We launched StockLogos as a business venture to help designers find clients and clients find good designers. The idea behind stock logos is to create a gallery of logos where clients can browse and find the style of logo that they are seeking for their new business and get in touch with the designers who created the preferred logo. The site is user generated and community driven. The e-commerce part is run by PayPal. The initial interest and participation is huge. Thanks for everyone involved for their help to make it happen!

You can read the interview in Portuguese or read below in English.

CHMKT: Tell me a little about your career?
IR: I've worked for GE and Coca-Cola in the beginning of my career as internal creative in Hungary. Later I worked for McCann, JWT and had the chance to set-up a creative dept in Bahrain for a new agency. Later I opened my own agency 7Field in Budapest. After selling it I started traveling with my family and after Singapore and Indonesia, I currently live in Australia. Currently I work on Ads of the World and a couple of other sites as a consultant.

I was asked to give an interview through Skype for the SOCIETY OF HUNGARIAN GRAPHIC DESIGNERS AND TYPOGRAPHERS - matt.org.hu, who is running an international graphic design competition. The title is "Annoying? Redesign it!" Everything imaginable found in Hungary can be redesigned.

Here is the gist of it in English:

In this interview I define cool, mkey? Here is the full article:

Ivan Raszl, Founder of Ads of the World (INTERVIEW)
As the Founder and Editor of Ads of the World, Ivan Raszl knows the importance of spotting trends. The Ads of the World archive and community features advertisements from around the world, and the Ivan Raszl is himself quite worldly.

Living in Hungary, Ivan Raszl speaks English, Hungarian and Russian fluently. He spoke to us about his work and the role trend spotting plays in it.

I felt honored to be invited to Digital Festival 2009 to speak about the subjects of advertising and the digital age. It was great to hear and meet the best of our industry both nationally and internationally.

You can read the article here or below.

Where adverts are the editorial

Although many web surfers block advertisements, some creative ones are worth seeing. Ads of the World collects and rates the best.

There's a Ronseal element to the Ads of the World website, which will prompt most UK users to remember the long-running slogan: "It does exactly what it says on the tin". Ads of the World is a great place to find advertisements from around the world, though not all of them. Searching for Ronseal, for example, finds no results. AotW is selective rather than comprehensive, but there are more than enough creative ads to keep you browsing for some time.

Ads of the World reckons it's "the biggest online advertising community (almost 50,000 members) in the world". It was started by an individual – Ivan Raszl – in 2005, then taken over by a large corporation. In this case, Alan Meckler's Jupitermedia added it to its Graphics.com network. Raszl, a Hungarian, also founded the CreativeBits blog and community in 2004, and 7Field, a boutique ad agency, last year. He also runs an ad blog on Ads of the World.

Addict, the famous anonymous blog regularly dissecting the Hungarian advertising scene featured Ads of the World and 7Field.

Thank you reklambuzi for your kind review and the encouragement to all commenters.

I have been asked a few questions about the importance creativity in business cards by the Instore Magazine. Here are the answers:

Why are the creative business cards so important?
Business cards are part of your attire, besides their obvious informative function. People judge your status and taste by looking at your card. Business cards are probably the single most important element of your company's identity. It gets the most attention and it's the most personal of all. It's also a design challenge as it's relatively small, has to be cheap to produce and ideally adhere to standard sizes.

How could you analyze a situation with creativity of business cards in the world?
My estimate is that less than 10% of cards can be considered well designed. Even big corporations tend to print good design poorly, which destroys the effect. People don't realize that their cards are a piece of their image and persona given away to other people, it's not just a piece of paper holding information. Cards are like shoes in a way. Both can say a lot about you.

Have to be all business cards creative?
Creative business cards with unusual solutions have their own place and not for everyone. Certain conservative professions require simple and elegant typography. Everyone else should have a creative card if they can find an idea. Sometimes it's really hard, especially if you need to design a card for yourself. It requires a certain critical and cynical view of yourself, which is very hard to attain. It's much simpler to draw a mental caricature of others.

For what positions can be creative business cards harmful?
High positions of all kind, such as CEOs, political leaders. People in a position where confidentiality or trust is important. Such as doctors or bankers. But there may be exceptions to there generalizations. I can imagine a cool card for a dentist or a loan agent. Humor can break the ice and it may help build personal relationships with their clients.

You can see a bunch of creative cards I collected here and here.

We've just launched a cool new service: Ads of the World Research. In a nutshell it's an advertising archive with a huge archive of more than 2 million ads carefully keyworded and categorized. It's a pay site, but hey people digitizing all these ads don't work for free. ;)

Hope you will find it useful when you really need to research an industry or brand to know what has been done already.

I'm only saying a few sentences:
The public is very tired of old formulas. It's very important to do fun stuff. Come up with a great story, which can survive on its own and then just attach your product to it. Obviously the two has to be related somehow. But, the whole idea is that you have to entertain the public.

Read the interview with Ted Disbanded. It is a blog about Disbanded people and Disbanded philosophy: things and persons who change the things. Apparently a lot of people from Italian advertising read it.

Ted: When did you realize AOTW was becoming so important?
Ivan: AotW was important for me from day one. But I realized it has become a factor in the industry when I started seeing creative CVs listing the appearance on Ads of the World as an achievement. At that point I realized that I have a responsibility here that goes beyond my own playground.

7Field is an advertising agency specializing in unusual communication solutions. We base our work on solid strategy and come with ideas that give you the biggest return on your marketing investment. We are media independent and creative driven. We are international. We pride ourselves being able to answer briefs unusually quickly. We would be happy to work for you!

You can find Photoshop tutorials I wrote over the last few years on Photoshop-Pro. Hope you find it useful.

I have the honor to have been asked to judge this year on the FWA awards show. Hope to see some great entries and winners this year again. Here is the shortlist for the people's choice award.

Arab Ad published an interview with me about AotW and my latest plans.

Unless you’ve been hibernating lately, you can’t have missed out on that ground-breaking blog turned into a website. Ads of the World is an online advertising archive. Nothing complicated. You log on, check out what’s new today, voice your opinion and come back the next day. What you get out of it is essential for work. It is a daily digest of inspiration for advertising students, next generation marketers, creative thinkers and anyone who’s looking for that lightening bolt. Your refresh your mind, you infuse new ideas into your thinking and get a daily boost of creativity from around the world. Another very popular feature is where creatives can freely upload their work to get feedback.
Ivan Raszl, the man behind this outstanding initiative, talks to ArabAd about the keys of his success.
(see ArabAd November issue p.118)

Here is a big collection of Photoshop tutorials I wrote over the years on Photoshopsupport.com. Hope you find them useful for your work.

I just found this interview I gave a few month ago to MediaME. I'll copy it in here for your convenience.

Ivan Raszl: Creating an online presence for the 'Ads Of The World' and more ...

Ivan Raszl is a creative director and the founder of several online communities for advertising professionals, most prominent of which is the incredibly successful AdsOfTheWorld.
Ivan's 'day job' is an Advertising and Design Creative Director working at Medina, a medium sized hot-shop branding agency in Bahrain. He's originally Hungarian and has been living in Bahrain for the last 7 years and worked for Promoseven, JWT and Al Hilal networks in the past.