To me this is a superbly successful innovative visual campaign.  I am the biggest fan of using art in display. Here they have done it through location specific illustrations. Depending on the grade of each store you may find a line-illustration featuring landmarks from the store’s city in the window display, inside the store on the tables, at and behind the service desk. This type of location-based display customization adds an instant feeling of community and local uniqueness to what would otherwise be just a generic national campaign. I love this idea of acknowledging and connecting to shopper’s greater living space. Social networking is one arm of the new connection to customers, location aware visual merchandising is definitely another key tool in creating engaging emotional connections to the modern shopper.

I first spotted this window display on Ingrid Elizabeth Summers blog showing the Centurion Mall store and  I had to go and have a look. Using air tanks as plinths to place the Air Max shoe onto is to the mark.

I decided to explore this campaign a little bit more and found a Nike Air Max launch party post on Don’t Party and a follow-up post on the Run your City mixes available. I also found a Flickr pic of graffiti guerrilla advertising. Then on the official Gallery 4th site (screen grab below) you can view all the visuals of more than air going up .

I like this visual effect at Gallery on 4th in Mellville (image found on Gallery 4th)

Here are some of my photo’s taken at the V&A Waterfront store.

Click through to the Facebook page.

at, into, or across the space separating

This theme has caught my interest of late, so here is a post on a few international creative sites, following this trend in one form or another.  The theme is all about being in the space, in the moment or in the time between.

First, have a look at Min Jeon Seo’s porcelain sculpture of cast ballet dancers arms, suspended in space, as if in motion. The graceful elegance of the form of the arms is contrasted with the harsh, yet beautiful, tattoo’s drawn onto the arms. This could be a great concept for a window display using fiberglass mannequin arms (using the many different arm positions) and either cladded with paper, fabric, metal (or any material you can think of) or drawn, painted, marked with any type of medium you can think of and then suspended allowing the viewers to use their own imagination and complete the details and the many possibilities. I found this via a tweeted post by Taxi.

The next visual art that caught my eye is Spaces etc. by Ron Gilad. This I found via a tweet from Design Indaba of an interview with Porky Heffer (Animal Farm and the designer of the man-size birds nest made from kubu cane and Elliot the V&A cratefan) who mentions Ron Gilad’s work, spaces etc. have a look at all his brilliant work on his website as I am only showing you one of his masterpieces “OPEN UNFOLDED SPACE”

This led me to remembering seeing a pop-up-shop design in February 2010 on The Cool Hunter for a British luxury men’s brand, Alfred Dunhill at the New York Fashion Week. Camper Design use light and a metal structure to construct a store in and open space inside a vacant meatpacking district warehouse. This bespoke design categorises the quality of the brand in the highest level. Every part of the design and placement of the suits floats above the expected level and ordinary is knocked out as you enter into something extraordinary.

This is the Spirit House Chandelier designed by Daniel Libeskind for the Royal Ontario Museum that I found on Max4Object. This will be installed at the Royal Ontario Museum using only innovation in lighting design to create a sculptural shape that seem as though they are floating in air.

Fishing for compliments is a airy display-alive with undulating aquatic shapes designed by the London based Spanish sculpture and window designer Ion Ander Beloki at Ja! studio that I found through Yatzer.

I found Damian Ortega’s Controller of the Universe suspended sculpture on Trendland. Damian Ortega a Mexican artist living in Berlin uses everyday objects and suspends them into an extraordinary piece of art.

Recently Selfridges in the UK had a number of suspended sculpture window displays. This was conceptualised and installed by a Brighton, UK  designer and animator, Kyle Bean who specialise in hand made models and stop frame animation. I found this on PSFK .

On a final note here is, for me, by far the most amazing exploration of “between”, a photography collective by NAM, that I found via My Modern Met post by Eugene When Gravity Fails.

Originally established by graphic designer Takayuki Nakazawa and photographer Hiroshi Manaka, there are currently over ten artists from various backgrounds in the the group. Together, they seek to push the boundaries in the world of visual arts, as they explore their theme — “Fantasy in Life.”

Thumbnail by Visual Panic