DESIGN BLOG

Developed by Kempt, the coders behind some of the UK's leading online games, King of Shaves have launched King of Air Guitar. Featuring the new Azor, King of Air Guitar is based on the best selling rock group games that are popular on all the major games consoles, but this one you can play on your computer (almost) anywhere and requires no expensive controllers. It features top bands such as Electric Six, The Wildhearts and Beanius and players in the UK can win a home entertainment 'upgrade' worth £1,500.

Click here to play King of Air Guitar. Or to see our other online games, visit www.kingofgames.co.uk.

For the last three days we have been on location in sunny Potters Bar shooting the winners of our modelling competition for the Fish and Angelfish 2009 screen-saver calendars. We've been on-set from 8am to 6pm each day, which has meant many of us leaving home at 6am and not getting back until 8pm, but the long days have been worth it as we have over 3000 top quality images (making over 30GB of data) to work from. The team consisted of the photographer, his assistant, a clothing stylist and his assistant, a make-up artist, four hairdressers from the Fish Hairdressing Salon and myself (art directing and occasionally making the tea) - plus four female models and five males. Oh and not forgetting representatives from our PR agency, the very helpful owner of the property, and (importantly) the caterer who kept us going with home-made sandwiches, pizza and cakes! More details of the shoot, the people involved and the calendar release date will be revealed shortly...

However I will be going through all the shots over the next couple of weeks and narrowing them down to the final 24 which we will for the calendars.

Until then, here's a behind the scenes taster...

Launched exclusively in Boots stores this month (October 2008) is our brand new cosmetics range - Ted Baker Beauty. Colour direction is heavily influenced Ted's seasonal fashion collections and the make-up shades and packaging will be updated twice a year. Designed by KMI's in-house design team, the Autumn / Winter 2008 packaging features strong colours, one of Ted's fashion prints and an elegant foil blocked logo. The interiors have mirrors framed in 'gilt' and detailing includes metallic gold lettering and Ted Baker London labels on the inner spines of some kits.

The range currently comprises Haute Ted (two different colour palette kits) includes pressed face powder, as well as cheek, lip, lash and eye colours, iii (six kits) eye make-up, Lippy (six kits) lip and gloss and Master'ize (four kits) eye shadow, eye pencil and mascara.

Custom matching point of sale units will be used to promote the range in-store at Boots and KMI have already finished the design and artwork for the expanded Spring / Summer 2009 range.

Saw this on The Dieline packaging website. Just made me smile - great copy and lovely 'design'. Shame their website is not up yet, I fancied being entertained for a few minutes this morning!

Microsoft's advertising campaign in the US has now moved on from the surreal Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates adverts buying shoes and living in an 'ordinary' household (which I quite like but then I was a Seinfeld fan) to ones which seem to take on Apple's "Hello, I'm a Mac" adverts head on.

Although showing the wide use of PCs, and the adverts also feature email addresses for all of the 'real' people shown in them, to me it has missed the point.

Microsoft does not make PCs. It makes operating systems and programs that run on a PC. And increasingly PCs are used to run other operating systems including Linux - and are even being hacked to run Apple's OS X. So they are spending a lot of money advertising something they don't sell. Doh.

It transpires even the adverts were created on Apple Macintosh computers. Read about that here.

The Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld adverts (arguably about 'nothing' just like the Seinfeld TV shows):

And some of the original "Hello I'm a Mac" adverts can be seen below. Not that they are to be held up as great advertising, they can be slightly irritating, but they do get their points across. And they are definitely advertising Apple products.

After the efforts of Tap in the UK to persuade us that purchasing bottled water is not only daft considering the generally very high quality of UK tap water (and indeed water in the 'western' world), and the huge environmental impact of shipping water around the globe, not to mention the 'carbon footprint' from bottling water and then throwing the bottles into land fill, and last (but not least) the fact the direct cost to you (I read that bottled water is actually more expensive than petrol) it was interesting to read that a New York company, TapdNY, has started selling local NYC purified tap water. I do like the design, bold city influenced graphics, with a great tag lines such as "no glaciers were harmed making this water".

However I think Tap in the UK is environmentally better, selling empty containers and stickers to encourage you to use water in your own home (the NYC version still has to be shipped in trucks at somepoint).

I read an interesting article on this subject in The Guardian. You can read it here.

At KMI we are concerned about the fact the many products are mainly comprised of water and that we are all paying to ship a lot of water based 'stuff' around the UK and the world. We are actively investigating ways around this... stay tuned for more news... but until then I was reminded that our first product, a 15ml Shave Oil first produced 15 years ago and still going strong today, is arguably one of the most environmentally friendly ways to shave. Despite it's compact size, you can get around 60+ shaves from just one bottle. It's light weight means a much reduced carbon footprint both in terms of manufacturing as well as shipping. The packaging is also made from (at least) 75% recycled plastics (like old fizzy drink bottles) and it is, of course, all fully recyclable.

Last weekend (5-7 September 2008) KMI launched our first fragrance for Hed Kandi in Ibiza to selected members of the press. Following on from our successful body sprays, Eivissa Eau de Toilette is the first fragrance for Ministry of Sound's funky Hed Kandi brand.

Conceived and designed by KMI, Eivissa comes in a gorgeous custom tooled glass bottle that fits beautifully into the hand and features the 'sun burst' motif from the Hed Kandi logo. It also features a removable charm that also stops the fragrance from being accidently dispensed. Sold in a beautifully elegant high gloss white carton with gold print and emboss detailing, this Eau de Toilette will be initially available from Boots and The Fragrance Shop this autumn.

Some images from the press launch can be seen on our flickr.com pages here.

King of Shaves products have been nominated in a number of categories in this year's FHM UK grooming awards. Click here to vote for your favourites!

...it's raining. And the forecast does not look good. But I'm still optimistically packing my tent into my hired white van along with bikes, inflatable boat, gas cooker etc, and I'm heading off with my daughter for a well earned few days break at our favourite campsite near Studland, in Dorset. The only thing that's going to spoil my time off is the fact that some of our friends have hired a rather gorgeous VW camper. So not only will they (probably) remain dry, they'll also look very trendy.

Recently I've had a pleasant email exchange with a chap called Dan who is the Head of Creative at our favourite drinks company, Innocent. We were discussing our Patently Obvious "clean without compromise" range. So we sent them a few samples and in return we received some boxes of smoothies this morning. Thanks Dan, it was a lovely surprise and it was good to see the KMI team all enjoying a chilled smoothie!