The design team chose a striking, modern theme which, when combined with sharp photography, gives the cutting edge, upmarket feel that Maro were hoping to achieve.

To view the brand, spanking new Maro Developments website visit www.marodev.co.uk

We have been admiring his classic Pan Am guides. George Tscherny completed a vast range of work for Pan Am in the early ’70s, redesigning everything from timetables to stewards’ aprons over the course of two years. These city guides beautifully demonstrate how simple, striking graphic elements combined with understated typography can have serious impact.

Take a look at it in action here-

The dot matrix water clock shows the time interspersed with astonishingly complex graphics, all with drops of falling water. Incredible.

These posters are available for purchase here.

Coming in at a cool 12.8 million euros, the AquaDom is the largest acrylic cylindrical aquarium in the world, with a diameter of about 11 metres. The feeding of the fish and the cleaning of the fish tank is performed daily by 3-4 divers. What a great job!

So, rather a pricey feature for Radisson. It is however, beginning to pay for itself. It attracts many curious tourists and hotel guests and is now the main attraction of the Berlin Sea Life Centre.

Turns out, Toca Boca is a relatively new company who specialise in developing digital toys and games for kids. Part of the Bonnier publishing group, Toca Boca develop games that are fun and functional as well as looking great. We just love the fantastic characters and designs. It seems we are not alone, the company has just passed 5m downloads 10 months after launching its first app.

“We reached 4m in December and then 5m on 15 January, with December being by far the best month we’ve ever had,” says chief executive Björn Jeffery. “We have a fairly sizeable team of 12 people now, but we were profitable in December, and now have around 200,000 daily active users.”

Jeffery says that one key lesson from Toca Boca’s first 10 months as a business is the power of free. “It gets the word out for sure: whenever we give something away for free, everything else sells more,” he says.

“You have to get out of that media mindset of thinking that if you give something away for free, it’s impossible to charge for it again. We’ve found the opposite effect. When we give something away, we sell three, four or five times more of the thing that we’re selling.”

So it would seem that word of mouth and giving something away for free wins the day as usual. When it comes to apps, the options are endless so standing apart from your competitors is a challenge. This can be said for any business, and these rules can be applied to most companies. Quality work and a clever strategy are key ingredients to success. Toca Boca are proving this theory in style. Supercute, colourful style.

Take a look here for more info.

Melanie Smallwood, UK Head of Fashion Brands for eBay, said: “The latest eBay Fashion app takes shopping one step further by allowing people to search for designer, branded and vintage merchandise at the moment of inspiration whenever and wherever they are. Whether it is a unique pattern or a colour that is to die for, the eBay Image Swatch will allow people to target their search like never before, truly reflecting their individual style.”

eBay has become the UK’s largest online fashion marketplace attracting larger brands such as French Connection and House of Fraser to sell their wares directly through the site. eBay state that an item is sold every second through their site via a mobile device, with fashion topping the rankings for most searched category. eBay’s mobile apps are available in more than 190 countries in eight languages, and have been downloaded over 78 million times globally.

Pretty impressive stuff for a web concept which initially started as an outlet to trade Pez candy dispensers!

The benefits of these digital tools are astounding, but every now and again, we like to remind ourselves of what we love about design. Not just sharp lines and bold graphic shapes, but flowing illustration, messy paints, screen prints and and hand crafted ideas.

Here is a selection of some of our favourite finds this week…

1.Moebius (Jean Giraud) 2. Julia Pott 3.charleskinbote 4. Rola Chang 5.Rubens 6.unknown