At the 2007 GDC Sony Keynote, Phil Harrison yapped about “the 3.0 phenomenon” that the PS3 is going to bring into the gaming and online landscapes.  He supported this argument by demoing LittleBigPlanet, and the crowd went wild.  Now, I’m no media expert so I have no idea whether or not LittleBigPlanet fulfilled Sony’s often overly ambitious prophecies.  This whole 3.0 thing could be made up marketing jargon for all I know.  But I do know this- LBP brought a fresh visual aesthetic to the world of design.  The craftsy texture look can go wrong in so many ways.  But backed by the concept of small worlds and planets, MM was able to make the most stylish digital solar system diorama ever made.  The calm emptiness of outer space,  and the bright, loud “handmade” system of planets sing beautiful and quirky songs together.

So ever since LBP’s debut, I’ve been anticipating a LBP copycat design explosion- websites, T-shirts, games, printed material, the whole enchilada.  I’ve been keeping an eye out for things like white with hot pink, burlap, cardboard, and knitted textures, iconography, sticker treatments, clay objects, and so forth.  So far, I haven’t seen anything that really has that signature LBP feel.  This is both bad and good; on one hand, I’m glad no one’s trying to rip off of that style, but then again, this might indicate that LBP didn’t make much of a mainstream design splash.

But today, I finally found something that definitely looked LBPy to me: a commercial for British Gas.  It’s part LBP, part Mario Galaxy, and part Coraline.  It makes sense that British Gas would want to send a message distinguishing themselves as a more intimate entity.