Advent Calendar

Last Christmas I did a series of thematic status updates on Facebook over advent. It was kind of stupid but I got quite a warm response. This year I thought I'd go for something a bit more tangible, and with a bit more scope for experimentation. My only restriction is that content needs to occupy a 400x400px iframe. This is also a chance for me to test my (puny) html/css/javascript skills and apply some of the concepts that I've been learning recently. The page isn't much, but I built it from scratch, and it does at least work. I'll be bolting bits on as I go along too (I'm also planning on some big overhauls in my web stuff from now through to the new year)

The calendar is here

Stephen King Gigapan @ St. Pauls

This is a GigaPan shot of St. Pauls Cathedral region of the north bank in London, taken from the roof of the Tate Modern (by Nathan Gallagher). If you zoom-in you should be able to spot about 25 people hidden amongst the landscape, holding large banners containing words. These words are from the last paragraph of Stephen Kings new novel Under The Dome and this event marked the end of an extensive real-life and online game of "hide and seek" for fans of Stephen looking to find clues into his latest work before the UK release (I also hid an extract on Unity's landing page)

Oscilloscope

A Gould Advance OS 3300A oscilloscope.

Does it work? No. No it doesn't. Why would a physicist give me an expensive, fully functioning piece of lab equipment?

Lego

One of the red-tops has been giving away Lego over the last week or so. After a cost-benefit analysis Stu and I decided it was worth the slight moral and environmental compromise and bought nearly every issue. I mixed the acquisitions with my small but growing collection (my little brother has all my old Lego now) and obviously had a couple of building sessions.

V&A Workshop

We ran a little workshop at the V&A on Sunday with the V&A's youth forum CreateVoice. The focus was on branding, and we had just enough time for a discussion on the CreateVoice brand, a contextual look at what we think is interesting in contemporary brand-culture, a primer tutorial on CS4 and a bit of an explanation of our background and how we got into design. This was the first workshop that we've facilitated, but we've been asked to come back for a second session on the 21st of November which is available to forum members (membership is free and available to anyone aged 16-21).

Instead

I found this little fella in a pile of 2p's in the corner of my room a few days ago.

It's from one of those fridge-magnet-poetry sets. I used to keep him in my wallet. If I owed someone money I would fish around for a bit, then explain apologetically "I haven't got the right change, can I give you this 'instead'?" They would laugh (the first time) and forget for the time being. I had to retire the diversionary gag in the end because - as you can see - the thing got covered in wallet-crud.

Periodic Desktop of the Elements

The Periodic Desktop is a back-burner project I've had on the go for a while, and it's evolved a fair bit as I've lived with it - grouping, positioning and coding my most frequently used programs in various ways.

I use my desktop PC* as a work-station and an entertainment centre, occasionally the latter when it should be the former. I've borrowed the metal/non-metal parameters from Mendeleyev's Periodic Table and tried to use the asymmetric distribution to create a digital space that encourages work over play.

I've also setup direct links to my most frequented sites and favourite blogs (Dezeen, BoingBoing, It's Nice That et al) in place of the Lanthanide and Actinide series.

Unfortunately the above .jpeg will only work properly on a Vista 1680 x 1050 px display, but if anyone expresses an interest I may adapt it for other resolutions or operating systems.

Below is a screenshot of the wallpaper in use. I've created a template for making quick custom icons in Photoshop based upon the Periodic Table 2-3 character standard (this required a "save as...">"_.ico" extension plug-in):



* Yes, that's right, I'm a designer and I use a PC.

We Have Moved

We have moved offices with Unity and Chalk down the road to 5-13 Hatton Wall. It's a fantastically large, open plan operation. There has been some excited talk of an office-warming party. Stuart and I now have our own decently sized dedicated studio space which will really help us increase the scope of our projects.

Goodbye LDF09

All done! This year's LDF had some great highlights (RCA at Designers Block, Tent Digital and The White Building @ The Dock). The word is that it was a better realised "festival" than the previous six, which is good news for Design in London.

For our part, The Incidental went well I thought, and though it was hard work we enjoyed ourselves immensely.

#incidental at London Design Festival

We've just finished installing the space for the British Council and their publication The Incidental in time for the London Design Festival, which starts Saturday 18th. We're also going to be working in the space over the week until the 27th. The Incidental, if you don't already know, is "a community-generated website and news pamphlet created by and for the design community which offers opinion, reviews, news and recommendations by tapping into what everyone is talking about."




We'll be running a similar operation to our space in Milan earlier in the summer (where we originally met The Incidental folks), helping facilitate dialogues in a temporary studio/workshop - though this time we'll be experimenting with a bit of technology to create a greater online-physical crossover.

If you're in London this week, come down to the space, say hello, have a cup of tea with us and join in. If you can't make it, follow the conversation on twitter, or check out my personal and the official flickr uploads, and of course, The Incidental website is the hub of it all - http://www.theincidental.org/

Pizza Express - Never Ending Song

Stuart and I recently finished our work on Unity's latest campaign. The client are Pizza Express and the campaign is called The NeverEndingSong. Currently a "NeverEndingSongBus" is carrying jazz musicians from venue to venue across the country as they perform an uninterupted, twenty-four-seven-non-stop-music-marathon. The campaign seeks to raise awareness of the public to contemporary jazz and also Pizza Express' close relationship with the genre.

We helped Unity put the concept together, and also delivered some graphics for it, negotiating with brand stakeholders and such.

Below is the van. Actually, it's one of two. I'll update the photo with one in-situ if I can (ha, unfortunately for me, I'm not in-situ, you see)

Home-made Babybel

Olly is doing something very interesting and experimental with hot, red wax. But when his back was turned I had a little play.

I've destroyed the ambience at dinner-parties and fancy gastropubs before by dicking about with hot wax on my fingers. It's great fun! Ow it's hot! Now it's numb! Other finger. Tap the table. Tap them together. Tap tap tap. Tee hee hee. Pulling the wax from under the finger nails. Looking at the empty little fingerprint negatives. Rolling the wax together into a little ball. Forcing it back into the flame so little black tectonics of carbon start to slake off. Maybe cut little grooves into the side so the wax pours out...I had a waiter in Greenwich confiscate one of those great big black candles from me about two years ago for doing that.

Anyway, this time I had ago at making my own mini wheel of cheese. Pics.

Black Box

This arrived in the post this morning. It's one of those black boxes I've been hearing a lot about. This will be very convenient for any critically-led projects where I lack the technological rudiments. Yay!

Tea Is For Trouble

Today we launched http://www.teamergency.com/, as part of a social-media campaign we've been working on with PR company Unity for Direct Line.

The site explores the British relationship with tea, specifically in a crisis. It includes a research paper conducted with City University and a dynamic map of tea-related tweets tying into a competition to win a bespoke tea blended especially by master tea-blender, Alex Probyn.

Like Skindividual, this has been another brilliant job to work on - bringing so many design disciplines together (brand, print, digital, product, illustration, interaction etc.) into a holistic outcome has made this kind of project you hope to get over and over. An excellent team effort all round, but must give a special mention to our developer Jono Brain for getting knee-deep into the Google Map and Twitter APIs to pull this out of the bag, and for being a thoroughly helpful guy.

The Tea:



The Tea_robot:

Interactive Kebab Furniture

This is great. At Lion's Fried Chicken, Brockley (an otherwise innocuous kebab house) is a table. With complete honesty and sincerity, it is one of my favourite tables of the year.

The interesting thing is, I'm quite certian it's a freakish and accidental one-off - an inadvertant piece of design interaction. There are about 4 or 5 cheap metal tables with grey-pink, laminated tops. But something has gone wrong with one of them. Somehow, the seal on the laminate has been breached or permeated and underneath are trapped 3 discrete 'substances'.

The first are air bubbles, which looks like white, amoebic blobs. The second is yellow and oil based. I wouldn't like to guess what this is, but we are, afterall, in a kebab shop. The third is the water-based pink colouring that gave the table it's original, unexeptional appearance - except now the oil has forced the ink down into the edges. This concentrated liquid is now a garish hot-pink colour. The overall result is a responsive panel of colour and form that can be manipulated with a firmly-applied thumb or fist, but will then ultimately leech back into its original state.

It's great fun after a few jars and a quarter-pounder.

V&A Crypt Consolidation Project

At the beginning of this year I took a part-time job working in the underground crypts of the National Art Library at the V&A. Whilst organising the books we came across some real gems. I've uploaded a Flickr Photoset of my favourites. I'd strongly recommend anyone to use the place as a resource if they haven't already, it's an amazing institution.










click here for the rest...

Ants!

Housemate Olly uncovered an ant's nest in our garden. Larvae everywhere. Managed to take a few pictures before the workers could carry them away. Which was pretty quickly.

Defrost

It’s quite important when designing an icon – an essential class of visual communication – to produce something that is easily and instantly comprehendible. It is necessary to understand and refer to an existing canon of typologies, signs and symbols – acknowledging time is a factor and exploiting a mental shorthand to deliver the message. To achieve this one might draw comparisons or visual simile.

So….presumably when Tesco were designing graphics for their chocolate gateaux, they thought the best way of conveying the message “it is necessary for you to remove this product from the freezer well in advance of eating” was by drawing an analogy between the mildly souring experience of eating a cake not entirely unthawed, and the global crisis of irreversible and disastrous climate change. Good work! I hope they went home early after that brainstorm. Of course, now it makes perfect sense to choose one of the most heart-rending (and overused) images of global warming: a doomed polar bear stranded on a dislodged chunk of it’s dwindling habitat.

At least the bear is smiling. Maybe it’s subliminal. Supermarkets are supposed to be malevolent and unstoppable forces for evil aren’t they? Like Zorg Industries? Perhaps they want us to think of cheap consumer products every time we see a natural disaster on the television. They could use a picture of a wrecked tanker to sell treacle: “directions for use: pour over pancakes in much the same way that this corrosive petrochemical has caked over this turtle breeding ground” or try “4 blade razors – decimate your own Brazilian rainforest”.

If I was ‘in charge’ I would adopt this hilarious symbol below to instruct purchasers to “pre-heat oven to 200 degrees”. Underneath I’d write “(That’s about as hot as a child’s arm on fire)*”:

[*- sorry, that's an outright lie. In an oxygen-rich environment a child's arm would most likely burn at around 1200 - 1500˚C .]

Gun Face

Skindividual

Working with Hellounity, on behalf of the Skin Cancer UK: SunSmart campaign, we* recently finished designing the website for Skindividual.co.uk. It was a brilliant project to work on!

Skindividual promises to reward whoever can invite the most friends to join their guestlist the opportunity for them and their entire social network to win a private gig, starring Ladhawke, the Bombay Bicycle Club and The New York Pony Club.

* - Stuart Bannocks & I.

*UPDATE* - The gig was brilliant!

“People called Romanes, they go the house”?

This graffiti has cropped up in the village where I grew up – Southwell in Nottinghamshire. My old school was demolished for a controversial housing project, but an old Roman villa was found underneath so the build has been suspended. A lot of the town is quite impressed to have latin speaking rebels, but I think it’s more likely they’ve seen The Life Of Brian. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIAdHEwiAy8 )

Lego Jolly Roger

Milan 2009

Back from Milan 2009, where we exhibited the Goldsmiths' design process at the Salone Satellite: building the space from found materials, then organising events and tools to encourage discourse, debate and creative interaction.

Had a fantastic time. We kept a record of our exploits whilst we were out there, as well as a flickr and twitter feed.

Carboard Armour, Picadilly Circus

Building the Risk Facilitator: Flickr Photoset

[edit: April Fool] (Bloody Typical) Another Damning Example of “Broken Britain”

** This was an April-Fool post; I'm not really a miserable, ranting misanthrope **

This is the dumbest thing I’ve seen in a very long time. I hate to use the phrase “political correctness gone mad” but I think this really is a legitimate case.

In line with the redevelopment for the 2012 Olympic Games, TFL have just unveiled plans “to rebrand what is currently the Metropolitan line as the Neopolitan line… a term synonymous with European culture and grandeur"(http://www.tfl.gov.uk/neopolitan_line_announced.htm). WTF?? As if it wasn’t a big enough hassle getting into work with the amount of work going on, and a massive drain on resources getting ready for the olympics, we’re going to have to endure months of delays for pointless “re-generation” – decorating stations in “tasteful chocolate hues”! and why? To give the bureaucrats in Brussels a sense of smug self-satisfaction? Fucking waste of time if you ask me.

Launch Arcology (Sim City 2000)

Are Ricky Gervais, Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington the 2009 Red Noses? No, no they are not.

I would be very suprised if nobody else has noticed the uncanny resemblence this years Comic Relief noses have with the worlds best selling podcast trio: Gervais et al. And yet, as far as publicity so far has shown, they’re not supposed to be them (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCpZqVHxHx0). Perhaps some kind of deal broke down at the last moment?

Pixel MP5

I would probably agree that Pixel-Art has had it's day, but there is something very theraputic about blocking in all those colours with the pencil tool.

Star Trek: The Wrath of Chaka Khan

I could try and justify this as an experiment in video editing but it's really just a bit of mindless fun. This is a mash-up between Chaka Khan's I Feel For You and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Snowman

Silly Snowman, If we let you in then you'd melt!

Fifteen Second Film Competition

My entry for the an as-yet-unnamed film-making competition with Stuart Bannocks and Kasper Pincis . The two requirements were that the film be 1) themed around the word "Obtuse", 2) No longer than 15 seconds.