Contemporary Issues

Ghostsigns World Tour

Perhaps being in Cambodia has sensitised me to the world of Ghostsigns beyond my home shores. Or maybe awareness of the project has encouraged those from around the world to make contact. Whatever it is, I thought it was time for a round-up of what’s landed in my inbox and surfaced on my internet radar […]

21 Jul 2011

Street Art

sarflondondunc, ever alert to the gradual shifts in our Ghostsigns landscape, alerted me to this new piece of street art positioned on the great Boyd Pianos sign on Shacklewell Lane, Hackney. It’s by the Canadian artist Specter and is part of the ‘If I saw you in heaven’ project. This attempts to “address the issue of […]

11 Aug 2010

Anchor

Photo: Creative Review Photo: Creative Review Creative Review and a few others have spotted this new outdoor campaign for Anchor Butter.  When I first saw the photos I assumed they were genuine hand painted ads but they are actually printed billboards which, in the case of the press shots, are cleverly cropped to suggest otherwise. […]

5 Aug 2010

Rage Factor

This campaign now has hand painted signs to support it!  The objective is to ‘steal’ the Christmas number one spot from this year’s X-Factor winner and here are the painters at work spreading the message. If you want to help with the effort then for just 29p you can do your bit to crack Cowell […]

15 Dec 2009

Charlton Signwriting

Some photos and film from a visit to Charlton to see Chris of Northern Star Creative at work on a sign for a garage. It was great to see him in action and to hear some of his stories from when he used to run a signwriting shop on the Woolwich Road. He’s writing these […]

4 Dec 2009

Chatting with the Ritual Project

I did an interview with the New York project as it reaches its climax. Read it in full here and find out more about their work here.

1 Dec 2009

Ritual Project Update

The project is into its final few days and there are some interesting snippets of the painters at work, both close up and in time lapse. Here are a few highlights, more here and here. I’d personally like to see some longer clips with perhaps some discussion from the painters about the techniques employed. I […]

26 Nov 2009

The Ritual Project

Stella Artois and Colossal Media are collaborating in New York to use hand painted advertising over 21 days to demonstrate the ‘ritual’ of pouring a glass of Stella.  This ritual involves nine steps and by day 11 they’re on step three, mainly due to adverse weather conditions. It’s going to be a busy ten days […]

18 Nov 2009

Auckland Billboards

Dean wrote to me following the ban in Sao Paulo to let me know that it is now the politicians in Auckland, New Zealand, that are looking to outlaw billboards. However, they didn’t expect the advertising industry to fight back with a bit of characteristic creativity and develop a campaign to highlight what lies beneath […]

12 Oct 2007

Rise and Fall of Billboards

In response to my post on SmartWrap, Faris warned me to ‘beware the backlash’ and sent me a link to his blog which shows the following TV ad. It’s for Sky Movies, promoting the fact that their films are uninterupted by advertising and is inspired by the Brazilian billboard ban. An interesting construct which Faris […]

6 Oct 2007