Coca Cola Arctic Home bottles by Darren Whittington

Coca Cola Arctic Home cans by Darren Whittington

At last, they made it to the UK!

Synapta 'Life happens on mobile' Gif Animation Frames

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Tom Cat

I’ve been working with the talented team at Turner Duckworth in San Francisco to help create the limited edition Coca Cola cans for the London Olympics 2012 which are now running in the USA.

The brief was simple; create silhouettes of the sponsored USA athletes and use the stripes as the point of interaction whether it be a base line for a tennis player, or a hurdle for a hurdler.

All was simple until you have to get the silhouette to look like the athlete in question and create a pose that will fit within the packaging guides for the can and the constant graphic of the stripes always fixed in one location.

I love a challenge. Great brief to play with. Thanks TD.

Here’s the blurb from The Dieline:

“Coca-Cola introduces 6 limited edition cans to cheer on Team USA at the London 2012 Olympic Games”

“The Coca-Cola Olympic Games campaign highlights The Coca-Cola 8 pack of athletes, graphically captured in action within their sports.  The designs cleverly use patriotic stripes to convey movement and context for the different sports. The cans will rotate throughout the summer with a new one hitting the market every 2 weeks, culminating with a can featuring a special composite logo in time for the opening of the Olympic Games.  There are 6 different Fridgepack versions launching in 2 phases.  Designs are also extended across larger can packs, bottle labels, and mini cans. The designs will also appear on in-store displays, premiums and select TV spots.  To learn more about the Coca-Cola 8 pack of athletes, visit www.mycokerewards.com/theolympics.”

It’s alive! 172 posts created, 450 images, umpteen animations and that’s just the start. Big thanks to Andrew Couldwell at RoomFive for his patience & building the beast.

Love to hear what you think but I’m hoping it’s easier for you to navigate, find what you want and enjoy.

Also if you need an illustrator right here, right now, just choose your form of communication and I’ll be at the other end saying hello.

Share at will. Cheers ;D

Coca-Cola never alters its iconic packaging lightly. But this winter, there was an excellent reason for turning its red cans Artic white.

The drinks giant is backing WWF’s work in the Artic to protect the polar bears’ endangered environment. As a key part of an attention grabbing campaign to raise awareness and donations, they decided to use their flagship brand by dramatically changing its packaging colour– for the first time in 125 years.

Darren Whittington was commissioned by Turner Duckworth to develop the iconic polar bear images at the heart of their innovative design.

How to depict these majestic animals? Cuddly anthropomorphism was out, but the bears still had to be friendly, engaging, animated and believable. Darren explains, ‘The biggest challenge was to capture all that in a simple silhouetted form with minimal features to reproduce on the packaging and marketing material’.

He succeeded, as proven by the eye-catching scenes – both credible and endearing – of a mother and her two cubs making their way across the Arctic, and of cubs at play featuring on the classic ‘gulp’ bottles.

Darren’s illustrations are appearing on 1.4 billion cans in North American stores this winter. Consumers are texting $1 to top up the $2 million already donated by Coca-Cola to WWF.

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The change has caused a stir in America. For some Coke fans the all-white can was a step too far and Darren’s polar bears now stand out against a familiar red sky.

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• There’s a great article on the launch of this campaign via www.thedieline.com

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• Here’s the stir it’s been causing:

Ben Sheidler, a Coca-Cola spokesman, said: “Bringing in the red can has also created a lot of stir. That’s exactly what we want to happen, is to have people talk about it and learn about the programme.”

Now, however, fans of the white can are fighting back. A Facebook campaign has sprung up complaining about the switch back to red.

“Just because those who are too lazy to read pick up the wrong drink doesn’t mean we should all pay the price,” wrote one protester. “Save the polar bears and save the cans.”

www.telegraph.co.uk

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Also if you want to see how ABC News reported it together with a Coke test that saw consumers saying it tasted different! ABCNews

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Let alone the Facebook White can fan pages! Just Google it. Crazy.

The Stranger Collective called last year asking if I’d help out with a new card design to raise funds for ShelterBox

So I did! How can you say no to such a great cause, and from what I hear they made a few bucks out of them too, so a big thank you to all those that made the effort to buy them. Money well spent:

To set the scene:

‘We want to help the polar bear – a beloved Coca-Cola icon since 1922 – by helping conserve its Arctic habitat. That’s why we’re using one of our greatest assets – our flagship brand, Coca-Cola – to raise awareness for this important cause. And by partnering with WWF, we can truly make a positive difference for these majestic animals.’

Muhtar Kent, Chairman and CEO of The Coca-Cola Company.

…and that’s how the conversation started when I was commissioned by Turner Duckworth to help turn the iconic Coca Cola red can white this winter by recreating the sacred polar bear icon to work across all the packaging and marketing material.

It’s causing quite a stir, so much so there’s another post with my press release written here, together with links to all the crazy stuff that’s been going on in America over the colour change. One hell of a brand story. Enjoy.

In the mean time here’s some more pics of the work created, just gotta love these ‘Gulp bottles’, wish we had them in the UK:

I’ve been working with the national writers’ association 26 over the past few months on an exciting project to promote Cornish produce within a gallery and restaurant setting. I was paired up with the writing genius Peter Blackman @DoubleArt and given one of the 26 Flavours of Cornwall, in our case, Pasties!

The challenge was to create a piece that would mounted in a wall space at Trebah Gardens and also have the dual purpose of becoming a paper table-setting in their restaurant.

We’ve tried to create a piece about the pasty and the power of involuntary memory – where food evokes recollections of the past without conscious effort. First explored by Proust in his epic ‘In Search of Lost Time’, we’ve tried to keep things a little more succinct than Marcel’s 4000 page masterpiece. The evocation of memory seemed particularly appropriate for this subject, for not only is a pasty warm, homely food for the body and soul, it is also often eaten as an accompaniment to our lives – what we do and who we do it with. So the pasty is a companion to activity in a way that ‘sit down’ formal dishes are not.

For example, we eat our first pasties as a creative team as we walked to the Lizard. Not before, or after, but as we did so. On the same day we saw the local Fire Brigade drop into Anns Pasties. A large bag of pasties swept up into the cabin to sustain a hungry team as they went about their important work. Farmers called in, parking lopsided ramshackle estate cars held together with baler twine, sharing their pasties with their alert, expectant dogs.

In order to show the way that the pasty accompanies the everyday life of Cornwall, we selected eleven different scenarios and characters. From farm workers to fishermen, tourists to native teenagers. First of all we wrote them up, creating diverse voices and narratives, then using the inspiration from the pasties baking in regimented formation on their red hot trays we created the idea of baking the memories of the day ahead, each hand crafted and unique, everyone of them capturing a moment. We selected type styles that embodied the subjects and wove the text lovingly by hand into the shapes of ‘top crimped’ pasties. Each pasty is therefore unique, each one of them made with a person in mind. All baked and ready for their prospective owner to walk through the door, select their pasty and enjoy it as part of the day to come, whether that’s the unrelenting cauliflower cutting of a migrant farm worker, or children huddled up under a blanket on the beach.

It was our intention that this would be a dynamic typographic piece featuring characters and narrative which are intriguing and engaging, but also elliptic and fragmentary, so that the memories of the reader / viewer come to mind. A piece that honours the humble pasty from a new angle, embraces the audience within the space it is meant to be enjoyed, entertaining them and reminding them how special a pasty truly is.

If you would like to find out more about our piece just go to the 26 Flavours website where we tweeted and blogged about our adventures and creative ideas throughout the process. Here you’ll also find the other 25 Flavours that are part of the exhibition which will run for 26 days at Trebah Gardens.

It’s been a crazy few months after winning a 3 way pitch for The Body Shop Vision and Strategy communication work against leading London agencies, which led to creating a 7 minute animation and supporting material to communicate the future of The Body Shop to the top 100 global leaders within the company.

Just 5 weeks from idea to script, style guides to key frames, animation, voice over, music, edit and delivery. A fantastic opportunity to work with a great client and pull a team together that delivered an outstanding animation.

Big thanks to Pete Kirby(writer), Blade McGivern(Animator), Sally Oldfield(Producer) and David Lovelock(Edit) for helping make this lovely piece of communication work in such a tight timeline.

Film edit on the way :D

I’ve been working with the leading London playwright Christopher William Hill on a new book he’s putting the final touches too.

It’s a beautifully dark children’s tale… so few these days!

Above is a taster of one of the initial ideas for a cover.

The final piece can be seen here: http://www.darrenwhittington.com/hand-baked-memories/

My involvement was minimal in the big scheme of it all helping to create the typography for the logo, the shapes for shiny aluminium fittings to give it a sense of the classic pink Cadillac and the arch that echoes the hearts with a South American twist.

As I understand it they are available to order from Concept Shed direct.

Darren Whittington