyourstudio.com

1. Project Womb by Diddo – “After birth, the second biggest event in life is death. We asked ourselves, why isn’t death treated as naturally and gracefully as birth?”

The media-driven time capsule just made me rethink about life, death, and how our friends and families, but never we tell our stories after the end. The sentimentality behind the design is great. Allowing us to edit the impressions and memories to be recorded and updated over our lifetime by uploading music, images, videos and text onto a cloud-based media database, which can be shared publicly or privately, all in your own words.

2. Digital Rico

During New York Fashion Week, Nicola Formichetti opened his first pop-up shop Nicola’s (featured in YourStudio’s blog post - Nicola’s, New York)  where he showcased a virtual fashion show! The tattooed model, Rick Genest – more famously known as Rico the Zombie Boy, has been digitalized walking the catwalk. It is truly amazing when they show a glimpse of how the digital Rico was formulated and it just makes you think: what is not possible in the near future in this digitalizing world?

3. Nendo – ’10 days 10 shelves’ Exhibition at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London

Further to my love for Nendo’s Thin Black Lines, this pop-up installation they did at the gallery is equally remarkable in its visual effects. The Scatter Shelf is made of 5mm black acrylic pieces constructed together in a grid form, so that when viewed from the front, any objects on the shelf will appear to be caught in a web. Ten of these shelves were placed together in the installation, and created a kaleidoscopic effect when viewed from the side; as the shelves nearby are reflected on the glossy acrylic surface, making the shelf appear to be transparent.

4. N Building, Tokyo

Now, the super-advanced technology trends in Japan have never ceased to amaze me, this is one of them. N Building, created by TeradaDesign Architects and Qosmo, in Tachikawa, Tokyo, where the entire façade of the building has been covered with a gigantic QR code. By scanning the QR code, you will be provided with shop information. A limited edition app allows the user to make reservations, download coupons, as well as view tweets and comments made by the people within the building in speech bubbles, following characters superimposed onto the video. Although it is rather scary to think that those outside can potentially stalk those inside the building, but the advance in the application of the simple technology will surely drive the digitalizing world forward.

5. the GazettE – Toxic

The GazettE – one of the most popular and influential visual-kei Japanese rock band – is my long term favourite. Introducing their new album – Toxic.

Please enjoy.