electric angel /design for life

back & refreshed

we’re back open for business as usual after 2 weeks off over easter. i stayed mostly at home, with a quick mountain biking trip to innerleithen over the last weekend, while adrian and rebecca have been to spain. it’s a bit of a catch-up for a few days while we work on renaissance news before the final assault on the CHART scarborough map. impressions from the last meeting before we went on hols is that it’s nearing completion, with just a few minor adjustments and additions.

it’s been such a time consuming process, it made me think how difficult it would be to map somewhere you don’t live, in any detail. i’ve really had to use the resources available to me, such as satellite imagery, OS maps and good old fashioned walking, in order to get the level of detail we want. details as far down as kerb shapes, steps, alleys and crossings are what differentiate a pedestrian map from a road map, so we’ve been making sure we include a curved building or a waist-high wall as much as we include a huge landmark such as the grand hotel.

as scarborough has so many landmark buildings and recognisable features, it makes for an interesting and beautiful map with individual qualities that couldn’t be associated with other places. also the spread of green areas has meant it’s been possible to include important contour information, valuable to a pedestrian, in a way that is both functional and aesthetically pleasing. hopefully people will agree that the finished product is both useful and stunning to look at.

incidentally, as you may be able to see from the photo, spa bridge is also refreshed and open for business as usual with a shiny, new yellow surface to match the sand and a new turquoise paint job to match today’s cloudless sky!

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.

updates-a-go-go

yep, it’s update night at the first creative coast of 2010 with news and opportunities from the north yorkshire creative network and on local projects. essential if you want to know what’s going on and how you might get developed or commissioned (courtesy of a new scheme offered by the north yorks network). rick of chrysalis arts and wendy of create will be spilling the beans. it’ll be nice to be back at the merchant too. 5.30pm. link to creative coast facebook group.

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.

name to a face

brochure-cum-poster for ‘name to a face’ at scarborough art gallery. the brochure includes a map of scarborough for you to have a go at matching portraits of famous people to associated locations in scarborough.

do go see this show – the wall paintings by sarah venus [also used on the poster] are fantastic and really help bring the paintings alive. there’s also a young person’s activity guide we designed [more of which later] which makes it a good exhibition for all ages. you can get a sneak preview here.

cc returns

we needed to quickly knock up some flyers for creative coast which kicks off again next week after a bit of a break and couldn’t resist this pun.

ironically all the effort into enterprising britain [2009 brochure here featuring scarborough] combined with a very busy 6 months for us and create meant that some of the things that won us the award have slipped – hence the almost absence of creative coast this year. but despite being quiet we have been busy behind the scenes making links and securing a little funding that will enable us to hook up with networks across yorkshire, sharing good practice and looking for opportunities.

the first of these is an evening with steve ding of bmedi@ in november, we’ll be sending a posse over to bradford in 2010 and hopefully get some kind of networking event sorted too. we have hook-ups with creative, IT & digital york for 2010 in the planning stages as well as having our sights on leeds and hull too. looks busy – we’re definitely spurred on by the two enterprise awards and looking forward to sharing our story. our ‘roadshow’ approach is also something of a pilot scheme that might be rolled out to other sectors with creative coast training organisations and businesses in scarborough how to get out there and share their story.

we’re also continuing what we hope are useful training/taster events, the first being ‘twitter night’ next thursday plus we’ll be bringing the creative sector on board with the CHART Scarborough project via a fun mobile phone treasure hunt in the dark. if you haven’t got hold of a flyer you can click on the second image above to view it large enough to read the text. looking forward to seeing folks on thursday.

bridge. our new exhibition

the new exhibition in our tiny gallery will be bridge – photographs by graham rhodes.

it’s daunting to begin to introduce graham, depending on whether that day he is exhibiting paintings, MC-ing a concert, acting as a ghost pirate, or as was our experience recently, collaborating as a storywriter on a comic. if you own the police’s early singles you’ll also have seen graham’s graphic design work. for our exhibition he is a photographer – something that graham has taken up quite recently and with some wonderful results. we love his good-affordable-art philosophy and the framed one-off prints in this exhibition will all be for sale at £40 each.

if i remember right [and conversations with graham can go off at deliciously wild tangents], the idea for the exhibition came from us chatting about producing some high quality scarborough artist’s postcards to be launched at an exhibition in our gallery. well, the postcards haven’t quite happened yet – next summer perhaps – but graham did hint that he’d love to take a series of photos of the iconic spa footbridge which is part of the view from our gallery/studio window. so we thought ‘why not’? and here we are.

the exhibition opens on monday with a private view this friday at 5pm. do get in touch if you’d like an invitation sending. we liked the idea of giving a photograph as the invitation, so one windy day 2 weeks ago graham photographed a printed invited tied to the bridge [below].

rock the boat

publicity material for ‘rock the boat – an exhibition of mechanical sculptures at scarborough art gallery.

as with the bawden and ravilious design this is a leaflet that opens out into a poster but with something of a challenge as the only images of sufficient quality we had to use were of half-finished sculptures. so for the main image we drew an illustration of the ‘mad cow minotaur’ that was to feature in the exhibition.

the print uses metallic silver ink to simulate the metal finish of some of the sculptures and we were able to follow this through on the posters outside the gallery and the information panels inside the exhibition. given the main image, the extra ‘o’s in ‘mooving’ seemed a highly appropriate mis-spelling to add to the design.

the leaflet also features a quick activity for younger visitors which we devised – spotting some of the components from which the sculptures are made [shown below]. as well as the minotaur the exhibition includes a moo-ing cow, two boats, a fascinating take on conception and a recently-delivered spinning teacup. the exhibition runs until sunday 20 september.

scarborough rocks!

poster and flyers for battle of the sands 09. the call has gone out for bands to take part in october of this year – last year’s winners – the excellent mum locked in castle – won a support slot with feeder at coastival. get your skates on as the deadline is 14th august. details at www.create.uk.net

we’ve designed the poster so that the call for entries section can be sliced off once the entry deadline has expired, thus saving print costs and paper by not needing two separate posters.