Alice Hlavin of Buster Creative attended this year’s Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) Scholarship Luncheon, hosted by the Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Community Associates of AIC. The event honored North Chicago student artists who were awarded summer class scholarships to AIC.

The luncheon featured an exclusive lecture by David Stark of the AIC Department of Museum Education, who spoke about the upcoming Roy Lichtenstein exhibit.

The Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Community Associates was founded in 1969 and today draws a membership of over 250 predominantly from Chicago’s northern suburbs. The group contributes to special projects at the AIC, funds art scholarships for students and provides an art appreciation outreach program in the elementary schools of North Chicago.

Buster Creative recently revamped the website for pro-bono account Association of Horizon, Inc., a non-profit volunteer organization that provides educational and recreational services for adults with physical disabilities. Some of the updates included faster navigation, premium flash photo album galleries and social media integration. Throughout this project, Buster Creative worked closely with Horizon’s Michael Trimpe, who manages the website, to ensure that he could easily update, manage and navigate the new site.

Visit the new Association of Horizon website: www.associationofhorizon.org

Looking for a last minute gift? Give an App this holiday season!

Here a few of Buster Creative’s favorite Apps.

1. Hipstamatic

Alice at Buster Creative is addicted to the vintage camera app Hipstamatic, which gives your photos that psychedelic, retro look made popular plastic toy cameras of the past. Hipstamatic keeps all the funk and whim of shooting old school photos but gives you the ability to switch through many different lenses, film, and flash settings.

Alice’s photos with Hipstamatic:

Alice’s photo without Hipstamatic:

2. iHandy Flashlight Pro

George at Buster Creative loves the iHandy Flashlight app, which uses your phone’s LED to fill your screen with bright white light. It’s the perfect solution for anytime you’re lost without a flashlight. George has yet to take advantage of the app’s strobe and disco light effect, but he’s sure to use it the next time he hits the clubs.

3. Pulse News

Michael at Buster Creative can’t take his eyes off of the Pulse News app, a 2011 Apple Design Awards winner and one of only  50 apps in the Apple App Store Hall of Fame. Pulse News is an impressive, customizable news reader that let you slide, scroll and tap through all your favorite news sources in one simple, easy-to-navigate interface.

4. Shazam

Kristi at Buster Creative can’t get enough of Shazam, the wildly popular app that identifies the name, album, and artist of a song through the microphone on your mobile device. What’s more, the app can now display the lyrics to the song that you’re tagging. Instant gratification and a karaoke machine that fits in your pocket? That’s music to our ears.

New York’s Cooper Union recently hosted PHARMA, an exhibit focusing on graphic design in the pharmaceutical industry from the 1940’s to present day. The show featured original and rarely seen works by luminaries including Andy Warhol, Lester Beall, Will Burtin and Herb Lubalin. As a trusted partner with the pharmaceutical industry for over 15 years, Buster Creative was delighted to hear about this exhibit. We were fortunate to speak directly with the man behind PHARMA, Alexander Tochilovsky, Curator at the The Herb Lubalin Study Center at The Cooper Union. Read the full interview below.

Buster Creative: How many people attended the PHARMA exhibit? Did you receive any good response or feedback?

Alexander Tochilovsky: We don’t keep that kind of statistic, we don’t track attendance. But the opening was very well attended, perhaps 500 people. And I would guess that over the course of the exhibition run there was maybe another 1000 visitors. The show got very favorable response, some in person, and some in print.

BC: How did you decide to start the PHARMA exhibit?

Tochilovsky: I was inspired by some of the materials in the Study Center (which is an extensive archive of graphic design ephemera). We have some really great examples of early designs for the pharmaceutical industry, including many by Herb Lubalin, whose archive of work was the foundation of the study center. I was intrigued by the subject matter, as it is really not often talked about in the context of graphic design history.  The materials were also rarely seen as all of them were intended to be seen by doctors, so the general public has never really seen this work.

BC: How did you choose the pieces for the exhibit?

Tochilovsky: Most of the pieces come from our collections, so essentially we showed as much of the material that we own. The pieces were chosen also to illustrate the evolution of the industry. We also borrowed a few pieces that focused mostly on European designs for pharma.

BC: What made graphic design in the pharmaceutical industry at that time so unique?

Tochilovsky: The designs were unique mostly because the industry was just being born. There was a lot of excitement and a lot of openness and freedom (as well as a lack of very strong oversight). The designers were able to explore things that were interesting to them, to implement ideas from the art movements that were occurring in Europe. They were making something new.

BC: How have these pieces impacted the pharmaceutical industry today and advertising in general?

Tochilovsky: I think as the work evolved, and competition increased marketing became increasingly more important. So in some ways these pieces shaped how marketing was conceived of and the role that design plays in marketing of drugs. New ways of promoting drugs were invented, new vehicles, such as magazines made by pharmaceutical companies. But in terms of visual residue, I don’t think there is much visible impact in today’s pharmaceutical work that can be attributed to these early designs. Most of this work has been forgotten, agencies have changed, structures changed, regulations tightened. The industry has changed.

BC: What was your favorite piece from the exhibit?

Tochilovsky: I have many, but my absolute favorite piece is the set of promotional booklets designed by Alex Ross for Sharp & Dohme in the 1940s. They are the ones that spurned me to create the exhibition. His work is really unknown, as he tragically passsed away  in 1950 at the young age of 36, but in his relatively short time produced an incredible amount of work that rivaled the work of his contemporaries, luminaries such as Paul Rand. His work exhibited an exuberance and freedom of experimentation that was inherent in that period of work for pharma. He was clearly influenced by the avant-garde movements in Europe and found his own visual voice within this work. His work deserves to be seen as it is really strong, and serves as a great example of the high level of design that was prevalent in the early days of pharmaceutical marketing.

BC: What’s next for the PHARMA exhibit? Will it be traveling or opening again soon?

Tochilovsky: The show is not scheduled to travel. And at the moment we are trying to figure out if a catalog might be feasible. We are looking into raising the necessary funds to allow for a catalog to be produced.

On October 22, Buster Creative joined thousands of fellow Halloween fanatics in Highwood, Illinois for the city’s Great Pumpkin Festival, where they helped make pumpkin-carving history. Participants carved and lit up 30,919 pumpkins, breaking the Guinness World Record for most lit jack-o-lanterns. The previous record was held by Boston in 2006 with 30,128.

“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe is a revered work of literary horror. You may have thought the original was good, but take a look at the edited version. Watch the video below as Buster Creative revisits the classic narrative poem with a little help of a proofreading pen. Narration provided by the talented Christopher Walken.

Want to hunt for some real ghosts this Halloween? There’s an app for that.

Ghost Radar is a creepy cool app designed to detect paranormal activity through the sensors of your iPhone, iPad and other mobile devices. Once the sensory readings are made, the app uses a proprietary algorithm to analyze the quantum flux and provides numeric and textual readouts of nearby paranormal activity.

After almost 20 long years, the time has come for Buster Creative to finally say goodbye to our postal meter. In the age of online communication and digital shopping, many wonder if we are nearing the end of snail mail as we know it. Following a $9.5 billion loss in revenue just last year, the United States Postal Service recently announced its plans to eliminate 3,700 of its 36,000 post offices, laying off as many as 120,000 workers. To put that into perspective, after Walmart, USPS is the single largest employer in the U.S.

Congratulations to Buster Creative’s Alice Hlavin and George Demet for competing in the recent Bank of America Chicago Marathon! On October 9, 2011, Alice and George were among the 45,000 participants who took part in the famous, world-class race, which starts at Chicago’s Grant Park and winds 26.2 miles through 29 of the city’s neighborhoods. As one of the fastest growing marathon road races in the world, the Chicago marathon stands alongside Boston, New York, London and Berlin Marathons, as one of the five World Marathon Majors. This year’s record-breaking Chicago marathon winners include Kenya’s Moses Mosop, who finished at 2:05:37, and Russia’s Liliya Shobukhova, who clocked in at 2:18:20.

Here’s a recap of the 2011 Chicago Marathon by the numbers.

34: Years the Chicago Marathon has raced through the Windy City. The race started in 1977.

4,200: Runners in the first Chicago Marathon back in 1977.

45,000: Participants in the 2011 Chicago Marathon. Regular registration ended in record time this year, with the maximum number signing up in just 31 days, three weeks faster than last year.

29: Neighborhoods runners will traverse during the marathon, including the Loop, East Lakeview, West Loop, Little Italy, Chinatown, Pilsen and more.

6: Continents with runners representing them in the race. Participants have come from all over the globe in recent years, including many Olympians.

58,420: Gallons of water available for thirsty runners at stations throughout the race.

48,250: Gatorade bottles available for runners.

4: Times Khalid Khannouchi won the Marathon. First in 1997, then in 1999, 2000 and 2002.

2 hours, 17 minutes, 18 seconds: Time of the marathon’s fastest female runner, Paula Radcliffe of Great Britain in 2002.

2 hours, 5 minutes, 41 seconds: Time of the marathon’s fastest male runner, Sammy Wanjiru of Kenya, in 2009. Wanjiru passed away in May.

Source

Check out the 2011 Buster Creative video reel with our video projects for Hollister, Motorola, iVEX, Paslode, a large pharmaceutical company, and a world-leading German laboratory diagnostic and engineering company.

Are you looking for new ways to market and promote your brand? Do it with video!

• Product Demonstration
• Training & Instruction
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Contact Buster Creative for all your video campaign needs:

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