electric angel /design for life

what we’re listening to [5]

pandora – the music genome project. you tell this website what music you like and it plays some of that and some stuff it thinks you might like. with each track you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down which influences what else it chooses for you. it’ll stream all day long and you can set up different ‘radio stations’ based on your likes and flick between them. genius.

today we’re listening to stuff that sounds a bit like ben folds, the super furry animals and tortoise. although not all at once of course.

our design is rubbish

also dropping onto doormats this week are the first pieces in a campaign for scarborough borough council’s rollout of recycling across the north yorkshire coast and moors area. it’s enjoyable working with people who are passionate about the subject and not ‘just doing their job’ and i hope some of this enthusiasm comes across in our print designs for which we’ve drawn a series of sea creatures made up of recyclable rubbish.

look out for leaflets, recycling roadshow banner stands, vehicle liveries and possibly even some nice stickers for your new bins all featuring our family of aquatic recyclables… (thanks to magnus from the centre for coastal studies for advice on sea creatures native to the east coast of britain)

scarborough, the movie

a special creative coast event on thursday – andrew mcallister and his wife sabine have arrived in scarborough uk (from scarborough, canada) to film for his project you knew everything there was to know. we’ve arranged a creative coast night out with them to hear about the project and share a little of what scarborough means to us. thursday, 7.30pm, upstairs at the merchant, eastborough. everyone very welcome.
andrew and sabine are blogging about making the film here.

what we’re listening to [4]

second lives. ‘a revelatory journey through the electronic looking glass of alternative life online, where 35 million people around the globe abandon reality for a virtual life.’ radio 4′s book of the week.

because we felt like it

the first issue of ‘felt’ should be hitting doormats this morning. read more about it here.

felt:words is a limited edition of 500 and the first batch are in hand-sewn envelopes including a pocket full of seeds. it will take us a couple of weeks to post them out, but if you don’t receive one or just can’t wait, do get in touch and we’ll be delighted to post one to you.

six words or less

on wednesday we led a creative session with staff and trustees at domestic abuse services. they offer a service within the north yorkshire coast and ryedale to women and men who are victims of domestic abuse – helping them get out of often very damaging situations and start a new life.

creative sessions like this are how we prefer to start many design projects – we learn so much more from being able to spend an hour or so with the people who are involved in the organisation than from any written brief.

we began by playing with random images, choosing those that represented the situations that cause someone to pick up the phone and contact DAS and those that continued the story after the victims had been given help. by no means is it a straightforward happy ending story – leaving your comfortable home and taking your children to live in temporary accommodation is a brave move, but several times the process was described as being a rebirth. any birth is a painful process.

taking hemingway as inspiration – who once said the best story he’d ever written used just six words – we wrote typical stories from the experiences of working with victims of domestic abuse. the photomontages became the binding for these stories forming a book (pictured above). the next stage is for us to take these as the starting point for ideas on how to communicate DAS’s message to both the people they can help, and the people who can help DAS to continue to provide the service it does.