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Bulldog work featured in a new design publication

Ren Spiteri — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 15:22:13 +0000

Our work for Yvette Mahon has been featured in ‘No Plastic Sleeves – The Complete Portfolio Guide for Photographers and Designers’. This book is a valuable resource for designers and photographers that are interested in the process of creating a portfolio. With hundreds of photos to guide you, the book covers a wide range of topics involved with developing effective marketing tools for selling creative work.

Authors – Larry Volk and Danielle Currier demonstrate an understanding of the need for our industry to present both creative and business facets, making it a interesting reference for professionals and students alike. You can get the full details at Amazon.com

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Personal work influenced by survivors of the Haiti disaster

The war on Christmas

Ren Spiteri — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 14:43:24 +0000

Anyone that knows me well will tell you that my loathing of all things Christmas is legendary. At this time, a downward spiral to the depths of depression is usually medicated with skiing trips, where I can take a break relatively unaffected by the whole thing.

When a friend asked me to create something for his blog that demonstrates how I feel about Christmas, my answer was “Are you sure about this?”

Here’s the result (yes, I do know I’m a miserable git).

THE WAR ON CHRISTMAS

I really hate Christmas.

I hate the cloying, fake cheeriness. The perfunctory, self-cancelling gift exchanges on Christmas morning. Dubious, uncharitable ‘forced giving’ and the utter absurdity of peace on earth.

I hate en-mass turkey fisting, over priced Christmas hampers and hideous, hand knitted pullovers from distant aunties. I hate those frigging 10 disk Christmas compilation CD’s. I hate the words ‘Batteries not included’, blow-up Santas and rotting pine trees with tacky, epilepsy-inducing coloured luminaires.

I hate inter-galactic reindeers, sparkly xmas underpants and raucous, hyperventilating ankle-biters, unwrapping their gifts.

And is there anything that screams ‘Fuck you’ better than a box set of 50 identical Christmas cards? I don’t think so!

How many times can you hear ‘Last Xmas’ by ‘George bloody Michael’ in department stores before you want to asphyxiate random shoppers with bits of tinsel?

I hate compulsory cheeriness and masochistic family get-togethers. I hate fake snow. Tinsel. Christmas crackers and Advent calendars.

I hate misletoe, office staff parties and misty-eyed nostalgia for the past but most of all, I hate guys like me – that hate Christmas, who in their tiresome sameness are about as predictable and perennial as the customs they claim to loath.

So Merry Christmas? Not bloody likely.

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Commemorative launch materials for the opening of the Calleja stores

A portfolio web site for Australian art director – Yvette Mahon

Ren Spiteri — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:00:12 +0000

When Australian art director – Yvette Mahon, asked Bulldog to develop a small Flash portfolio site that would help her solicit the attention of design organisations, we were only too happy to rise to the challenge. The next few days were spent with Yvette, doodling ideas on scraps of paper that would identify what makes her work different from many other art directors pitching their skills to potential employers.

We soon realised that the answer was staring us in the face. True creativity is not about expensive processes and slick animated sequences (sure, we pay lots of attention to technique but only if it is relevant). No, in truth, true creativity is about great ideas. It’s about that feeling you get when you experience something exceptional, even if the idea is still a doodle in the margins of a newspaper.

With this in mind, we constrained ourselves to developing Yvette’s entire portfolio site using doodles. While this sounds like it could be limiting, it helped us develop a unique and exciting visual language for this project that perfectly illustrated a basic truth that Yvette strives to instill in her work: adapt the technique to the idea, not the idea to the technique.

We opted to create Yvette’s web site using Flash because the primary objective was to make her portfolio unique. While this route is not for everyone, given Flash’s search engine optimisation limitations, we believe that in this case, the quality of the content and the experience created by this site for its intended audience, make it the right choice to leave an unforgettable impression.

Click here to visit the site »

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Personal work influenced by survivors of the Haiti disaster

Chic, jam packaging for Bakke

Ren Spiteri — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:00:33 +0000

The Bakke family have harvested and canned seasonal fruit in the Trondheim area of Norway for over 150 years. Their delicious jams are made in traditional open pans using fruits native to the area – such as strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and multe (cloudberry). For years, the jams were stored in glass Kilner style jars, adorned with hand printed labels and sold at farm produce markets in districts surrounding Trondheim. However, demand for Bakke jams reached a scale that necessitated more sophisticated production, marketing and distribution methods and today, these jams compete with hardier (but less authentic and tasty), mass produced, jam brands on the shelves of Trøndelag’s supermarkets.

Bulldog was commissioned to develop an identity and packaging for this range. The result is a set of utterly simple but chic label designs, colour coded in distinct, fresh shades that help consumers easily distinguish between 6 different fruit flavours. Sourcing unique specialty food-grade glass jars can be quite a challenge but the attention placed on this has paid off handsomely ensuring that the product looks as good on the outside as it tastes on the inside.

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