electric angel /design for life

coastival’s rather splendid day out

coastival returns, and a year earlier than expected with a one-day event – their rather splendid day out.

due to public demand, coastival’s buxom seaside postcard mascot – christened glady’s – also returns to entice you to the UK’s first seaside resort for an out-of-season day of drama, laughs and good grooves for all ages. tickets are already sold out for some events so head straight to www.coastival.com for yours.

images are from our flyer design featuring a die-cut cover, hand-drawn logo and some cheeky seafront-inspired typography.

saucy

the coastival 2011 brochure design – it folds out from a postcard size leaflet to a large poster. we had fun playing with the seaside cliches and puns (and acknowledge our debt to saucy seaside postcard artist donald mcgill for the inspiration).

the toe-dipping skinny man illustration is by house of deadleg, the plump lady we drew in-house. look out for a few more seaside cheeky chaps and gorgeous gals when the coastival essential guide comes out in november-december which will feature complete listings for the weekend.

iSaint

iSaint came about as a response to a call from designed and made for their items that could be given or lent to people as part of 100% design (aka london design festival) which is happening this week. the idea of the project, called ‘love me live with me’, is that people live with an item for a couple of weeks, then respond with how/if it made an impact on their lives in some way.

iSaint is a secular icon – you write your name on the front and hang or place it by the door to be reminded every time you leave the house of your potential to play a positive role in the world.

you can follow progress of our iSaints (there’s a thousand of them out there somewhere) and look at the other items that are part of the project at www.lovemelivewithme.com

post some art today

advance postcards for coastival 2011. the postcards all feature images by local creatives who will be taking part in the yorkshire coast’s biggest arts festival in february next year including rachel welford (her postcard features the glass panels in our studio/gallery windows), rachel howfield who turned a hotel room into art installation at the last coastival and this haiku by kate evans with photo by mark vesey:

we wanted the cards to be functional so that you could post some art to a friend. there are six to collect but you’ll need to visit several venues around scarborough to find them all…

for the postcard promoting ‘rollercoastival’ – the mini-festival within a festival of creative stuff for kids, we took a photo of a craft activity from last year and superimposed text taken from a ‘rollercoastival radio’ broadcast about ice cream from the first festival. the fonts were chosen based on shop fronts on scarborough’s south shore ice cream parlours and arcades.

the coastival poster/flyer with details of all the headline acts will be launched on tuesday down on the south bay beach.

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.