This post comes from the heart. If you are at all interested in print, independent magazines or free bloody speech then you need to subscribe to this service; it has, quite frankly, changed my life.*

The concept of Stack is to promote independent press by sending subscribers one (or quite often several) independent rags a month. This can range from Eye (RRP £17!) to Little White Lies, Bad Idea, VNA, Anorak, the list is endless. If you’ve heard of these then you’ll know what a good deal this is, if you haven’t then you, child, are the most in need of it.

Strangely though, for me at least, it’s the other ‘free’ magazines you get with the featured title that make it all worthwhile. One example is Manzine, an outspoken reaction to mens magazines written by some of their editors. Reading-on-the-bus-kudos aside, it has helped to reinforce my confidence in the power of a print mag, however home-made - No-one else will own my copy of Manzine, I’ve spilt coffee on it and dog-eared the corners, it’s truly been a journey. I still pick it up months later and it’s as ball-splittingly hilarious as it was the day I got it.

I can’t recommend Stack enough, it’s a bundle of joy landing on your doormat every month, a constant in a world of wars, politics, doom, gloom and digital media. Plus they delivered issue one of our magazine last month, getting them a gold star in my book.

Jonny

*well maybe not changed my life but it’s definitely been the best £40 I’ve spent this year

Living in or around Nottingham? Love Screenprinting? Then you’re gonna love cheesy peas Screen fiends, a screenprinting event being held by Nottingham Trent Design students. Thing is (and sorry guys for being so crap) it’s in 2 days!

Anyway, find a crappy old tee, bring it along and get a one-off design that will rival any of the wang* that the Shoreditch kids are rocking currently. Find out all the deets here.

*wang = mildly derogatory term (not as rude as wank).

Diesel have a way with catchy, controversial taglines.  Global Warming Ready back in 2007 sticks in the mind.  This latest campaign: Be Stupid by London agency Anomaly overlays the familiar bold text comments on photos of beautiful people engaged in inadvisable situations.  The photos are less glossy and airbrushed than in the past, with a bit of a Vice magazine or Lastnightsparty (website seems to be down at the mo) hipster vibe.  The images are like a psychological Rorschach test (those inkblots that look like angry clowns killing puppies), they provoke an emotional response to each situation: are you a free-living funmeister or a disapproving consequence-driven square…?

**Warning product design bias!!**

The open-ended student project brief can lead to incredible innovations.  The unconstrained mind can come up with quirky ideas like the screw-in coffin or the moneypad, but getting there can be the most stressful and time consuming process.  Also, each project you take on is an investment in your own future, your portfolio has to stand out if you want to get your paws on an ever-more-elusive job, so you can’t mess it up!  This is why many students use competitions as a source for ideas.  Clued-up lecturers often use the briefs set by our mates at D&AD as part of their teaching.  Mine did not, but a friend recommended it, and it made a really fresh, relevant, well-rounded final year project: you have to set some of your own boundaries, read up on the area, establish your target market and so on, and you can make it as technical as you like.  It beats those tired ”pill dispenser for the elderly” briefs, and if you are a finalist then that looks great on the CV.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but for those who are not aware of this excellent source of creative briefs and inspiration (as well as prestige and prizes for the winners), here are some interesting links:

• Contest Watchers (those tie-wearing shapes above) is a blog that aggregates professional and student design, visual arts and music competitions from around the world, keeps an eye on entry deadlines, and bigs up the winners to a growing audience (via psfk)
• The Design Council’s events and competitions directory is quite good, despite the baffling and hideous website.
• Dexigner is an awesome design industry news resource, and also has a feed of competitions with deadline info.
• Core77 is another design resource, good for news as well as job hunting and portfolio hosting.  They often run 1-hour design challenges which are a great way to show off your skills to the design community in a short time period.

There’s a huge product design bias in these links, if you have a moment, please comment with other resources from your field.

Good luck in those competitions!

The URL for this site is ‘http://jblyth.com/blog.html‘, the implication of course being that it leads to a blog. It sort of is, but pared down to one element - piccies. Piccies of boobs and bikes, design and illustration, arty/wanky photos and a few more boobs (the clue was in the title). It’s refreshing though to not have to wade through a pile of some guy yapping - no, the irony is not lost on me - to get to the eye-candy (by which of course I mean nice photos, not boobs…)

It is the work of Justin Blythe (Designer, Art Director etc of some renown as well as owner of the domain, duh.) He doesn’t link to it though, so shhh, mums the word (that means keep it a secret, yanks). Or don’t, whatever.

Our roundup of the ShellsuitZombie experience at New Blood is finally here. Offering a mixture of chat, live briefs, loud music, ‘itsa-bitsa’ style artwork creation and general stick-it-anywhere-we-aren’t-precious tomfoolery (oh-err) we managed to attract graduates and industry in their hundreds to our messy corner of the Kensington Olympia (helped by D&AD generously allowing us free air-time on the tannoy - apologies to anyone we disturbed). We collected cards, friends and email addresses in scenes akin to Bruce Bogtrotter and Augustus Gloop at a chocolate convention, met loads of you, got your opinions on us and the industry and had a hell of a lot of fun at the same time. There are some photos here, to see them all visit our Flickr and Facebook pages.

ShellsuitZombie Face-Offs

We held two official SSZ Faceoffs, the first was a two-way between Falmouth University and Staffs University advertising courses. In an atmosphere more ‘intense’ than a music festival (in tents…doesn’t matter) during which we had to hold back both teams from physical blows, the brief was set - come up with a 30 second advert for Lucozade. While the relative merits of the adverts are still being discussed by creative directors worldwide, on the day Staffs were declared victorious by public vote for their ‘joe bloggs beats Usain Bolt’ concept.

The second face-off was a four-way between Duncan of Jordanstone, Lincoln, DMU and the eventual Victors Nottingham Trent, all of whom were given half an hour to rebrand D&AD. For the judging not only did we have Matt Dent, recent (and youngest ever) black pencil winner for his coinage redesign, but a curiously phallic clap-ometer which induced giggles (from us at least).

The ShellsuitZombie Picnic

Our biggest event consisted of a free-for-all overnight brief to devise a campaign for a household cleaner - utilising any form of media necessary. As you can see we had nearly a hundred people taking part in 25 submissions - of which two teams were chosen for placements at BCL - a fantastic integrated agency responsible for Dove Natural Beauty and the current Lucozade Energy campaign. Reports on how they got on will follow. Thank you to everyone that did some work for this, the standard was very high.

Pecha Kucha

To top it all off, on wednesday they let us do a Pecha-Kucha, God knows why. Here is one of our slides, all of which were created in Microsoft Paint. Again, to see the rest have a look on our Flickr page. If anyone has pics of us doing it please let us know, we have none.

So Basically

We had an awesome time, we hope you enjoyed it too. Anyone who posted us your card, email address etc and hasn’t heard anything back, bear with us, you’ll be the first to know when we announce future events, and we will feature as many of you as we can over the next couple of months.

Thanks to:

Morph are a great digital agency from Shoreditch, London, who kindly sponsored the stand and print - Coming soon, a filmed interview and article with Anthony. Eyes Peeled.

Brave - Representing BCL who offered support and time, delivering a brilliant brief and giving opportunities to nearly a hundred grads through our stand at the event.

Us here at ShellsuitZombie have been so busy running around organising the crap out of stuff that the blog has had a quiet patch of late. As a result this luverly magazine has been sitting in the inbox for way too long. Bonafide is a magazine about music, art and design and fashion and is produced (very much like ours) outside office hours as a labour of love. Truly bruvvas from anuvva muvva.

Please please check out their stuff here (where you can buy back issues and catch up on some ace underground music and goss) and as for us, don’t worry, just get your collective asses to New Blood (see right) - it’s all kicking orff.

Thank God. Just slap bang in the middle of that boring gap between Easter and Christmas when there’s nothng to celebrate, the 2009 WBMC comes to save us from sinking into pits of melancholy. Why how can you be sad when you can be privy to the judging for the ‘Fu Manchu’ or ‘Freestyle Moustache’ categories.

And what a year! After Germany’s domination since the inception of the world tour, ‘Beard Team USA’ gave them a WW2-style thrashing, winning 12 of the 20 Gold medal spots so coveted by all beard-lovers/wearers the globe over.

Pictured - from left to right: The winners of the partial beard and full beard freestyle categories, shortly before indulging in the women and spoils so closely linked to the WBMC