Two different ways of sharing things. The social media police may arrest me for this because Pinterest launched way back in January (aeons ago in social-world) but it’s my blog post and I like ‘em…

Pinterest

Lets you create a virtual pinboard of things you like on the interweb. Other users can Like, Re-pin or Comment on your choices. You can make lots of different pinboards with themes (or just one, it’s up to you).

Checkthis

Lets you publish a single web page quickly and easily, without registration and all that time-consuming blah. Glen & George call it ‘kind of a bigger more picture-y tweet’. Which I think pretty much sums it up.

Thank you to Design Week for this News in Brief on the ITFC Suffolk Punch branding in today’s issue.

Spring has now launched the new branding and websites for TV and film airfield Bentwaters Park and its renewable fuel division, Eastern Woodfuel.

We have been working alongside Sarah Brown for six months now, updating the brands, planning, designing and building these sites, and all manner of technical work including drawing up architectural plans and maps.

The sites feature amazing content including their resident Spitfire, military hire vehicles and fascinating insights into the Cold War and WWII uses for this airfield and its varied buildings – including the runway specifically designed for crash landings.

Next steps will be an introduction campaign targeting location scouts across the British film and TV industry. We are delighted to be working with such a famous feature of Suffolk.

I thought I’d share with you a sweet little project we’ve just completed for the National Trust – a weddings marketing piece for Coggeshall Grange Barn.

This 13th Century Monastic barn in Essex is a lasting reminder of the powerful Coggeshall Abbey, and was probably built in around 1240. Previous owners included Henry VIII – the irony of it now hosting wonderful weddings would, I am sure, not escape him.

Crowdsourcing has started to become mainstream – remember last year’s ‘David Cameron as Gene Hunt’ winner of a Labour crowdsourcing campaign?

For some brands, Labour included, the value is more in the action (with its implications of being willing to listen to the general public and the brand awareness resultant PR creates) than its result. I can’t help feeling this is true of the most recent creative crowdsourcing brief to come to my attention: Wikileaks.

The leaks website is offering $365 to the winner of their tshirt design competition. So far, 374 people have entered and the deadline is just under 5 days away. You can find out more here.

Crowdsourcing contradicts every argument that industry associations make against unpaid pitches. Open opportunities, encouraging hundreds of replies, against a lose brief mean that the hours put in can never, ever be equalled by the profit margins available to the winner.

This democratisation of graphic design started as soon as we moved from pasteboards to macs, and has been turbo charged by the internet, broadband and social media. Many people’s concern, mine included, is that in many cases this has led, not to meritocracy, but to a industry-wide loss of craftsmanship.

Wikileaks crowdsourcing? For a brand that sets out, in the first sentence of its mission statement, that it is for the public – and is in fact created by that same public, a bit rebellious, a bit anti-establishment; I’d say it was spot-on positioning.