If our new business papers were any fresher, you’d want to chew them like Orbit. Because we are freakish about details, love rewarding anyone who is nice enough to pay attention to us and want to bring back the art of writing on actual paper, we added some really nice details in our materials.

Most notably, our business cards are a large puzzle that comes together to form the image of the founder of our company. It’s like Voltron, but with an ad guy.

Credits: Richard Sullivan Sr. (founder/subject/sport), Ryan Lundy (designer), Ken Ziegler (copywriter), Wally Hitchcock and Diana Nichols (creative directors), Julie Palmer (print producer).

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A couple of months have passed without a post. Sorry about that. Let’s catch up. Here are some of the things we’ve noticed, bookmarked and talked about since we last wrote:

1. Keith Richards authored a book called “Life.” This fact alone should be interesting enough, but there are some real lessons for creativity in Richards’ story. The guy is a student of his craft, studying ceaselessly. Everything is a potential source of influence and inspiration. He also goes into great detail regarding his creative process. Grab a copy.

2. The writer behind the Letters from a Nut series of books has been revealed. I’m kind of upset it’s not Jerry Seinfeld. Regardless, this writing has been as influential on my advertising copy as anything from our industry.

3. We’ve just launched a holiday outdoor campaign for Dixie Lily. We’re excited to be working on this resurgent brand, and there promises to be more including some pretty awesome packaging work from our design arm.

4. Red Square #2 just opened. The office, which is a bit of a mess presently, houses our creative department (now numbering 24). We’ll post proper photos and more details soon.

5. “Big” announcements from Apple and NASA disappoint. Really, Apple, adding The Beatles to iTunes was something “I will never forget?” Really? And NASA, next time you tease an announcement regarding extraterrestrial life, you’d better have found E.T.

There’s plenty more, but no need to get wordy. We do have some great news coming this week. Be warned: none of it will change your world like having The Beatles on iTunes or the discovery of an arsenic-based bacteria. Nevertheless, we’re excited.

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The inaugural Hangout Beach, Music & Arts Festival was this past weekend, and what a success. Crowds from all over gathered on the very beautiful, very oil-free beaches of Alabama to experience an amazing event that was the culmination of the hard work of scores of people. Grace Potter said it best: “my God—it’s Coachella on the beach!”

Our creative/design and PR crews, led by Sarah Jones and Niki Lim, executed flawlessly. The designs, from the stages to the signage to the tickets, were killer.

As for the PR side of things, the Red Square kids worked like maniacs alongside our pals Music Allies setting up press conferences (note Alabama Governor Bob Riley giving the international sign of the fest), managing internal communications, coordinating live news shows, and dealing with the good people at Associated Press, CNN and other major media.

Congrats to all involved. We are thankful to have been a part of the festival’s success.

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MTV changed their logo. So what? Fine. I admit I haven’t cared much about MTV in a long, long time, but I still feel a little funny. MTV was my Sesame Street. I was raised by Martha Quinn, Alan Hunter, Headbangers Ball, Kurt Loder, Pauly Shore—all of them.

I loved MTV.

So the logo feels like my cooler older sister just got a facelift. It’s still her, but she kind of looks off. Very simply, it’s a refreshing of the mark rather than a redesign. And a facelift is just a nip here and tuck there, right? They’ve dropped the “music television” descriptor, which is appropriate. The “M” has been cropped and widened, and the stroke on “TV” has been cleaned up, which is nice. Creative Review notes the updated logo allows MTV to house imagery within the widened “M” letterform:

The space in the new logo will be used more to push its programming and its endless procession of reality TV micro-celebrities than as a canvas for artists, and animators as it once was.

Sweetness! I was hoping they’d figure out how to incorporate Snookie in their logo.

Bobby over at Kitsune Noir has some good observations regarding the evolution of a 30-year-old brand:

MTV has become a household name, those three letters alone. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone call it Music Television before and I grew up in the 80’s. It’s the same as other major networks. You don’t get your news from the Cable News Network, you don’t tune into the Home Box Office to see True Blood and you don’t hate the National Broadcast Company for screwing over Conan. These three letter acronyms are culturally built-in at this point and after almost 30 years MTV deserves the same treatment.

Fair enough. I do think that many people will feel like this is absolute admission of a betrayal of the channel’s initial and core philosophy—playing music videos. Not that anyone has the patience to watch an entire music video these days.

Tina Exarhos, executive vice president of marketing and mulitplatform creative projects at the network, sums it up best:

I’ve been at MTV a long time, and as it was reinvented over the years and maintained sort of a fluid nature, we never touched our logo, which is sort of ironic. It’s a fantastic, iconic logo, but it wasn’t working for us in a way that we needed it to anymore. It needed to express more about what MTV is today, not what it was in 1981.

In other news, I am officially old.

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The latest addition to the Red Square library is Naive: Modernism and Folklore in Contemporary Graphic Design. It explores the current resurgence of Classic Modernism in graphic design and showcases a wide variety of work–everything from illustration to poster art to editorial and book cover design. I am a big fan of The Heads of State, whose work is prominently featured.

Sadly our library isn’t public, so you’re gonna have to get your own copy.

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