It took some whinging from the Guardian Unlimited about their loss in Design Museum’s Designer of the Year award to alert me to the fact that Jamie Hewlett has knocked down some major design wins in 2006. I noticed his first achievement in the 2006 Webby Awards “Special Achievement Honorees” with the Webby Artist of the Year award for Gorillaz. This month he won the Designer of the Year award from the Design Museum, London, over the likes of The Guardian Unlimited newspaper, Tom Dixon (the wire chair, among other great designs), and Cameron Sinclair (Architecture for Humanity).
If you’re old enough, you might remember Hewlett’s first major achievement, Tankgirl, an anti-heroine comic character developed initially for the music and culture magazine Deadline. The ensuing Gorillaz project grew out of “a shared interest - and apartment - with Blur’s lead singer Damon Albarn.” The debut self-titled album for this animated band sold six million copies worldwide, making Gorillaz the most successful album ever created by a virtual group.
If you think you haven’t seen Gorillaz, think again. Did you view the MTV European Music Award, or the Recording Academy’s Grammy’s? Then you saw Hewlett’s work, where he took visualization and personification of this animated band to a new level. The group’s “live” performances were created by complex quasi-holographic images, where the band members were fully rendered onstange in three-dimensional “reality.”
The Gorillaz site is a Flash whiz job, where a viewer can take a tour of Kong Studios, a Zen-like mess (if there is such a thing) of a music studio. If you get lost, you can consult the “map monkey,” a fez-bedecked and undernourished mammal, for help. Viewers can also learn more about band members, sign up for newsletters, order Gorillaz merchandise (like ringtones, T-shirts, and - of course - music) and more.
So, the Gorillaz site is more than a virtual community - it’s a three-dimensional world that has garnered some real-life rewards for Jamie Hewlett. To learn more about Hewlett, go to the Design Museum’s link about the Designer of the Year award, or visit his site, Zombie Flesh Eaters (another Flash marvel with a rather violent entrance technique).
