Super Clipboard

A One Day Brief. Paper has two sides but we often only use one. Printers are able to print on both sides so let's help ourselves write on both too...

We took apart an innocent old printer, and used its insides to make our own super clipboard that, using a handle, we can turn over.

The Tomato

A well sculpted to-bum-to grown by my mum, it's a shame it appears to have needed stitches...

Not much to say here apart from what a beautiful sky I came across in London on a chillly October evening.

Lots of letters, lots of me

My New Years resolution is to write a letter once a week to a different person. 
Turns out letter writing is quite a difficult skill, i'm trying to master it. But to begin my quest, I've designed my own letter paper, these are my first attempts...

Mityana Project

The Mityana diocese project is a charity organisation based in my home village of St Mary Bourne in Hampshire. It is a church led charity that started from the link made between our local Whitchurch Deanery and Mityana Diocese in Uganda. I visited the area in 2006 with a local youth group. We visited many schools and orphanages, teaching, building and experiencing the culture. Since then, many income generating projects have developed from money raised and ideas put forward. For example through a Piggery project, we gave several schools pigs to raise and breed to provide meat for the school. One school has been able to give away nineteen piglets this year which is a huge achievement.

I have done this piece of design which will be used on informative leaflets to show the villages and schools in the UK that are linked with one in Mityana, and the kinds of projects, and help we are doing.

A Kiss

My latest project completed with Chantal Marson and Milly Bruce.

Using one girl and nine boys, one at a time, we lay the couples next to each other in complete anomnity. They were not to communicate in any way apart from 'feeling and smelling' the other person next to them. 

As we have discovered, they are swopping pheromones, a hormone we excrete and absorb to determine compatibility in mating. Kissing is the best way to do this but not necessary. We are showing an open kiss without out actually kissing between nine couples.

chicago neighbourhoods

Here are some beautiful logos by chicagoan Steve Shanabruch. Their reflection on the architecture and culture they're representing is spot on. They have a really three dimensional feel to them and you expect them to sit comfortably in any spot around their neighbourhood. There is also something about these images as a whole that reminds me of gang culture, a welcome progression from the 1979 film The Warriors. They are lovely to look at.

Indefinable space

I have tried to photograph an indefinable space, a size you can't guess. Is it a huge warehouse or a small cupboard?

Counters

How do you describe the typographic term 'counter'? It is the encapsulated space within letters like the circle of an 'o' or the semi-circle within an 'e'. These are moulds made of alginate that highlight the space our mouths create when we speak. Each shape represents a different syllabul. 

 

those magnificent men in their flying machines

Using videogame controllers, an Android phone and custom-built wings, a Dutch engineer named Jarno Smeets has achieved birdlike flight. Smeets flew like an albatross, the bird that inspired his winged-man invention, on March 18 at a park in The Hague.

Smeets got the idea from sketches of a futuristic flying bicycle drawn by his grandfather, who spent much of his life designing the contraption but never actually built it.

When Smeets began studying engineering at Coventry University in England, he realized the physics of a flying bicycle just didn’t pan out. Instead, he drew inspiration from Leonardo da Vinci’s wing drawings to build his flying machine. Along with neuromechanics expert Bert Otten, Smeets brought his design into reality

The design is based on mechanics used in robotic prosthetics. The idea is to give his muscles extra strength so they can carry his body weight during the flight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GYW5G2kbrKk

London wanderer

I accompanied my friend Chantal to visit all the Olympic sites in North London. Whilst she took some magnificent shots using a Maya Camera, I snapped the surrounding areas with my digital. It was a bitterly cold but beautiful day.


Westfields at Shepard's Bush

Hackney Wick

The Saatchi Gallery-Gesamtkunstwerk

I went to the Saatchi Gallery's latest exhibition the other day of artwork from New Germany. I always enjoy the Saatchi Gallery because although the art can be very ambiguous and strange, I find it very relatable in some way, whether it is in the way the artist intended I don't know but all the same, I come away feeling fulfilled. Here are two works that I enjoyed the most.

Jeppe Hein made a mirror that shakes when the viewer approaches it, prompting us to re-access our relationship to it. It shows you the world you are experiencing but not what you are actually doing, you aren't wobbling and shaking. All sense of reality is obscured. 

Brothers Gert and Uwe Tobias have created these woodcuts on paper based on many elements from their Transylvanian national costume. This I only found read after I had been totally captured by the beautiful balance of weight and construction of these figures. They were mechanical yet full of character, mischief and charm.

nostalgia

I took a trip back to my childhood for a personal project and this was one of my more successful experiments-rephotographing as accurately as I could photographs from when I was five years old.  I think the comparisons are especially spooky because not much in my home has changed. 

Durham Lumiere festival 2011

Sadly I didn't manage to actually see witness the Lumiere Festival in Durham, i was one weekend too lat.e However after been told of the beautiful things that had gone on by my brother, I checked it out on the internet. Incredible illustration by projection artist Ross Ashton covered Durham Cathedral. It was imagery drawn from the Lindesfarne Gospels and inside the cathedral itself.

But it wasn't just the Cathedral that was illuminated, all over Durham there were light instillations beaming far and wide through the darkness of the small city by many different artists.

Walter Hood lit up the entire forest that runs alongside the River Wear.
Verity Quinne and bethan Maddocks created banners inspired by Durhams mining industry illuminating Durhams history in neon light.

In contrast there are installations that illuminate the present. I love this idea of a group from Belgium to visualise the communication and information passed across Durham when electromagnetic waves are transmitted. Through infrared rays, Binary Waves capture the information and turn it into a light, sound and colour displayed on fourty panels in a wave determined by the mirco-events.

These are just a few of 35 light installations displayed all around Durham.
Check out their website to see them all. I'm just so impressed by the range of ideas and innovative visuals that lit up the skies. I'm certainly not missing that next year.

http://www.lumieredurham.co.uk/programme/installations/les-voyageurs-(the-travellers)/

more synesthesia-i can't get enough

I've already blogged a bit on synesthesia but to continue this interest, here is a video my friend steffan linked to me, a beautiful and fantastically imaginative way of trying to reproduce/explain/show synesthesia-almost a contradictory task to do using all our senses. I would love to know what a person with severe synesthesia thinks of it, could they totally relate to it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHnnGHgeyC0

Alvin Diec

I have never been much of a poster designer myself, I can't say it comes very naturally to me, however after completing my first poster design brief, my avoidance of poster design went out the window. Poster analysis is great. It's the same as dissecting a painting and I found it fascinating. Suddenly this world of alignment and typography is becoming addictive. I am quite a fan of this graphic designers work-Alvin Diec. I found him on a great blog called bumbumbum. Here are my favourite pieces of his work. His simplicity and careful placement of form and type are so beautiful and perfect, I feel the same emotions towards them that I do when looking at a delicate piece of ceramics.

HERE-----http://bumbumbum.me/2011/08/22/alvin-diec-poster-design/  is the link to Alvin Diec on bumbumbum

HERE-----http://www.alvindiec.com/indexhibit/ is a link to Diec's website.