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Springleap – design crowd with marketing muscle

How do you turn a T-shirt company into a powerful marketing play? You provide access to your pool of 17 000 designers to brands needing beautiful and relevant content (through design) and utilise your social media skills and significant global crowd source loving fan base of course.

That’s just what Eran Eyal and his team at Springleap.com has been doing and so far the results have been positive.

The Springleap team has been proving their concept using the best possible case study – themselves – having grown Facebook their fan base 6000 to 193 000 in less than a year (it’s now closing in on the 200k mark). Eyal says at one stage he was testing 600 different Facebook ads to figure out best practice and what achieves the most success.

At its core sits 17 000 designers who submit designs to Springleap.com – these designs are then voted on by its community and as many friends as the designers can pull through their own networks to the site. The winners receive a cash prize and royalties from the resulting product, usually a T-shirt. Sales are handled by Springleap. Eyal looked at this talent pool and their social pull and realised it could be a powerful asset to activate design and brand fans.

International Council of Communication Design has designs on Africa

by Herman Manson (@marklives) Gaby de Abreu is the executive creative director of the Switch Brand Agency, believes the graphic design industry around Africa has much to benefit from associating with international industry organisations, and a lot to offer.

De Abreu was recently voted onto the board and became vice-president of the International Council of Communication Design (Icograda) as the representative from the Brand Council of South Africa. Icograda, a world body for professional communication design, represents 224 member organisations across 129 cities and 67 countries.

With his election de Abreu hopes to introduce South African designers, and their counterparts in key and growing African design markets, to Icograda, and use its established credentials to help enhance the standards of design, professional practice and ethics in the industry. He wants to regulate the pitching process for greater benefit to designers, for example.

South African studio helped design Newsweek Jubilee edition

South African design, illustration and animation studio amicollective raised their international profile once again when they were commissioned by Newsweek, through their New York based representatives, Bernstein & Andriulli, to work on their special Queen’s Diamond Jubilee edition which went on sale worldwide last week.

“We were asked to develop four crests that depicted elements from each chapter on a “then and now” basis,” says amicollective MD Mark van Niekerk. These were applied to print and digital media.

amicollective designed the World Cup special edition Coke can in 2010 which was rolled out globally and is busy with five illustrated billboards (20 x 60m) for Nippon Paints in China that will be hand applied commissioned through their Shanghai agent.

Ravi Naidoo talks Martha and a billion bucks

by Herman Manson. Ravi Naidoo launched South Africa’s signature event for the global design stage, the Design Indaba, in 1995, with 200 attendees at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town. The Indaba, and Naidoo, has come a long way since then.

Video interviews from the Cannes Lions advertising festival

Adlip, the industry video interview site, attented the recent Cannes Lions Advertising festival and filed the following reports.

Clive van Heerden sees the ‘far-future’ of design

by Herman Manson Clive van Heerden is the senior director of Design-Led Innovation at Philips Design. In its simplest terms, Van Heerden and his team researches how socio-cultural and technology shifts only just emerging today might shape society and the way we live ten or twenty years from now. In 2007, the team’s work on …

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An architect’s manifesto

People are expecting real change real fast. This is true for the Middle East and North Africa. It’s also true here at the Southernmost point of Africa. Urban environments that imprison and entrench poverty rather than provide economic mobility has immense socio-economic and cultural ramifications for an increasingly urbanised nation.

Omar Sosa on the Apartamento design style

Omar Sosa co-founded the magazine Apartamento, which bills itself as “an everyday life interiors magazine” but which the New York Times’ T Magazine called “The burgeoning indie design movement’s official international look book”, with business partner Nacho Alegre.

Print designers need to adapt for digital age

Eva Csernyanszky explains how publishers may make the leap into digital publishing

Pulp fiction with Jungle Jim

So you want to start a magazine. How far do you think R1500 will take you? Quite far, it seems, as Sean O’Toole brings you a true story about the impossible.