create’s new website is now online. it features a searchable database of local creative industries which has been in demand for a long time - good to see it finally arrive. we are partners with create in getting creative coast off the ground and our plan for the new creative coast website is to link through to this database so as to provide a high visibility portal for creative industries on the north yorks coast. go take a look.
the electric angel team is away for the week - we’re back in action on monday 30th in the afternoon. in the meantime you can leave us an email or fone message for when we return.
[image by Adam Ciesielski from http://www.sxc.hu]
spent some time today taking photographs or our print work, prompted by a talk i’m giving to the design students at yorkshire coast college tomorrow. originally i was doing screenshots straight from the software but photos are far better for giving an indication of the tactile quality of much of our work - that’s often as important as the graphics. they’re much more honest in showing the true colours too - what you see on screen is notoriously unreliable.
anyway, apologies in advance to the students who’ll have to put up with my initial pics tomorrow as my photo skills aren’t really up to much and detailed work requires something better than our 5 megapixel sony sureshot. but todays results are good enough to rethink how we present our work over the web.
this wednesday, 5.30 for 6.00, upstairs at the merchant, eastborough. looking forward to this one as we’ve got local designers, developers and artists talking about how they charge and offering their perspectives on the whole thing. that’s creatives for you - there’s no such thing as fixed prices, but rather charging philosophies… we’ll report back here later in the week on some of the insights that came out of the evening.
and tonight we have mixed loyalties - i’d love to go to the creative york ‘brand halo’ event in hull, and would have booked a place had it not been for the fact that the last train back to scarborough leaves at 7.14?!! (the event doesn’t finish till 8.00). what kind of sorry excuse for a rail service is that? kind of cuts off scarborough as a potential commuter town for hull and means that day visitors can’t stay for an evening meal. unless of course it’s a canny marketing ploy to fill b&b’s in hull?
so it looks like that opens up opportunity to meet the new chair of the town team instead. and i’ll be home for tea.
the sun has just broken out again here - isn’t this weather great?
we’ve been working with run for a while now in developing a house style - we’ll gradually post that work over time but for starters here’s a flyer we designed. it’s a multipurpose thing - to introduce run to potential members of the network and also by the addition of one of those little sticky foam cd holders, a package for delivering CDs.
the shape is a custom die-cut that arose out of us playing with variations on the cross. we also explored a cross shape that would both fold as a flat packet and build into a cube. the final version you see above cost a lot less to print though and so was the chosen design. we were also able to fit some postcards onto the spare card that arose out of cutting an unusual shape - value for money and environmentally sensible.
the flyer arrives folded - the size of a cd jewel case and opens out to first reveal a description of the network and then again to display a 3-fold mission statement of the network (and a CD if there’s one there). the multipurpose use makes it a very cost-effective solution to sending multimedia in an interesting and professional way, customised by surface prints onto the CDs. we’re told it’s been going down well.
i think even the most faithful worshippers at the high altar of consumerism are getting tired of the commercial binge that is christmas. thankfully help is at hand. from the number of tv and in-store adverts suggesting suitable easter gifts, easter is set to become christmas mkII. ah, a return to more innocent days when you only needed an overdraft rather than a second mortagage for the festive period. what do you mean you were going to give chocolate eggs? that’s not a suitable present for such a celebration. succumb to the pressure. now.
we’re doing the sensible thing and taking a break over easter to eat modestly sized chocolate eggs and ponder on the symbolism of such gifts. we’ll be back in the studio checking phone messages and emails on wednedsay 11th but will continue to take it easy for the rest of the week unless there’s anything urgent. we invite you to do the same. now then, lets get this place decorated with some tinsel.
[photo above of the faberge 1897 coronation egg, courtesy of http://mieks.com/. if you hurry i think woolworths still have some in]
after i watched the 1950’s version of the classic “War of the Worlds” over the weekend and finding out that Rob had never heard the Jeff Wayne musical version i felt it necessary to bring in the remastered double album. memories of my mum listening to this on vinyl came flooding back…obviously i had done something very wrong when i was young as this is possibly the scariest album ever created. if martians did come i don’t even think they’d be as frightening as this album. i’m not sure of Rob’s opinion of it but i know me and Adrian enjoyed it.what makes this album so good is how “accurate” the martians seem…i think i’d actually feel ripped off if a martian came and didn’t scream “ooooooooolllaaaaaaaa” at me from his fighting machine. the only downside to this remastered version is the tacky remixes slapped on the end…one is in a reggae style…REGGAE?!?! i don’t think its possible to pick a less applicable genre of music to add to this album. even nursery rhymes would convey fear, panic and destruction of the entire UNIVERSE better than this UB40-like addition.so after skipping the remaining “ulla ulla ulla Ibiza Banging Mix” we sat back and remembered that the martians weren’t here and that that was just a cracking album.
What with being the child rearing end of the Electric Angel empire I don’t tend to get out much. So when Adrian suggested conning someone into babysitting and coming down to the Merchant for the Creative Coast Swap Shop I jumped at the chance.
The creative skills on offer to swap were varied to say the least from photography through drum lessons and cake decorating to corset modelling. Fortunately for me there were a few visual artists there who were happy to swap a piece of work for a website and I managed to make a deal with Rachel Welford who works with glass.
Rachel makes stained glass and fused glass pieces, you may have seen her installation at Scarborough Hospital. I have been a big fan of hers for a while now particularly the architectural stuff as I like things to be both beautiful and useful, and this is a great opportunity to get a nice something or other. The image above is from a fused glass piece called Barnacles.
We also met John Allsopp at the event who was offering web site testing in return for being able to use the site as a case study. We saw this as a win win situation and since John is such a big fan of our new blog we thought we would go for it. Check out John’s blog at johnallsopp.co.uk.
In fact the swap shop went so well it inspired Rachel to organise a babysitting swap club so I may even be able to get out attend another Creative Coast event, you never know.
about time we put some web stuff on here… we were asked to help the university of hull centre for coastal studies market their website beyond the usual university routes. part of the uniqueness of the centre is the studying environment where students and staff have a friendly and more personal approach to study - something that needed to be communicated better. there was also the recognition that ecology is a hot topic but attracting potential students to courses beyond the obvious subjects can be difficult.
so a unique domain name [http://www.coastal-studies.org] mirroring the university website enables them to steer more visitors from search engines. we also did some work on the webpages themselves, creating more user-friendly navigation and communicating the feel of the courses by taking a more visual approach using photos from field trips. keep your eyes peeled for a name change and new logo for the centre in the near future…
designing for galleries, exhibitions and arts organisations is always enjoyable, not least because you’re working with people who also have a creative vision. this was for an exhibition at scarborough art gallery at the end of last year. the photos in the show [by three local photographers] were all fascinating, i especially loved david chalmers huge prints taken of high tides washing over the promenade at scarborough - they had an dreamlike otherworldly quality to them. quite in contrast to when you’re stood overlooking the sea on a stormy day and can feel the vibrations of the waves slamming against the stone.
the type for the exhibition title was inspired by the typeface fragmenta by manfred klein. instant legibility was a concern so weren’t able to be quite as abstract as klein with our lettershapes [we adpated the font lucida bright] but i think we managed to express the theme of the exhibition through the type. the posters and invites were printed with text in metallic gold/bronze.