Designers: “Harden the flourish up!”

Block has been recruited by Spicers Paper Australia to create a 2012 calendar with a difference.

Enter the Spicer’s Guild of Xtreme Printing and Finishing: a three-man unit of macho men brought together by Block to give the design industry a very extreme makeover.

The Guild have been recruited to drive tanks, shoot guns, brandish chainsaws and ignite explosive devices over stacks of paper, pioneering some of the most extreme printing and finishing techniques ever attempted.

When you’re designing anything for designers it’s tempting to create something that looks very pretty and trendy. Instead we decided to do the complete opposite.

This campaign pokes fun at the prettiness of designers and the prettiness of their designs by giving the industry a not-so-metrosexual makeover. It’s design that makes the ears bleed, which is incredibly fun to create.
The Spicer’s Guild of Xtreme Printing and Finishing takes popular techniques like embossing and foiling and ramps up the voltage tenfold. It consists of Joe the ‘Brawn Identity’, Paulie ‘The Gun’ and Dave the ‘Number Cruncher’ – three burly blokes with a passion for blowing things up.

The Guild have been devise extreme ways to print, emboss and die cut paper, which will be used to create 3,000 calendars. Their antics have been captured on film, and each month a new episode will be uploaded onto Spicer’s Facebook page. Watch the teaser campaign here.

Spoofing reality TV shows such as American Chopper and Monster Garage, the campaign is a tongue-in-cheek critique of an industry that is vulnerable to foppish hairdos, noiseless loafers and manscaping.

As creatives who also have friends and colleagues fitting the descriptions of the designers we’re spoofing, the campaign is a fun way to celebrate our industry whilst satirising it at the same time.

Spicers has a goal to engage designers over time, so Block has taken every cliché from the macho reality TV genre and is launching a very quirky calendar that will extend from print to online and social media.

Pre-production has been a hilarious process. We put out a call on Facebook for anyone who owned a tank, and within an hour we’d sourced four.

The first half of the calendar (January- June 2012) will be released in early 2012. The second half (July – December 2012) will incorporate extreme printing and finishing techniques suggested via Spicer’s Facebook and Twitter followers. It will be released in mid-2012.

We have absolutely no idea what the calendar will look like when it’s finished – we could end up with a small pile of ash. But discovery is half the fun.

In 2011, Block released a calendar for Spicers that consisted entirely of images from old calendars sourced on eBay. Titled ‘What’s Old is New Again’, it was highly awarded internationally at The One Show and ADFEST.

Follow the Spicers Guild of Xtreme Printing and Finishing via Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.