electric angel /design for life

intervening with CHART Scarborough

CHART Scarborough is one of the big projects were currently working on. the main focus is a map of scarborough based around cognitive mapping theory aka legible cities thinking, that has the intention of encouraging people to navigate the town via cultural destinations. to raise awareness prior to the launch and to encourage some wider participation in the project there’ll be a series of ‘interventions’ around the town over the next few weeks.

some are pretty straight forward like the sign above that went up outside the library yesterday, some will be more situationist guerilla art. i’m not saying any more about those… if you’re in scarborough you’ll hopefully discover one by chance. there’ll also be a week-long competition in the local newspaper.

the library sign is the first time – if you discount the progress reports on www.chartscarborough.com – that an section of the map has been seen in public. this is still a work in progress and there’ll be some changes to this after a couple more community workshops and feedback from the interventions, but it will give you a good idea of what it’s going to look like. the map will be packaged as part of a leaflet in which we intend to break away from the traditional imagery found on publications promoting this part of the world – ‘map as art object’ is one of the phrases from the original brief…

espionage, blackmail, romance and menace!

ah, just a typical day in the studio.

actually that’s how we’ve chosen to describe the 2010 scarborough literature festival. our design work includes posters (copywriting too on those), flyers, bookmarks targeted at adults and kids and the festival brochure. it’s a good line-up again and this year’s main image is in the style of a pop-up book with each pop-up suggesting one or more of the authors and events in the festival – this theme follows through into the brochure. we’re particularly looking forward to the beano event – tickets are on sale now from scarborough tourist information centre.

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.

meet the locals

young people’s activity guide for the name to a face exhibition at scarborough art gallery.

an exhibition of portraits can seem dull to a young audience unless the stories behind the faces are drawn out. the exhibition already does this very well, but another layer needed to be added for a younger audience. perhaps the trickiest part of this was guiding them round an exhibition you haven’t yet seen yourself – it’s one thing to look at the works that will form it and the plan of what will go where, but until you’re in the space itself with art on the walls it’s hard to think of the best way of creating that guide. but that’s a luxury you don’t have. we threw around some initial ideas with the museum trust’s learning officer, ian, and then developed the full guide from there.

‘meet the locals’ is designed to be used by children who can read on their own or by younger kids with the help of an adult or older child and encourages them to explore the exhibition according to themes, and back again to see if some of the paintings stuck in their memory. it asks questions and encourages them to make creative responses by drawing, writing and moving around the gallery. it’s an activity sheet that can’t be done anywhere except in front of the painting and photographs.

but there is something to take home – the rear of the guide has instructions of how to turn the guide itself into a mask and a pin-hole camera. galleries and museums have always seemed to be about more than looking – they’re about inspiring people, so we love the idea of young people going home and trying to ‘capture’ a portrait of someone on their pinhole camera.

east coasting for nippers

we were asked to design an activity sheet for younger visitors to the bawden and ravilious exhibition at scarborough art gallery. after a creative chat with ian, the learning manager for scarborough museums trust, we developed a series of activities that encouraged kids to explore the exhibition and respond with their own creativity.

the crab on the front echoed the exhibition leaflet and posters and provided the first ‘can you find…?’ activity.

the fisherman are inspired by a bawden linocut. the original tantalisingly doesn’t show the fruits of their struggles fishing off a pier but we thought that young kids would enjoy following the tangled lines to discover what each had caught.

the capital letters here are a copy of ravilious’s ‘nursery’ designs for wedgwood. we couldn’t resist spelling ‘cod’ underneath the fishermen. the capitals are also used on the exhibition information panels in the gallery and we hoped kids might spot those too and thus maybe read a little about bawden and ravilious.

the largest piece in the exhibition is a collage by edward bawden on a map of scarborough. we wanted to encourage young visitors to have a go themselves, so the centerspread is a contemporary map of the same area for them to decorate with their own whimsical beach scenes.

by the way, the title pun was a flash of inspiration by james – we tend to bounce verbal ideas back and forwards over our monitors and james hit this one first time i think.

…it’s a coast thing on the road

photos of the first two uses of the brand on local business vehicles by bluebird vehicles and awj glass.

…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.

coastival programme

the coastival programme was launched this week announcing a fantastic line-up for the festival in february. our challenge in designing the programme was to create a cohesive look for a wonderfully diverse weekend in which you might go see feeder, watch laurence olivier in wuthering heights, visit a video installation in an underground carpark and spend some time in the company of a best selling author.

we’ve identified the 8 strands of the festival with hand-drawn icons and a colour-coded system. the first two ‘openings’ of the programme reveal a general then genre-specific intro to coastival, the reverse is a full page of what’s going on over the whole weekend categorised by strand. we wrote the copy for the introductions.

as with all work for festivals like this the priority is to create something that is as usable as possible. all the venues are numbered and can be found via a map on the rear of the leaflet. plus there’s an at-a-glance listing so you can browse each day chronologically.

if you’d like a programme posting to you free of charge send an email titled ‘Please send me a Coastival programme’ and containing your name and address to contact@create.uk.net

don’t be gull-able

this is a companion piece to the ‘drinking‘ and ‘dog poo‘ signs. scarborough borough council gave us a very open brief to design something eye-catching and that would get the message across in a more friendly way than regular prohibitive signage. we were given free reign with the design and wording.

as with the other 2 signs, the images were entirely consutructed from lettershapes – you can see the comma for the gull’s eye and the parantheses forming the gull’s neck.

this is a small project, but public signage is so pervasive there’s a responsibility in designing this stuff. to be honest, i wish they’d just put them on lamposts and not spoilt the signposts. we got to suggest where the metal freebay signs might go in the same area and made an effort to avoid spoiling an attractive place whilst still informing people of the free wifi access. the idea behind designing all these signs the same size was that they could be clustered in just a few locations and look cohesive in an attempt to avoid too much visual pollution. it’s always a thrill to see your work in the public realm, but a shame if it’s spoiling it.

crazy, damn right i’m crazy

the title comes from a t-shirt slogan by artist ross sinclair, appropriated for this exhibition at the ferens gallery, hull. the exhibition is curated by the ferens art ambassadors – a group of young people aged 18-25, the work selected from the arts council collection featuring works by the likes of tracy emin, david hockney, joseph beuys and david shrigley.

the project started with coffee and a chat with some of the team behind the exhibition – timing from concept to delivery of print was tight so this was the only real chance to genuinely understand the motivation behind the exhibition and the works chosen for exhibit. the main aim was to break down some barriers between this supposedly high-culture thing called ‘art’ and to get people not just looking, but thinking.

after a range of sketched ideas this booklet was chosen – quite a departure from the usual gallery publicity. for starters it’s a 12-page booklet rather than a flyer or leaflet, it encourages the reader to interact by adding to the illustrations inside – each based on an artwork from the exhibition – and it’s day-glo orange. the photos here don’t really do justice to how bright these are.

this is a job that also called our copywriting skills into play. taking some of the artworks as a starting point, we developed them into the ‘activities’ in the booklet, writing the copy and providing the introduction to the exhibition – a distillation of that chat over coffee. the art ambassadors gave feedback on the initial design suggesting some rewordings and with thumbs up from the ferens and the arts council we were able to make the deadline with the booklets and posters ready for use at events promoting the exhibition. print is by scarborough-based adverset.

the exhibition opening night is this friday. we’ve also designed exhibition graphics, banners etc for inside the gallery so plenty more on this one to blog…