dvd cover and cd-print design for run. the idea of iMatter is that it’s a give-away item - something designed to pique interest rather than be an answer in itself - hence the inside cover of words that ask ‘what matters?’ tight production deadlines on this meant we had to design the packaging from the script rather than see the finished film that’s on the dvd. having now seen the dvd i think we got the feel just right - not that we’re taking all the credit, this is the result of good communication and the run folks are good communicators.

it’s always nice to hear of how our work has taken on a life of its own - sometimes it feels a bit like having children and sending them out into the world. mark - a friend from back in the day when we did things with dance music and digital projectors in churches - got in touch to say he’d been using our mount series posters in the chapel of northern general hospital, sheffield during lent. they’re accompanied by a leaflet that lists the original passages the posters were based on and offers a prompt for reflection. a compilation of some photos of the posters in the chapel above. thanks to other folks who have also got in touch to say they’d used them.

some organisations issue annual reports because they have to. some use them as an opportunity to celebrate the last 12 months and share a few stories. the latter are always more enjoyable to read.

i remember a friend once observing how most contemporary jobs lack a ‘harvest festival’ moment - the point in the year when you reflect on the past 12 months of work and celebrate the result of your labour. of course, churches still have harvest festivals but the focus has remained on agriculture meaning there is no celebration for the office worker, the shop assistant, the council employee, the graphic designer… as a result there’s little sense of spirituality - however you choose to define that - in many working lives. it can become an endless working grind.

so there’s a good case for annual reports and for them to come accompanied by a big party, a day off work and a celebration in the church, the mosque, the temple or wherever you choose to celebrate life. and then maybe we’d all feel a bit better about our work.

images are of artworks annual report from last year - the first using the new visual identity. we’re just about to complete this year’s. has 12 months gone that fast? we need a party…

today sees the launch of the new proost website at greenbelt festival. if you’re of a religious bent then we’d describe proost as being on the cutting edge of worship resources since 1997, if you’re not, then we’d describe proost as being an independent london-based record label catering to a niche audience. whichever, the proost posse are heroes and it’s been a pleasure to work for them.

the brief was to help relaunch proost on their tenth anniversary as they moved to the next stage in their evolution offering not just CD’s and books, but movies, mp3’s and pdf’s as downloads. they’re also on a mission to discover fresh creative talent with their ‘unusual suspects’ campaign and so there’s lots of stuff on there that no-one has seen before.

we invited gordon (aka scarborough-based sneakytrick) to work with us on this project and he should take credit for the clever stuff happening when you use the site. basically it’s an online shop with a slideshow as the main interface and a media player to preview audio and video. much of the content is available as physical products or downloads and there’s a cracking subscription offer that gives you access to all downloadable content for 12 months. it’s built in joomla! - an open source web application framework. we’ll blog more about the philosophy behind open source sometime soon, perhaps when we’ve shown you a few more sites we’ve been working on recently that were all built with similar technology.

i confess a vested interest here. a few years ago proost published a track i wrote on the cd ’spirit of the new’ and as a result it was also picked up by a publishers to go in a youthwork resource book/cd-rom. thanks jonny for spotting my badly produced original! so should you be interested you can log on at www.proost.co.uk and take a listen - it’s called ’spirit draw near’. and while you’re there why not take out a subscription…?

year two report for the mission partner project.

one from the archives. thornbury mission partner project ran in the community in which we were based in bradford - it’s aim to try and find common ground in a diverse cultural setting and thus sow the seeds for a more cohesive community. these reports served the dual purpose of informing local people of the project’s progress and in attracting further funding from various charities and trusts. the project was successful in extending it’s initial thee year funding to a five year period.

I’m not quite sure how to describe the surf scene in Scarborough, it’s unlike many other places I think. The scene in Scarborough mainly consists in the water, the same faces will be surfing the same spots when there’s a wave there. Outside of that it’s the occasional Secret Spot organised surf night (www.secretspot.co.uk) or long chat with Steve and Mark at Fluid Concept (www.fluidconcept.co.uk) or congregating on the North Bay early morning looking at a flat sea because that swell never arrived. It’s temperamental here, a swell can last one evening, it can blow flat within minutes and you hold your head in shame as you walk out of a flat sea. It can also be absolutely perfect, some well travelled locals say it’s world class here on occasion, and I think slowly the secret is getting out…

A weekend trip to Scarborough isn’t the chips and ice-cream affair of the past, nowadays it’s a drop by a hire shop, get a board and a wetty and spend four hours splashing around in the north or south bay kind of place, something we as surfers are all having to accept. We have to accept that more and more people are taking up surfing and look at the advantages it brings to us rather than the disadvantages. Yes, we’ll have to start abiding by the rules of surfing, we’ll have to look out for learners in the line up and we’ll have to accept that people will be in our way sometimes but also these people probably mean that Carl can keep doing a job that he loves (Bay Area Surf) and Mark can keep shaping beautiful boards for us all (Fluid Concept).

So for all those times we fight our way through 60 people in the north bay on a weekend there’s the times we surf it as the sun comes up with 3 other people out mid-week. In the end, it’s all surfing whether there’s 2 of you or 202, there’s loads of waves round here, enough for everyone to enjoy. There’s waves right now in fact…

interesting interview with new york-based designer james victore courtesy of graphic define magazine - an except from the forthcoming book by debbie millman ‘how to think like a great graphic designer’. i particularly like his honesty in the following excerpt and his definition of the impulse to produce beautiful, pure work as ‘god jobs’:

The rule here is there are jobs you do for “god,” and there are jobs you do for money. I try to approach everything as a “god job”—lowercase g. At the beginning of a project, I ask, “What are we going to do, and how are we going to do it? How are we going to make a person fall in love?” And when we start getting questionable feedback about what we’ve done, we have to realize it’s not always possible to do the god job. That’s when I know we just have to get it done and get paid.

in the interview he also talks about the designer’s responsibility in the world to contribute to society. good stuff.

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’.

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.)