Susan Hoffman, W+K Portland’s ECD extraordinaire and other such useless superlatives, paid us a visit a couple of days ago.

She’s currently on her sabbatical travelling across India, so it was especially nice of her to stop by and tell us about Portland’s start-up days, tough clients (yes, portland have them too) and her new blog she’s all excited about! Well worth a visit, given her fantastic pictures, like this one she took of all of us here.

As you can probably tell, she’s a lot of fun.

2012 an incredibly busy year here in W+K Delhi, so much so that we struggled to even squeeze in our customary end of year party. But that didn’t stop us from throwing a pretty extravagant party last week in true Mad Men style. Wait, did someone say Mad Men?

Suits, ties and great dresses marked our ‘Mad Men: The Party’, giving the evening a proper sense of occasion. Also marking the occasion were presentations by all departments to take stock of everything that took place in 2012. Which, as it turned out, everyone seemed quite into.

During the course of the presentations, we went through the work that defined our year along with a lot of promising work that’s in the pipeline. Highlights of the year included our work for Forest Essentials,

Xylys

Dubai based Landmarkshops.com for whom we created everything from identity to tone of voice as well as a campaign that should be out in the coming weeks.

Plus our idents for cleartrip which got considerable airtime and continue to get a fair bit of attention.

As for the party itself, this picture should help you form your own conclusions.

Office crew meets film crew on a chilly Sunday morning in Gurgaon. Ah, the life.

The office slowly buzzed back to life last week and as we predicted earlier, not only did the world not end but a lot of people did indeed turn up for the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale. Some of us from the office were there as well, not least Sunil, who as a trustee of the biennale has been working behind the scenes for the good part of two years to make the biennale happen.

But this wasn’t the only inauguratory gesture of the event.

That’s right. Mathangi Maya Arulpragasam aka M.I.A was there to kick off proceedings as well with what we hear was a pretty spectacular performance on the opening night.

From then on, it was quite obvious that all everyone was talking about was the biennale, with art everywhere you looked.

Apart from the work of street artists, present were the pick of the artists from both India and abroad, exhibiting their work in specially restored spaces, which inevitably gave way to some site-specific installations.

Such as this clever piece by L N Tallur,

this beauty from Ernesto Nesto

and this compelling takeover by Atul Dodiya at Aspinwall House.

Subodh Gupta took on the issue of migration in this beautiful yet slightly unsettling installation titled, er, Untitled.

While Robert Montgomery’s typically poignant writings found a suitable canvas in the more picturesque side of Aspinwall House.

If you’re not already planning a visit, it’s worth reconsidering. It’s a beautiful city with some fantastic food, inspiring art and as this picture illustrates, incredible style.

The Kochi Biennale is on till 13 March 2012. More information on artists, venues and location here

After naming W+K their Global Network of the Year, the good folks over at Ad Week also decided to delve deep into what makes us tick. Read what they had to say here

It’s nice to be loved.

Three nights back-to-back in three cities. Heineken Green Room went on the road again last weekend with Messrs. Tiger & Woods and as these pictures might suggest it was plenty of fun.

We’re still trying to shake off this tune.

The mystery men of disco Tiger & Woods are coming to the second edition of the Heineken Green Room (more on it here) After going through a fair few artists, we invited them because no one seemed to know who they are, what they did or even what they looked like! (Google them)

Unsurprisingly, Tiger & Woods are notoriously secretive about their identity. They don’t have a wikipedia page and give very few interviews. So when the chappies at Dazed & Confused managed to get one with them, even they couldn’t help but get all excited about it.

All of which we thought lent itself quite nicely to the question, ‘Is anonymity the new stardom?’ for the Heineken Green Room Sessions, due to take place on the afternoon before the events. And as they clearly demonstrate in the epic Gin Nation (see below), if the music is good, it really shouldn’t matter.

Bring. it. on.

If you were on IndiGo airlines about a month ago, you probably witnessed the world’s first-ever food tasting in the sky. Over 1000 passengers were pleasantly surprised with their own bite-sized samplers to taste and vote their favourite. The Veg Junglee Sandwich and Curried Chicken Sub were the clear crowd favourites and now feature proudly on the IndiGo menu.

For all of those who couldn’t be there, here’s the video straight from the flight deck.

You may be familiar with the work we did for Indian Air Force (as seen here) to mark its 80 year anniversary.

And since the season of caring and sharing is upon us, we’re giving away these wallpaper-worthy outdoors as, well, wallpapers.

All you have to do is go to this little page, choose from any of the five executions and voila, you can be the proud owner of a dashing, new Indian Air Force wallpaper.

Do you copy?

The first W+K EXP show from our new office opens tomorrow with the office itself a subject of the show. Outside In is a comment on a new globalized India and what it means, with W+K’s old and new offices as fitting examples. The show examines the two contrasting spaces – through some stunning pictures of our earlier office exhibited in thought-out spaces of our shiny, some would say more grown-up office – as a case in point to Robert’s argument.

We recommend you drop by to have a look for yourself. We’ve seen some of the work and it all looks promising.

Robert E. D’Souza is an artist, designer and academic at Winchester School of Art in the UK. He has an international ‘art + research’ practice that overlaps areas of visual art, cultural study and social science in relation to India.