Design/Advertising | Petronio Associates

Petronio Associates are a design, branding, and advertising shop out of France that do absolutely beautiful work for an array of high-end fashion clients such as Prada and Chloé. Originally I think I followed a link from a site featuring their current posters for Chloé featuring -- surprise -- Chloé Sevigny, which are really cool on their own. But then as I explored the rest of their site, I was impressed by their work that is so much loftier, artsy, and inspirational than most advertising dreg that clutters our lives. How wonderful would it be to create work that truly straddles the divide between art and commerce?

Design | Poetic Licence, Polyvore

There's a growing trend for these very interesting sites where you can move parts around and create your own design -- kind of like a dumbed down Photoshop/Illustrator. Poetic Licence is a UK-based shoe manufacturer whose site allows you to create your own ad for their shoes by giving you some logos, photos, words and other elements to play around with. Polyvore is a little more advanced and is an application (available both on its own site and on Facebook) where you can play around with creating your own outfits based on thousands of pre-loaded shots of clothes. The design comes in by creating your own personal dream outfits (or real outfits, I suppose) in a sleek and polished way that resembles the pages of a fashion magazine. Clearly there's major potential here for revenue if the clothes you represent pay money to be on the page; from a more personal standpoint, it affords hours of fun for any girl (or guy) who thrives on the creativity and self-expression that comes from putting clothes and design elements together -- even if they're out of your price range.