electric angel /design for life

chart in print

this month’s renaissance news includes a centrepsread about CHART Scarborough so far – or you can catch up on the blog. it’s the first time the logo has been seen in print and gives a hint as to how it’s designed to be used as a containing shape as well as traditional logo. it’s going to be cropping up all over the place shortly – if you see us wandering around town measuring up various windows and signboards on monday you’ll gather something is cooking…

more names, more faces

photos of our two full walls for the ‘name to a face’ exhibition. the mood of two distinct areas of the exhibition was of piecing together information, notably about victorian society photographer sarony, and making sense of a vast archive of material from a scarborough family. visitors to the show were encouraged to add any further enlightenment to the material on display.

to echo that theme we developed a chequerboard approach to the interpretation panels that was both very cost-effective and allowed some freedom for extra works to be added. initial layout ideas for the two walls were produced in the studio and then we helped place and fix the panels in the gallery.

other interpretation panels for the exhibition match in style and all the prints have a textured laminate and are wrapped to give the effect of canvases to tie in with the paintings that formed the rest of the exhibition.

.

below you can see one of sarah venus’s wonderful wall paintings in the background – we incorporated a corner frame design by sarah into the panels for a cohesive look.

an interesting project

first public outing for the CHART Scarborough logo, on the side of woodend at last night’s creative coast mobile phone treasure hunt.

making an entrance

occasionally we are approached to work on something that doesn’t exactly fit our business model of working with public sector clients and charities, but the subject matter of the job gets us so excited we have to say yes. when we were approached by local engineering firm unison to help them make their reception entrance a bit more dynamic for a series of visits from the USA, thoughts of cladding the walls in dual-layers of images and text flooded into our heads. they’d never go for that…would they?

well, yes, they would!

unison’s clients include huge names in world aviation and vehicle manufacture such as boeing and alexander dennis and they recently began running tours across the UK taking in their facilities at eastfield industrial estate, alexander dennis, GKN aerospace and the university of sheffield’s advanced manufacturing research centre. we first helped them create a brochure for these ‘tech tours’ and this formed the basis of the reception area designs. our suggestion was to use the large wall at the back of the area as a kind of introduction to the tour, showing the places visited. this would be in two layers, a bottom layer carrying on the smoke design from the brochure and a second perspex layer showing the current tour itinerary and clients.

the use of the perspex layer serves 2 purposes. it creates a separate focus from the purely aesthetic background images, allowing important information to be displayed, literally standing off. it also takes into account the possibility that the tours could change venues and therefore the perspex can be replaced or amended without adjustment to the rear panel. bay area sign and image solutions were helpful as usual in making the idea work.

the total effect of the reception area was added to with door signage and another board showing unison’s key client, which sits behind the reception desk, visible as soon as you enter. in the future we hope to be adding more signage to the factory, including a 5 metre long glass wall and banners throughout. it’s exciting to work on such large scale things with clients who don’t see anything as an impossibility and like to see nice, big design as much as we do!

some other nice, big design will be revealed soon when the railwayart project is put in place.

meeting the locals

we were in scarborough art gallery to take photos of our interpretation panels for the ‘name to a face’ exhibition and were able to snap this school visit using the ‘meet the locals‘ activity guides we designed. they hadn’t got round to building them into pinhole cameras yet. the chap on the wall is captain browne bushell – a royalist privateer (that’s pirate to you and me) from whitby.