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.










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