Monday 15 February 2010

San Serriffe

Back in the hazy, distant days of 1977, the annual japery of April Fool's Day was far from a fixture in the UK's newspapers. But then The Guardian ran a seven-page feature on the remote island nation of San Serriffe, in the Indian Ocean – complete with descriptions of its two main islands, Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse, its capital Bodoni, and its ruler, General Pica.

I happened to find this "interesting" joke whilst browsing on the Metro online newspaper (research for D&AD), most of you will see that the names are references to typographer's terminology. This joke was printed in the Guardian for april fools day but a huge number of people fell for it, aided perhaps by the fact that the paper roped in many legitimate advertisers, including Guinness and Kodak, to play along with the gag. The Guardian's office switchboard was apparently flooded with phonecalls from gullible people wanting more information on the fictitious islands.

Any way just thought Id share that with you guys before going into detail of what i've been up to the past month or so..
Im thinking the D&AD competition brief is a good place to start, basically we had to Create a transport advertising poster campaign and strapline that cuts through the visual noise of the everyday commute to promote Metro newspapers. We have collectively as a group come up with a concept that hopefully answers the brief. We decided the Metro needed a personality, the idea we came up which is, using info graphics, illustrate the other uses of the metro i.e. using it as a crowd dispersal device, using it as an umbrella when it rains etc.. we are still in talks about a strapline, which at this point in time is becoming very hard for reasons unknown, the strapline needs to reflect the slight witty humor we are going for with the illustrations but we are very concerned about making it cheesy, as whilst doing our research on the type of person that already picks up the metro, we found that the people that don't, tend not to due to being embarrassed by being seen with this "gossip mag" we are working on this today so I will keep updating on our progress.

















This is a pdf we created quickly for our presentation with our initial ideas.

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