That guy is Noel. He was at VS. We think he enjoyed it.
On Tuesday the 16th of February, a day that will live in infamy, We, ShellsuitZombie, hosted a silly evening. Braving wind rain and puddles, a krunkload of people came along to enjoy what we had promised would be a night of competition, intrigue, industry and graduates. And against all odds, we think we just about pulled it off…
With creatives from agencies like AMVBBDO, Fallon, W+K, Profero, BCL etc, designers from beautiful boutique agencies like A+B, The Plant, Morph, Magpie and DRY as well as some lush prizes on offer, a couple of cracking bands, beats by DJ and Designer David Rudnick and a lovely bunch o’ students and grads, that made for a fun-ass time. (and the longest sentence in the world. care.)
The Point
We believe that your first contact with industry shouldn’t be in the reception of a design agency, nervously clutching your portfolio. Job interviews are so forced and you have such a short time to get your personality across, yet personality is a vital part of teamwork and the creative process. Fortunately, the majority of design professionals are joke-loving booze-hounds and somehow they seem a lot less daunting with a beer in their paw. Our intention was to create a social atmosphere where grads and pros meet not as potential colleagues, but as co-humans; connecting through humorous anecdotes, not relevant work experience; flipping beermats, not pages of the (immaculately formatted) CV.
The Competition
We really wanted to avoid a school disco situation with grads on one side and pros on the other, nervously eyeing each other, dreading that first dance. So we came up with a strategy to skip the small talk and escalate to full-on flirting. The theme of the night was VS, and so a competitive spirit was encouraged throughout the night. Guests were instructed to pick mini-duels with each other in whatever form they deemed appropriate. These nano-challenges could be anything from drawing the best willy, to a dance-off, to the best magic trick. The winners of the most impressive micro-tasks won some awesome geek-out prizes kindly donated by our friends - including mugs by A+B Studio, t-shirts and posters from Magpie Studio and the limited edition Firetrap gnome from DRY (thank you all for donating these prizes). Most importantly everyone got involved, the air was thick with challenges, and these led to real dialogues between new acquaintances.
Meanwhile we had music from the awesome Keston Cobblers Club and the smooth sounds of Harrison Hope. Later on designer and DJ Dave Rudnick laid down his eclectic beats (So Solid anyone?) and the boozy chat continued.
The Future
More of the same innit? We love organising events like this and will keep on doing more. If you have suggestions for themes or locations, definitely get in touch. Check out our flickr and Facebook pages for more pics and make sure you come along to the next one!
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).
We like Beardyman here at SSZ Towers, in fact I once drunkenly asked for his autograph literally right when he was having an argument with his girlfriend (He remained polite - A gentleman first, beatboxer second) but frankly the sight of six* of his disembodied heads whining and spinning due to some star-trek science shit made me want to cry. Nevertheless big props to the aforementioned science, this video is really clever.
The second prize haul for Tuesday’s NOW SOLD OUT VS event is a couple of brilliant limited edition prints from Student Designer, ShellsuitZombie contributor and irritatingly talented Midlander [Stoke, bleugh] Andy Cooke. I warn you, I will personally be fighting tooth and nail for one of these bad boys, so bring your A game dickheads (nothing personal). If you want to jump the gun and snaffle one up right now, go to his shop here.
Still more to come you beautiful people (I’m feeling a bit bad about saying the dickheads thing now)
Just a few of the prizes and giveaways available on Tuesday courtesy of the guys at Magpie Studio and A+B Studio. Benji, David and your respective crews, we salute you!
50 students and graduates. 50 professionals. Two bands. Two DJs. Some beers. And unfortunately we will be there too.
Come one come all to witness a gladitorial battle - observe a series of physically and mentally gruelling tasks designed specifically to test us all. Grip your beer white-knuckled as your agility and nerves are put to the test. Or just help us unite the current and future leaders of the design and advertising industries at utilising a mixture of beer, chat and music.
Some people have asked so we thought we’d give you a bit of an update on who is coming along to VS (which is now in a week!). Here are a few of the rival industry crews who should be rocking up for a pint.
That plus students and graduates from all over London and the UK. Bring your uni down and REPREZENT.
We also have some lush giveaways and prizes (objects, posters, buttons and other ephemera) from Dry, Magpie Studio, A+B and ourselves.
MUSIC
Musical entertainment will be provided by two bands who have been picking up lots of radio airtime and have both recently released debut singles -
And second up it’s Harrison Hope, a North London outfit known for
melodic soulful rock.
As well as these two awesome live acts we also have a mega treat in the form of ‘The Liberal Democrats’ - a duo of DJ’s who have recently worked with Ali Love and Erol Alkan (including designing this Tee) and are currently working the London circuit. David Rudnick was responsible for the Annie Mac mini mix last week - believe us these boys will blow your socks off.
Download a free 80 minute taste of David Rudnick right Here courtesy of us.
If this sounds like your cup of tea, click on the poster up top to go straight to our shop, where you can pay the paltry price of £2.50 for your ticket (It will be £3 on the door, that’s if there’s even space!). What’s more, with the cost you will recieve a free badge and a poster on the day so you NEVER FORGET US.
7pm, Tuesday 16th of Feb, The Old Blue Last, Shoreditch. Drop it like it’s hot motherfucker.
The Designers Society in Plymouth is a project organised by the students who (among other things) have invited design luminaries to talk at their university. They have bagged some huge names including Harry Pearce, a partner at Pentagram, who is speaking this Tuesday 19th of January at a dirt cheap £5 a head.
In addition their inaugural exhibition based on a brief based on the theme of Plymouth kicks off on the 20th. If you’re local to Plymouth go along, if not just look at what a determined and driven bunch of students can do. Let’s hope this kind of thing carries on and other design courses take up the mantle.
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.
From right, Michael C Place, Joe Shouldice, Ollie Johns, Paula Scher, Andy Altmann, Gary Fernandez
Ollie Johns
Paula Scher
Anthony Dickens
These delightful little creatures (just a few of 30) have been decorated by various famous designers and are being auctioned off on the 14th of this month at Glug - the big old monthly design knees-up in the east end. All proceeds go to DAHRA - Designers Against Human Rights Abuse, so the cause is very worthy, but to be honest I would (and probably will) throw money at it just because they’re so darn cool (shotgun the Ollie Johns one). Check out more on the project on the DAHRA site and buy Glug tickets here.
Oi. Yeah you. Did you know that for the price of your birthday suit £6 you could get:
1. A beautiful double sided B2 poster (see more pics here)
2. A useful tube for putting things in
3. a couple of hand-printed flyers for good measure
4. a few jealous mates
All you need do is one of two things. Either email stuff@shellsuitzombie.co.uk or get on your twitter account and send this message: ‘RT @shellsuitzombie I’M GETTING A FREE SPIN POSTER BY RETWEETING THIS‘ along with your email address. We will then send you an email asking for £2 for P+P via paypal and within a week the good stuff’s yours.
Forget that. Just get to our shop here and pay up.
Just to put it in perspective, Spin (who designed the gold side) usually sell their posters for up to £20 + P and P. We aren’t selling ours, we’re giving them away. AND THEY’RE PRINTED IN GOLD!
£2 £6. That’s less more than a big mac, but less than the meal if you have a mcflurry. And you can’t hang a big mac (or a mcflurry) on your wall [very effectively].
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.
…of Joy Division, but when I stumbled across this in Manchester city centre I couldn’t help but be impressed. It brought a smile to my face on a rainy day. Artist unknown.
You may have seen symbols like this one above littering the internet lately. Well, this is the symbol for an RSS feed. Some of you will know already how RSS works, many probably do not. (This recent study shows that 50% of blog readers have never heard of it and another 39% know of RSS but don’t use it.) But before you snort and say ‘only for geeks’ just hold on. RSS is bloody great.
In Layman’s terms, an RSS feed allows you to read all the new posts on your chosen blogs from your homepage, without having to visit each one. An RSS reader like Google Reader (which is far and away the most popular) will allow you to add hundreds of sites to your feed and click on each one in turn to snaffle up the content.
It is totally unobtrusive (no annoying spam etc) but saves you the hassle of having to remember to visit every website you like every day. All you need to use Google Reader is a google account (which can be set up just using an email address).
If you would like a more detailed explanation have a read of this. If you would like to add ShellsuitZombie to your RSS feed click here.
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)
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.
