The world famous psychedelic-anime artist Takashi Murakami shocked the world in 2003, when he and Mark Jacobs designed the colorful ‘MONOCHROME MULTICOLOR’ series for Louis Vuitton. ‘SUPERFLAT MONOGRAM’, the promotion video for that series, became one of the most remarkable pieces of advertising art of the 21th century.
6 years later Takashi Murakami is starting a new revolution. Again for Louis Vuitton he created designs for the new ‘MULTICOLORE SPRING PALETTE’ spring series. Therefore Murakami created a new promo animation, called ‘SUPERFLAT FIRST LOVE’ which will be launched on Aprl 28th exclusive on Louis Vuitton’s new mobile site. Access to the site is provided through a revolutionary designed QR- code, which invites to ‘the fantasy world of Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton’.
Colored QR-codes with simple clip-arts are widely known in Japan, but this new QR-code combines high art and functionality and brings QR-code design to a new level. Amazingly also old phones we tried could read that code quick without any problem.
In the near future we can expect many imitators of this new art form and therefore project a future of even more colorful and artistic mobile advertising.
BUT WAIT!!! We actually predicted this years ago. Already in 2006 CyberMedia created QR-codes for example for the German Airline Lufthansa in the same style.
Louis Vuitton’s new campaign is themed “From Japan to the World”. Like many new lifestyle trends coming from Japan, this might also spill over to the western market soon and bring new advertising possibilities. Maybe it even revoltutionize the mobile culture of today.
The ‘AU Design Project‘ always surprises with unique and simply designed phones like the INFOBAR, INFOBAR II, talby, neon or MEDIA SKIN.
Now the first phone of their new premium mobile brand ‘iida’ is hitting the shelves. ‘iida’: stands for “innovation, imagination, design and art” and at least 3 innovative models are expected to come.
The first release is the ‘G9’ slider by Sony Ericsson. The minimalistic designed phone has all the latest phone features and is one of the view phones from AU that can be used worldwide in over 150 countries. The phone is available for 1845yen (19$) per month with payment by installment for two years, or at once 48.000yen (495%) for a basic 2year contract. The battery charger is sold separately for ecologic reasons, like on most of Japanese phones nowadays. The charger itself is held in a green ECO design with attached leaves.
The additionally available ‘Pico projector’ transforms the G9 into a mobile presenter. This mobile projector also fits to several other au models and can be bought for 50.000 (500$). As a special promotion everybody who buys the new G9, will receive an online access code to a mobile site where they can get a 60% discount for the projector. The mobile projector will then only cost 19.000yen (196$).
The next phone which will come out is going to be the ‘Misora’ clamshell phone, which was produced in stylish collaboration with Yayoi Kusama. Her typical ‘polka dots’ and a special keitai-strap, which makes the phone look like a small designer handbag, are the characteristics of this new lifestyle concept.
This summer in June AU will also introduce the solar-powered concept model bt SHARP, which was on display AS A CONCEPT PHONE during CEATEC 2008. AU claims that 80% of the battery can be charged by the solar cells on the phone. The next generation’s mobile trend is therefore obvious: ECO CHARGING and ECO LIFESTYLE.
The Telecommunication Carrier Association (TCA) and all five Japanese mobile carriers (docomo, au, Softbank, e-mobile, willcom) announced on April 16th, that the usage of filtering services on mobile phones reached an all time high of 5.7 million subscribers. That’s an increase of 780.000 in the last 3 month and an increase of 2.3 million in the last year. Young Japanese under the age of 18 are therefore unable to see content which is on the blacklist. However parents can decide and individually activate sites at their child’s phone if they think its appropriate.
