Creature Is At SXSW!

Groupies, gamers and film gurus are all converging on Austin, and Creature&'s expert correspondents will be there checking out the industry's latest and greatest. We'll be live Tweeting, Blogging and Facebooking over the next 5 days, so if you're one of the unlucky kids that got left behind this year have no worries, Creature has it covered!

Also (for the first time ever) Creature will be hosting an Interactive Panel! Check out the details on the SXSW schedule. Panelists will include industry leaders Michelle Gass, President of Seattle's Best Coffee; Polly LaBarre, Co-Founder & Editorial Director of MIX; and Jeff Howe who is credited with coining the term “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 Wired magazine article. He is also the author of an acclaimed book by that name, and he has been a contributor to NPR, Wired and other magazines. Panel is at 11:00am, Tuesday the 15th at the Hilton- we'll be in the room with all the awesome people, you can't miss it.

What's Your Outdoors?

Look. We’re from the Pacific Northwest. We know what “outdoors” usually means to people. The thorough exploration of fleece’s many applications is but one example. We don’t wear fleece often.

JanSport has always challenged this idea of the outdoors. As a brand that came from hardcore mountain-man origins to one that’s been embraced by students, clubbers and couch surfers of every stripe, they know it’s not so simple.

That’s what inspired the latest Creature x JanSport collaboration: What’s Your Outdoors? The goal: Redefine what it means to be outside, according to you. Everyone’s got a place — the spot they go to when four walls won’t cut it. And contrary to popular belief, that doesn’t always involve glorious mountain vistas or expansive bodies of water.

The project invites people to submit their favorite outside spot via 360° panoramic videos. As they come in, they’re stitched into a constantly looping chain. Seen together, they form a constantly shifting, growing, collective definition of the outdoors. The $10K prize is a nice deal-sweetener.

See the chain at jansport.com/whatsyouroutdoors

Pardon Our Packing Peanuts

Construction is well under way at the new Creature office, and last Champagne Friday we ventured the two blocks up the street for a quick tour. The space is beautiful! A mezzanine, 20 foot rolling library ladder, dedicated table-tennis area and a basement speakeasy-vault all await our arrival this Spring. Here is a sneak peek of all the awesomeness to come.

The Birthday Cheat Sheet

It's Friday again, and that means two things; birthdays and bubbles! For those of you not savvy to the Creature traditions, we've put together this handy cheat sheet of how-to's and hand gestures for when we recognize a fellow Creature turning a year wiser.

The Salute and the Double-clap are the classics, but we've recently added a few new options to the mix. Which one will it be tonight?

*Happy birthday to Shawn, Clara and Sandhya!

Art Activism: Remake America.

Creature did its bit for democracy during this year’s mid-term elections with a public art piece. The project was motivated by hearing statistics that voter turn out for mid-terms was extremely low in the US. That’s dangerous, because these are still really important votes to cast.

The response was simple: remind people that every vote has the power to change the shape of the nation. Creative and Design Director Steve Cullen, partnered with fabricator Jack Hodges to create a large-scale and modular sculpture of the American flag. The sculpture was set up in pieces at community events during the week leading up to the elections. People were encouraged to rearrange the sculpture and take a photo with their creation. In return they had some fun and got a small hand written reminder note with the message “Remake America: vote.” And a url of the flickr gallery were all the images and artwork were hosted for the week.

Thousands of people—young and old—participated, and all left with a positive experience and hopefully something that empowered them to head to the polls.

Love Is In the Air

Creature's been hit by Cupid, all over the office...

Happy Valentine's Day from everyone at Creature!

Our Newest Creature

Hemant Jain joins Creature's Seattle office as an ACD, with a wealth of experience as copywriter/illustrator/designer and you could even say environmentalist. He has spent the past 12 years in advertising, working at agencies like Wieden+Kennedy (in Amsterdam, London and Delhi!), Leo Burnett, Ogilvy and Y&R India.

He has won perhaps every major international award that there is out there to be won including Cannes Gold, Silver, D&AD, One Show, Communication Arts, London International, Adfest Asia and a host of Indian awards. Interestingly he has won them not only for his copywriting skills but also for graphic design and illustration.

He is also known for an ongoing environmental campaign in India called ‘The Great Indian Clearance Sale’. Which he calls an ‘ideology-free art project’.
http://www.greatindiansale.org/

Apart from advertising, his art regularly sets the blogosphere abuzz with his ‘illustrated dispatches’:
http://www.munnaontherun.com/

He's a jack of all trades, and we're happy to welcome him to the Creature team.

Congratulations Ramon!

Cheers to Ramon and his lovely new wife Nicole! Ramon has been with Creature since the early years and is not only an amazing designer, but also rocks the most awesome handlebar mustache in all of Seattle. Nicole, you are a luck lady.

Congrats to the newlyweds!

An ECD of Three in the UK

We’re no strangers to talent here at Creature, but we’d be lying if we said we weren’t incredibly excited about our new creative trio heading up our London office.
 
We’re proud to welcome Ed Warren, Ben Middleton and Stuart Outhwaite – three creative émigrés from Mother’s London shop – aboard Creature, as our new UK creative partners, working alongside the familiar and esteemed Ivan Purdie.

As you’d expect, they come from distinguished stock. At Mother, they were at the helm of the agency’s Unilever account, creating some of the UK’s best-known campaigns. Including a couple of Campaign magazine’s top ten for 2010.

Check out their Pot Noodle ‘Sticky Rib’ TV spot to give you a flavor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74benH-G0oo

Collectively they’ve also worked across accounts as diverse as Beck’s, Powerade and Match.com. Notable work includes Four Feet from a Rat – a graphic novel series developed for listings magazine, Time Out, and the groundbreaking Pot Noodle the Musical, for Unilever, which debuted at the 2008 Edinburgh Arts Festival.

Ed started out as a planner at Lowe and DLKW before taking up the creative mantle at Mother. Ben and Stu are a well-established creative partnership after 8 solid years at Mother.

We anticipate big things from these three, so be sure to give them a warm welcome. We searched long and hard for our Creative Directors for London as we look to expand internationally, and I can’t imagine a bunch of guys that fit in better. We will have them visit as soon as we can so you can all meet them. They officially start in March. One last note; although Stu’s name is super hard to spell, he’s really easy to talk to. Ed speaks Mandarin fluently. And it is rumored that Ben invented steak.

The Refreshingly Hydrated New Nuun Website

After several months of hard work the new Nuun.com site is live. (Luckily, we had plenty of Nuun to keep us properly hydrated the whole time we were working on it.) The new Nuun.com is your interactive digital Mecca for all things Nuun. It includes everything you could possibly want to know about Nuun and hydration, as well as upcoming Nuun events, Nuun athletes, a plethora of pictures and stories from Nuun and Nuun friends, and of course the best place on the web to stock up on Nuun. So drop a Nuun into your water bottle and start exploring the new world of Nuun.

*Click the image to visit the new Nuun site!