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.