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).
Nick had one of those ideas that everyone wishes they had had themselves - and boy has he run with it. Some elegant sculpture here that makes me - not inherently an ‘OMG-I-JUST-GOTTA-BUY-THIS-LAMP’ kind of person - want to buy ten of them, have them all face into a white wall (that I currently don’t own) and pretend my room is like the one in Roald Dahl’s ‘The Twits’ (those pesky monkeys!).
The only thing more impressive is the list of blogs he’s been featured on, a list that doesn’t include us. So I apologise if everyone’s seen this stuff a million times on fffffffound and other ‘user-curated-image-bookmarking-sites‘ [said in a robot voice] but sod it, it’s pretty and we like.
Cracking mixed media portraits using old floppys from Nick Gentry. His official blurb is that his focus has been to explore how technological advancement is affecting society. Each floppy disk used in the paintings has a history and story of its own. It represents the increasing pace of the modern life cycle, where objects are created, used and disposed of quicker than ever. To challenge this notion, as these personal artefacts of life are cast aside, the obsolete are now given new life and a renewed purpose by using them as a medium for art. 
Nanami Cowdroy is an Australian artist, with Japanese and European roots. She has created these beautifully detailed and expressive drawings in mixed media, and is now exhibiting around the world. For me, the inky style adds depth and movement to her subjects, and many of her creations provide a fresh take on traditional Japanese imagery.
**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:
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!
Tree:Mix is a platform for designers and illustrators to show of their creative skills to the world through a variety of collaborative projects. We posted a while back about ‘Rip Rip, the project where people illustrate halves of a magazine page‘. Well this idea - started by recent design grad James Robert Fox - pushes that even further.
In ‘Digital:Mix’ one person does an illustration in either Photoshop or Illustrator and submits the artwork file to the website. This artwork can then be downloaded by anyone to embellish/improve with the only rule being a link to the existing piece. There is also ‘Scanner:Mix’ which caters for the hand-drawn technophobic illustration style by not allowing any computer trickery.
Both options are free for anyone to have a go at and the idea is brilliantly simple - in fact hopefully SSZ will have a pop at one over the christmas hols (if we can see over our collective bellies post-turkey that is). Then anyone can rate each mix and view them all in the provided gallery, or use the forum to chat to the artists.
Honestly, this site has everything a christmas-holiday thumb-twiddling aunt-avoiding wine-infused image-maker could ever need. Get yourself there, download the files and have a go. Your new Xbox can wait.
Wear It With Pride has been going for a little while now (by a while I mean 7 bloody years) but Darren recently asked us to let everyone know that there’s a new range of work on sale to celebrate WIWP’s site relaunch. Some of you may baulk at the prices but for original work by the likes of Build, Non Format, Wilfred Wood, Pure Evil (above) and Rankin it ain’t that bad, perfect christmas prezzies even (Mum, if you’re reading this I’d like the FONS SHEIDON one).
Just be sure to get there fast, honest to god they’re going like hot cakes.
Luke is a fine artist from Loughborough with a focus on ceramics - These pieces are visually arresting in the flesh/bone as well as being funny. He also dabbles in other mediums, check out all his work on his website and flickr page.
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.
The Girls are re-emerging British artists Andrea Blood (1975, UK) and Zoe Sinclair (1976, UK), whose collaboration began in 1996 at Central Saint Martins. The duo are now working together on a project set for the new year, which will feature much of that mystery, nostalgia, make-believe and dream like character the rest of their work accomplishes so well. We’ll post more on this soon!
Featured project: The Embodied Soul Passes Through Girlhood to Death
Some say he rides a camel and he once patented the inflatable telly. Others that he only has one arm but two hands on the end of it that are forever twiddling thumbs. All we know is that his name is Gerard and his website looks lovely.
I always find it strange when people don’t put any information on their site, especially when their work is so good. Regardless, this is worth a look.
This. Is. Awesome.
Rooted is a show that awards not only design/artistic/photographic/illustrative talent but also the ability to show it off by allowing exhibitors to display work anywhere, anyhow (even going as far as being part of it themselves) - the only rule being not to deface others’ work.
Having seen Skeletor at New Blood back in July, when one of us was invited to judge at the Rooted exhibition last month and he was chilling out on centre court, the decision had to go in his favour.
He (for it is a he) was created by five Kingston grads, Laura, Jamie, Ashley, Elliott and Lewis.
‘There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.’ - Raoul Duke, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
With all this fancy-pants type design, art-direction and film being flaunted, wouldn’t you just love to see something old-school pretty? Well we just bloody found it for you didn’t we. Akbar Ali just graduated from Westminster in illustration and these are his watercolours. Enjoy.
OK so recently we held a couple of events. If you were at one of them, go tag yourself on our facebook page. Or just go and stalk if you weren’t. (If this is you, hi Noel)
then click here
I’m confident that being young, fresh, beautiful people, you will have all heard of Spotify. We’ve started a collaborative playlist for you all to add to with tunes you love. Click here to add the playlist to your Spotify then add one song that you love. Try and make it something we might not have heard before. Tune.
ShellsuitZombie is supported by D&AD. Click here to see what they do.
