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.