The Ephemerist

Jan vander Veken, one of the best Belgian illustrators around, created this masthead for Vacature, a Flemish want ads paper. This seems to have run for a while in the paper, but I only noticed it today. Shame on me.

When I was for working the late and great Men@Work back in 2000-2001, one of the projects we did was the first broadband portal in Belgium, for internet provider Telenet. Our art director asked Jan, who I think had just completed his education, to create the title illustrations for the different departments. The portal has changed its looks (and name) quite a few times in the mean time, but Jan’s drawings still are radiant (click the drawings to open the animated version) :

This weekend, VW launched a new campaign in the Belgian newspapers, promoting their special conditions on sunroofs.

The campaign features an indian (Tonto ?) who hears a call for help and, instead of jumping on his trusted palomino, hops in his VW and rides on to the rescue. Admittedly, this is not the most original of ideas - I personally think the Smurf I blogged about earlier was better. However, I do like the way DDB handled the execution. Instead of using photographs or the like, they opted for illustrative art in a style that is clearly reminiscent of the traditional european, semi-realistic Western comics.

That said, it is not the first time VW uses comics in its campaigns - just click back to this post for a look at Tintin driving a Golf.

(By the way, my excuses for the bad scan - it was ripped from a PDF version).