For over 55 years, the I.D. Annual Design Review has recognized the best in graphic, environmental, product and furniture design. We are very proud that MSLK’s own Sheri L Koetting has taken her place among a jury of the field’s leading practitioners. Her voice and sensibility played a large role in the winners chosen this year in the graphics category. Viewing everything through a lens of sustainability, Sheri not only examined the purpose and aesthetics of each piece, she questioned its material usage and life expectancy.

You can see all of the winning pieces on view now until September 10^th at the AIGA National Design Center. Read more to view some of the winners and what Sheri had to say about each of the pieces.

If you’re a marketer, you’ve probably thrown around those ubiquitous terms, push and pull marketing. The marketplace has seen a major paradigm shift from pushing products onto consumers, to pulling them in, inviting them to engage with the brand in novel and unique ways. At MSLK, we think this is especially important to consider when creating sophisticated branding campaigns in the beauty industry. How can you stop consumers dead in their tracks, invite an interaction or ignite a conversation? Burt’s Bees skincare installations do just that. In a series of three installations that have traveled to public spaces across Canada, the pieces educate women about the harmful effects of most allegedly natural skincare products on the market.

These days everyone seems to understand that wasted paper is bad for the environment. Therefore “going paperless,” or bringing formerly printed materials onto the web, is inherently a greener solution.  Or is it? In his recent eye-opening article, “Is Digital Media Worse for the Environment than Print?,” Don Carli, senior research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication, alerts the public to the unseen and largely unreported environmental impacts of digital media. He urges us to look beyond “green rhetoric,” and to consider the harmful effects of the digital supply chain in order to make informed decisions.

MSLK has produced some fun and informative short films showcasing our work and design process. These were created to demonstrate to clients our 360° approach to branding. We found that video is a great way to fully explain all the details and thought that goes into each project.

Above is our video detailing our rebranding efforts for the national hair care distributor Maly’s. You can view the other 360° videos on our website, and we’ll be posting a new project to the blog each week.

Enjoy!

Over the past year, MSLK has been very involved in the social media hype, figuring out the best strategies in using these medias to reach our clients and potential clients in creative ways. In light of the upcoming FGI presentation, we thought we would give you a sneak peak of various key statistics and demographics of users of blogs, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Read more to find out a few of the fun facts that we found. You can download a pdf of the presentation here.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our webinar on Social Media, with marketing expert, Sheri Koetting and social media consultant, Shannon Nelson.We hope you gained some new insights into the power and potential that platforms like Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter hold. As we discussed they not allow you to reach millions of users, but give unprecedented access to data about your fans and their daily lives.

We’ve had several requests for the presentation from those of you who couldn’t join us and those of you who were riveted and need to watch it again. A recording of the presentation is posted here for your convenience.

Affordable Luxury Webinar 5/6/09 from MSLK on Vimeo.

Thank you to everyone who joined us today for our first webinar on “Positioning Your Brand as an Affordable Luxury” . I really appreciate all of the great feedback, pointers and responses we’ve received thus far. It seems that many of you agree with the positioning opportunities that we’ve defined and I truly hope that our insights provided you with a new lens of how to view the marketing initiatives  you see all around.

Here at MSLK we are keenly interested in the effects of society’s mass consumption of plastic. It seems that the things that are most transient to us such as disposable bags, silverware, applicators, packaging and bottles are made from plastic, a material that is very enduring. What happens when we are done with these single use items? Where do they end up? And more importantly how many of these things are we mindlessly using every day?

Websites have become the most essential marketing tool for businesses. One click from a customer is a valuable opportunity that can make all the difference. If created properly, a Website should instinctively lead visitors where you want them to follow.

In spite of the known value a good Website can bring, take a moment and think about just how many poor Websites you encounter every day. While not every business needs their site to be a high-budget multimedia extravaganza, every site should be effective, and properly targeted to a company’s audience.

Too many times people rush into putting up a quick site, thinking this will hold them over until they get around to the big launch. This is a fallacy—it is almost always far more difficult to rebrand an existing Website than to start with a good one.

The quickest way to change the public perception of your brand is to give it a facelift. MSLK was recently presented with the challenge of re-inventing the image of a photographer whose identity was making his work feel dated and out-of-touch. Our objective was to develop an identity to help Jim attract his ideal clientele and speak to a younger crop of art directors. It needed to be engaging and flexible, but not overpower his detailed photography. See some examples of his new look in comparison to his old identity after the jump.