electric angel /design for life

the homeless speak out

so what is art good for? it’s only for middle class gallery visiting types, right? and isn’t publicly funded art a total waste of money that nobody benefits from?

artworks understand the value of art. not million-pound pictures on gallery walls, or vastly funded large scale public artworks, but art in the hands of those who are rarely heard – the homeless, young people in care, residents on estates with drug problems. in their hands art becomes the voice they’ve never had. a montage of photographs, a spray painted mural, a self-penned performance – this is art with true power. art with powerful truth. this is the kind of art artworks deal in.

our design work for artworks has often been to communicate the end results of creative events where they have connected people with artists to help them tell their story. problem is, you can’t necessarily get your decisions makers and money holders along to spend a day with homeless people. so you have to get something interesting and eye-catching onto their desk. that’s where we come in.

budgets for this kind of work are often very tight – this was a one colour print job onto cheap tinted paper with the use of art, photos and crucially the voice of young homeless people to provide the impact. some of the images you can see on the photos here are of young people decorating a tent with stories of where they’ve slept – tracy emin’s tent reimagined with a deeper message.

an artist’s survival guide

a quick message for any yorkshire coast creatives – it’s creative coast day on wednesday. helen from creative york will be buzzing about the borough delivering surgery sessions (not as painful as it sounds. it’s creative business surgery) and from 6pm be at the merchant in scarborough to pick up top tips and valuable advice from wendy clews of create. it’s the last in the current series as we’re taking a month’s break over summer. if you want a lovely flyer to be dropping on your doormat when the new series starts be sure to fill in a form and post it back to us. tis all free.

illuminating communities

one of the highlights of 2006/7 for us was being invited to develop a full visual identity for artworks creative communities. we’ve worked with artworks for nearly as long as electric angel has been in existence and as well as giving us interesting and stimulating work they have had a big influence on how we approach the creative process. that whole round-a-table-get-out-the-glue-and-pens thing we often use with community groups and charities had its genesis in the artworks approach.

the first time we worked with them like that it hit like a bolt from the blue – i’d done lots of stuff like that with young people but never considered doing it with adults ‘at work’. but why not? it was a revelation. it’s now part of our philosophy – a belief that everyone is creative and should be given opportunity to be involved in the design process.

so this visual identity… well we’re going to keep you in suspense for a week or so and first show a few of the many design projects we’ve done for them over the years. it should also help explain what artworks are all about and why we approached the visual identity the way we did.

so this is the very first electric angel design for artworks back in the day (much coughing in the studio as we blow off the dust). a simple flyer for an exhibition of community artwork. we took the photograph of a hand (because that’s the artworks logo) against strong light (…the name of the exhibition…) to get that effect where the outline is beginning to distort then applied a chunky halftone for graphic effect. printed 2 colours on uncoated paper for a nice feel and to keep within budget.

create your future

this week we received a pleasant little promo booklet for the creative industries in north yorkshire. we opened it up and on the first page… hey – that’s us! the leaflet has been produced in partnership between higher york, science city york and learning city york. the aim is to explain what the creative industries are and encourage young people and adults alike to consider it as a career. it’s got a rather strong york bias at present as it only lists courses in the city and i think we’re the only business quoted in it who aren’t based in the city…? but i understand there might be the possibility of promoting other north yorkshire universities and colleges offering creative courses (such as scarborough!) in future editions. nice job on this nonetheless.

design renaissance

just over a year ago i worked with a group of digital arts students at the university of hull scarborough campus to develop ideas for the much needed revamp of scarborough’s urban renaissance newsletter. nick and linda at renaissance had been doing a great job compiling the newsletter themselves that kept people connected but it was time to move to the next level and produce something that also reflected renaissance aims of quality design. we ran a creative session at the town team meeting which received very favourable comments and from the work created that night the students did a great job with an A2 folding to A4 design featuring a map of current renaissance projects as a centrespread. they presented to the town team who loved it. and then it all went quiet…

…fast forward 12 months and finally the newsletter has a sponsor (TourismFirst) and the budget to produce something of quality. so we sat down with nick and ruth (head of marketing at sbc) to look at first forming an editorial policy that would steer the publications future direction. some fairly brutal but necessary decisions were taken, plus since the initial design the new postage charges have been introduced we also had to reconfigure the design to A5 which folds out to A2. i have to confess to a little bullying of nick to get this moving again as there was some resistance to change when he announced the intention to the town team (maybe they’d forgotten last year’s presentation?). but the opportunity is too good to waste and i’m grateful for him and linda trusting me on this. now we’ll wait and see what everyone else thinks – it will be hitting doormats and leaflet racks over the next couple of days.

newsletters are often rather dull and so the temptation when designing one is to indulge yourself with a radical graphic approach, but the main aim of this publication is to communicate in a confident and enthusiastic way, not dazzle with clever typography. and so the design is colourful but straightforward, hopefully achieving a happy compromise between making an impression and yet making people feel it’s their newsletter and they are involved. the new format actually costs half as much to print as the previous booklet style and yet has the same number of pages and, i’d suggest, a hundred times the impact. the design takes the colourcoding from the renaissance website to identify the regular content such as minutes and reports, the folding format allows a great deal of flexibility in reporting on events and projects or introducing special features or even using the centrespread as a poster. i’m looking forward to developing it over the coming months and continuing to involve any students who are around in the process.

it ain’t easy bein’ green

ah, kermit the frog delivering the eco-message long before it was fashionable. we figured that with our work for scarborough borough council’s roll-out of recycling and our founding principle of offering graphic design with an ethical edge, we owe it to the people we work with to come clean about whether we cut the mustard on green issues.

well, we are trying… we re-use paper (ie. we print on both sides and use scrap for sketches and note paper), we take all used paper to be recycled, we upgrade computer equipment for as long as possible before buying new kit, then we offer our old kit to friends, family and for community use rather than see it trashed – we’re not adverse to pre-used kit ourselves either. we send print cartridges for recycling, always buy re-filled cartridges and try to print as little as possible using screen-based proofs instead. we re-use envelopes (see pic above) and have often re-used furniture at electric angel hq. our studios to date have always been in buildings that have been cheaply adapted to new use (old mills etc) rather than glitzy resource-consuming new office buildings.

we use public transport for business meetings as a first choice and we almost always walk or cycle to the studio. we use an ethical bank. we check out the green credentials of the printers we work with all of whom use paper from sustainable sources. we have looked into recycled paper many times but the current view is that the recycling process to make paper suitable for litho printing is more damaging to the environment than growing and chopping down trees. but we’ll keep an eye on that. james and i dress entirely in clothes made from recycled tractor tyres plus lunch at the studio is only ever what we can gather from rockpools in the south bay – mostly bladder wrack and sea anemones.
ok, so we made the last couple up, but we are making an effort.

but we confess we’re not too sharp at turning off the plug sockets every night. this used to be because we’d leave time-consuming processes running overnight but they’re not nearly as necessary now computer hardware is more reliable and a lot faster. it’s now very rare that a pc is switched on if we’re not using it. but we promise we’ll starting switching those other bits and pieces off when we leave on a night. also our current website hosting provider doesn’t claim to use green energy (although we haven’t specifically asked them) so that’s something that’s on our mind although things are so much simpler with them that we’re at least saving a good few hours of computer energy-guzzling time developing websites…!

we’d love to hear of any eco-conscious creatives’ suggestions of how to do the green thing in a studio/creative business. so do leave any ideas or experiences here by clicking on ‘comments’.

i’m gonna make you a starfish

more of the recycling material for scarborough borough council – folder and insert from the information pack.

another 6 months of creativity

creative coast met on monday to plan the next 6 month series of events. a strong turn-out and some great ideas including an genre-challenging exhibition of members work, bingo networking, repeats of the 5 minute pitch and the creative swap shop, and the one i’m most excited about – ross‘s suggestion of a ‘blog night’ when we increase the number of creative scarborough bloggers by, oh at least 1000%.

the new series will kick off in september with a big joint event with local schools to introduce the new creative diplomas. and don’t forget, there’s one event of the spring/summer series left: ‘an artist’s survival guide’ on the 18th of this month, 6pm at the merchant, eastborough, scarborough. i suspect it’ll be an interesting and useful evening with wendy of create for all creatives.

find your inner space

one last piece of church-related work from the vaults (actually from our shelves full of plastic folders). this leaflet-poster always makes an impression with people who know of the community of the resurrection in mirfield. largely because this is not the sort of imagery you’d associate with them. click on the link and you’ll get a flavour of the community.

but a group of students with a dynamic approach (including james mckaskill, later to be channel 4′s ‘priest idol‘) had a vision of a youth event that would tap into the intrigue about religious orders and new age belief, combining the opportunity to spend a night in a monastery with rock music, midnight mass, bbq’s and chilling out round camp fires.

there’s an obvious debt to anthony gormley and perhaps david bowie too with our ‘star man’ illustration. he majority of the poster is set in typefaces designed by eric gill. the community’s logo is from a memorial roundel carved by gill and the chapel has some beautiful stations of the cross carved by gill’s assistant joseph cribb. they’re not usually accessible to the general public so it was a treat to be able to see these when our friend huw invited us to dinner and evening mass with the community. two things stick in my mind – the atmosphere of the plainsong mass and the sizable portions of chicken. “ah! vulture again” commented one of the monks.

(if you want to visit some of gill’s work in yorkshire i highly recommend the publication by graham carey available from the henry moore institute.)

future faithful

whilst we’re on a bit of a religious tip it seemed appropriate to photograph some of the branding for the diocese of bradford which we designed about 4 years ago and is still going strong. how we came to be offered the work was a very pleasant experience – the bishop had expressed a desire to rebrand the diocese in order to suggest fresh thinking and a dynamic approach to being church. this was in contrast to the ‘firm of solicitors’ image that their current coat of arms suggested. the diocesan communications office asked around for suggestions of local designers who would bring understanding and enthusiasm to the job and our name turned up every time. (all those bottles of whisky sent to vicars at christmas clearly paid off…)

the visual identity is comprised of three main elements – the logo, the coloured strip (an echo of the logo) and the strapline. the diocese asked for some ideas for a strapline that would symbolise both the history and tradition of the anglican church and a forward-thinking attitude. ‘future faithful’ was what we came up with and was an instant hit.

the colours that make up the logo and colour strip were chosen for symbolic reasons: blue is for the river aire and bradford beck on top of which the city of bradford is built. green symbolises the moors and hills that make up the wider metropolitan area of bradford. grey represents the stone that the city’s iconic buildings are built from, purple has a long standing tradition of symblising christ the king and orange is a vibrant contemporary colour deliberately chosen to contrast with the others.

a rather nice coincidence that turned up was that all the colours were also represented in the bishop’s stole (long scarf type thing worn over his cassock). the logo flies as a flag from bradford cathedral as well as being available on everything from ‘future faithful’ badges to umbrellas.