Towards the end of last year we were approached by Stewdio “an art practice, a code house and a graphic design studio” to produce a really exciting project. They needed us to print off 30,000 slips of paper, roughly business card size, each one containing a completely unique phrase on it. Our expertise and experience in running variable data projects on our HP Indigo’s enabled the project to run smoothly but the context wasn’t entirely clear to us until we saw the display appear in Selfridges’ window accompanied with the blogs produced by It’s Nice That http://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/its-nice-that-words-words-words-at-selfridges and Stewdio http://stewd.io/w/wordacoaster
It turns out It’s Nice That had been tasked with promoting Selfridges’ “Words, Words, Words” initiative designed to promote slow communication and celebrate the inspirational and creative power of words and literature. How delightful that a printed product was still considered the best way to encapsulate this.
Stewdio created a custom in-browser Javascript which hopped around Wiktionary collecting thousands of adjectives which were then converted into “fortune phrases” with help from the Adobe Illustrator plug in http://scriptographer.org/each one with a unique font.
A large wooden “Word-A-coaster” built by Atom http://atomltd.com/ dispenses a plastic ball containing your unique fortune for 2012.
This is such a fantastic display of creativity and one that we’re so pleased to have played our part in. Now lets all get down to Selfridges to have a look!