Just got back from this event at the Wilmo in Clerkenwell: an eclectic selection of talks hosted by interactive experience agency Specialmoves. They included Katy Beale from Culture Hack, who helped start Coding for Kids, a group that is looking at ways to introduce programming into the education system which I think is hugely important if we want our kids to innovate in the future. Ben Richards from Jotta talked about the intersection between art and digital, showing off this epic water projection from Latitude Festival 2010, a whole year before Jordan Melo:
Ciaran Park from Specialmoves got technical on responsive web design, made the interesting point that designers are constrained in their thinking from the moment they set the page dimensions in Potatoshop. Then furniture designer Gareth Neal gave an epic talk about some fairly inept experimentation with CAD software that resulted in some serendipitously stunning designs, like this table with segments machined out to reveal the sexy curve of the legs:
His combination of computer design and hand finishing gives his machine-made work an individual lo-fi quality. The individual charm of bodging continued with Jane Unpronounceable-surname from Sugru, with her inspiring tale of the invention of the ‘next blu-tack’. Then there were some ‘young gun talks’: James from Hyper Island confirmed our views that it may be the best course ever, Mike from YCC told it how it is and our boy Jonny said a swear.
You can keep your pop-up calvados and chutney tasting bar, constructed entirely from reclaimed tamagochis, I’m going here:
Currently addicted to British Pathé’s Youtube channel and website. In the early 1900s, the company was one of the first to make short news and lifestyle video bulletins to be played in cinemas around the country – at a time when cinema attendance was at it’s highest ever. Now their free online archive provides us with a time-warp to a bygone era where everything was brightly coloured and slightly camp (and provides them with a tidy income through licensing). The 90,000 videos on the site are quite overwhelming but there are some absolute peaches in there if you care to dig.
Candid advice and stylish visuals from ex-Falmouth designer Gus Cook, which go some way towards explaining how he landed a couple of placements, then a job with the design legends jkr. Well worth a read for all you sleep-deprived undergrads, high on spray-mount, guillotining your custom business cards and preparing your firm handshakes for degree shows and New Blood. Best of luck (and see you there)!
The design agency and capital letter-avoider jkr has released a new book entitled “The Blue Lady’s New Look and Other Curiosities”, or just “Blue Lady” to its mates. I got hold of a copy a few weeks ago and since then I have been reading it on a variety of trains and deck chairs around the country.
The purpose of the book is to present a collection of posts from jkr’s blog, the Design Gazette. Almost daily, its author, Silas Amos, provides an intelligent, thought-provoking critique of the latest developments in design and branding, delivered entirely without ego, which is impressive from an agency described by a leading creative industry commentator as “pretty shit hot”. To describe the Blue Lady as an anthology is to sell it short though. In my opinion, the book is much more than a collection of disparate essays. The pieces have been lovingly organised into a number of themed sections building to a climactic final chapter that articulately captures the current state of design and culture.
Like an episode of Scrubs, each of the essays introduces an important question that often has no clear-cut answer. Should you continuously refresh your brand’s image or stick with what’s familiar? Is it a good idea to associate the brand with a particular celebrity? Should packaging be different for items bought online rather than in-store? For each of these issues, the Blue Lady presents a spectrum of recent cases that have been successful and some that haven’t. This makes the book a great source of inspiration and guidance for both students and design professionals. It’s a shame there isn’t an index to help search through different brands or key concepts.
One of the Blue Lady’s closing points is that design today is highly referential, so it is fitting that Amos regularly draws from an encyclopaedic knowledge of past designs, literature and the arts. At times when reading the book, I felt like a young apprentice, smiling and nodding as my mentor spoke in a language of past icons and learned cultural references, then scurrying off to Wikipedia to work out what he was on about. Don’t get me wrong, the Blue Lady reads well and is free from impenetrable jargon, but it treats the reader as a peer, expecting them to share a certain level of cultural understanding. By the end of the book you’ll be well equipped to contribute to the discussion (if you weren’t already).
So yeah, get a copy. It will inform you about the many factors that are shaping today’s cultural context and make you think about where things might go in the future. Which is important because you’ll be the one doing the shaping. It’s only £7.19 on Amazon right now and, in case you were wondering, it smells great.
There was a bit of abuzz last month about the discovery of over 100,000 photos taken by a previously unknown amateur named Vivian Maier. The vibrant photos of life on the streets of Chicago and New York were discovered in an auction when her storage locker was reclaimed due to missed payments. Critics are saying that she could give renowned street photographers such as Robert Frank and Walker Evans a run for their money. A guy called John Maloof has been painstakingly scanning and cataloguing the work (he’s the guy with the dollar signs in his eyes in this lengthy video). He puts more up on his blog every few days, I’d recommend having a look.
We’ve recently been featuring a lot of stunning computer generated videos and showreels, so it’s nice to see that Russel Crowe’s creaking crotch sounds are still generated by a muscular man massaging a pile of leather. Look out for the skillfully repurposed boxing gloves and burger flipper.
Just spotted these crazy robots on the Core77 design blog. They have been built in Kandahar, Afghanistan by the US soldier Rupert Valero out of local junk. His creations speak the international language of awesome, which is great for bonding with the local kids. There’s an interview with him here and you can even buy some of his stuff on Etsy.
The London Art Fair features a boat-load of modern British and contemporary art and is on til Sunday at the Business Design Centre in Islington. I went along earlier today and was swamped by the amount and diversity of the artwork being displayed by galleries from around the world. One of the exhibits featured work from the Catlin Guide (above), which is an annual, independently-curated book of the 40 most promising art graduates from all over the UK (it’s very nicely presented and smells great in case you were wondering). According to Justin Hammond, the editor of the guide, it is really tough for new artists to get exposure or gallery space, particularly if they aren’t based in London. He added that many graduates leave university ill-equipped for challenges such as pricing and promoting their work. A familiar story for many of you design grads!
One of my favourite exhibits from the whole show was the rapidly ripening Bananaboat (below), by Jacob Dahlstrup Jensen, graduate of Glasgow School of Art, which was the centre-piece of the Catlin Guide collection. I’ve put a few of my other favourite works from the fair up here. Get down to Islington and see for yourself if you get the chance – some very famous artists featured (such as Magritte, Mattisse, Paolozzi, Hirst), and the people-watching is tremendous!
This set of images was created by Aled Lewis, a gifted designer, illustrator and Threadless regular. He often works with pop culture imagery and his t-shirt designs have that “I wish I came up with that” quality: simple, witty images that work beautifully with the colour of the material.
Everyone’s talking about China. It is fascinating to see how their culture is evolving. The video above is about the growing skate culture in Shanghai. There’s some nice skate fooootage and a decent soundtrack, but it really gets interesting when you find out about the skaters’ struggle to overcome pressures from home and traditional values so that they can express themselves and pursue their passion.
The second film is the one that they show at Tate Modern to accompany Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds (highly recommended – there til May). The decaying, impoverished town and traditional methods used to mould and paint the porcelain seeds show a very different side to China compared with the futuristic cityscape and rebellion of the skaters. Also, the recent demolition of Weiwei’s studio shows that things aren’t all free and easy in Shanghai.
Mike Diver and Pedro Aguilar from DMB have painstakingly recreated some of Caravaggio’s most famous paintings in a set of rich, lustrous photos for the Italian Moda Magazine. They seem to have hired a motley bunch of roadies and bike couriers to add extra menace to the pictures.
Thousands of logos animated into an award winning short film with stunning visuals and snappy screenplay. Directed by talented Frenchmen H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy and Ludovic Houplain. Watch out for Big Boy’s wandering hands…
The SSZ love affair with JR continues (challenged only by the magic touch of Blu). This one’s a music video for German singer Patrice singing Nina Simone’s “Ain’t got no (I got life)”.
