electric angel /design for life

…it’s a coast thing

this evening sees the official launch of the new brand for the north yorkshire coast at beiderbecke’s hotel at an ‘ambassador’s dinner’ sponsored by yorkshire forward. the ambassadors dinners are a renaissance initiative and include representatives from scarborough businesses, education and strategic partners who are well placed to spread the word about scarborough further afield – which is why we’re going to them first.

“…it’s a coast thing” is a brand in the fullest sense incorporating photography, language, a logotype and most importantly – attitude. this is the culmination of a fair bit of work by us, as we developed the mechanism back in 2006 by which we engaged a wide cross-section of the residents of the borough in creative sessions, encouraging them to share what they valued about living in this part of britain [a similar process to that for the bowling gates we designed]. this led to the creation of a constantly growing bank of comissioned photographs, the logotype and our writing the brand guidelines.

the launch to organisations we hope will be enthusiastic early-adopters of the brand has been a while coming but has recently been given impetus by scarborough’s enterprising britain win. it seems an age since we designed the business coast brochure which was the first publication designed to the brand values but we hope there’ll be many more uses across a wide range of media to come as people use the brand – this evening i’ll be introducing it used on stationery, emails, website and a van and bus in the hope of encouraging others to think of ways in which they can start to spread the message.

we’re in, but not quite connected

the move was far less painful [physically and mentally] than expected and we’re glad to be in our new studio – it’s seemed like a long wait while we’ve pulled out shop fittings, had walls replastered, puzzled over a surfeit of electricity, a lack of water and done a lot of painting.

our next task is to get the other half of the space completed to be the ‘electric angel gallery’ in time for coastival. our main task is to build some steps. we’re also keeping our fingers [and legs] crossed for running water. watch this space for more news on the gallery.

if you’re passing do pop in to say hello, we’ll be having a proper ‘come visit us’ day for gallery and studio on 13th feb.

we’re moving

from tomorrow electric angel design will be based at:

no.1 museum terrace
scarborough
north yorks
YO11 2HB

find electric angel on multimap
phone number will stay the same.

it’ll take a couple of days for us to get up and running again so we appreciate your patience while we struggle up hills and down steps with various boxes and furniture. the fantastically heavy glass desks and 21″ crt monitors aren’t moving with us, so post-move visits to the osteopath shouldn’t be needed.

see you on the other side.

peasholm magic lantern

coastival sees the welcome return of scarborough’s festival of light [which i think was our first design work for create]. we’ll be converging on the rotunda museum for a lantern parade on friday 13 february and will certainly be checking out other light goodies such as video installations in the south bay underground car park and in the crypt of saint martin’s church on south cliff. there’s also something called the chroma van which promises ‘a unique exploration of colour perception in the comfort of a remodelled caravan’. how can you resist that?

i’ve also been invited by poet kate evans to apply typographic interpretations to a series of haiku’s as part the peasholm magic lantern. the lantern will take place in the faux-oriental pagoda on the island of peasholm park and features haiku’s by kate, photographs by mark vesey and an original composition by amaya huntley. kate showed me the first draft of the complete sequence yesterday – i think it’s going to be something rather special. the music is wonderful and the whole experience reminds me very much of some of the more immersive alt.worship experiments we instigated in bradford.

the images above are from felt – our little book of treatments of poetry from 2 years ago. this haiku makes an appearance as part of the magic lantern – you’ll have to come experience it for yourself to see the others.

films at coastival

[no.2 in our 'things we're looking forward to at coastival' mini-series]

the studio opinion is that we’re rather impressed with the coastival film line-up which reflects the other strands of the festival – a link we wanted to make explicit on the poster.

i’m particularly looking forward to round midnight which i’ve been wanting to see for ages, james will be heading for control [and probably every other film he can get to] and there’ll be a riley family outing to see yellow submarine which is one of dylan’s favourite movies. but there’s more than just music movies – west yorkshire-set my summer of love is tempting as is turn of the tide – a 1935 story of rivalry between two fishing families filmed in robin hoods bay. and it’s always hard to resist reggae-gangster classic the harder they come [pictured].

full coastival listings at www.coastival.com

what the chamber maid saw

we thought it would be fun to blog some of things we’re looking forward to at coastival.

one of the artists exhibiting is rachel howfield. her blog was selected as ‘bloggers choice’ on the an site in december. i intended to blog about her installation at the art gallery last year which included a projection of rachel sat and dancing in the exhibition space, projected (from a suitcase on top of a wardrobe) in the exact space.

her installation for coastival – what the chamber maid saw – sounds intriguing. it takes place in a room in the grand hotel in scarborough and each visitor has their own bookable slot to explore through the absent tenant’s possessions and perhaps discover some of their secrets.

[image: rachel howfield. 'the slightly depressing bottom line'. wire 27.2.08. from rachel's blog]

what i like about rachel’s work is that because it regularly uses everyday items, sometimes it can almost seem to be not there – it’s only because of the context that you take notice. and so you then have to look and think to understand the piece. i love the piece above for being so simple and witty yet ably communicating the themes that rachel is exploring. we were chatting in the pub at new years about the differences between artist and designer, particularly in how you respond to or cope with external direction and feedback. the above piece demonstrates an ability to communicate that many designers would envy.

coastival website

we invited gordon aka sneakytrick to work with us on this project – a website that includes online ticketing for the coastival event. there’s also an e-newsletter to sign up to [with electric angel-written copy] and we’re pleased to say this really works – emails are regularly followed by a flurry of ticket sales.

there’s new content going on the site all the time so do check back towards the festival. you can visit the website at: www.coastival.com

coastival poster

poster for coastival. C19th music hall posters were the inspiration for this – and for the centrespread of the coastival programme too. we took the same idea of displaying a wide range of acts/events on one long poster but in a more contemporary style.

it’s fun working with typography within a limited format like this because it’s about achieving visual hierarchy and thus steering the viewer visually through the design, not always in a straight top-to-bottom way [a lot of contemporary graphic design seems to take very minimal approach to this, usually at the cost of readability]. this is a balancing act with following some self-set ‘rules’ about typefaces that sometimes work against what you’re trying to do. the typeface issue is that music hall posters would use a diverse range of fonts to cope with long or short names on the poster – we felt this approach would have been too busy and too retro in this situation.

we’ve had some nice compliments on the poster and the programme design – thanks folks. i can feel a post coming on on the whole visual legibility thing as it’s often something that people have stated as to why they’ve chosen to work with us.

what we’re listening to [14] – ollie’s free download

back as part of digital scarborough 06 we organised a creative coast event – the 5 minute pitch. we invited a panel of investors and creatives to hear three local creatives pitch an idea, dragon’s den style.

the ‘pitchers’ received training on speaking in public from lizzie of raised eyebrow and duncan from business link. ollie green was the youngest of the participants – still in school at the time – and impressed the panel with his idea for an internet radio station showcasing local music and his enthusiastic & slick presentation.

forward-wind 2.5 years and olllie is now at music college and has just released his first album ‘hold on’. it’s a free download so you can enjoy it too: http://ollie.bandcamp.mu/

the tracks are as infectious as ollie’s enthusiasm was back at the sjt in ’06.
if you’re local, look out for an interview with ollie in next month’s issue of scarborough’s future.

goodbye 2008, hello 2009

we’re back in the studio today after a well earned decent christmas break. happy new year!

2008 was a fantastic year for us and there’s plenty work we’re really proud of that we haven’t yet blogged. we’ll also try and find and time this week to do our usual ‘highlights of the year’ list. 2009 is looking particularly exciting for us – more news soon, but for now we’ll leave you with this teaser of a web link:

www.electricangelgallery.co.uk