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.

we didn’t manage to blog this at the time, although it’s lovely that people are still mentioning the design. taking cue’s from literary history and continuing to evoke sense of place [the lure of a long weekend in scarborough is an integral part of marketing the festival] this identity from 2011 helped the festival consolidate it’s place on the literary calendar.

scarborough’s own cultural olympiad project, seaswim, is sending poem postcards to outdoor swimming clubs around the country asking them to notice sights, sounds and textures when they swim. the aim is to write a collective poem from the responses.

look out for a seaswim exhibition as part of coastival and a series of beach hut artist residencies in summer, plus regular group swims of course.

we were invited to take part in this year’s beach hut advent calendar down the coast in bridlington. a beach hut is opened each night in the lead up to christmas and the theme we selected from the nativity story was “although many people who lived in this area were jewish they were ruled by the romans.” our choice was based purely on typographic possibilities – we figured we could do something with roman and hebrew letterforms.

playing with the idea of occupation and oppression and wanting to create something that people could take part in, and hopefully take something away from, we came up with the idea of filling the beach hut with balloons. it took 300. and all afternoon to blow them up. we closed the hut up and at 6pm two children opened the doors to reveal the mountain of balloons inside.

each has the word ‘oppression’ printed on it in a roman typeface and visitors to the hut were invited to think about an oppressive situation in their life and pop a balloon. inside each is one of several messages derived from isaiah 51:14 in jewish scripture promising freedom. as the balloons were popped a backdrop was gradually revealed featuring ‘shalom’ – a hebrew word meaning peace.

there’s still two more advent beach hut openings if you fancy popping along – all are welcome. you can find out more here (including a video clip of our hut being opened) and here and keep an eye on BBC local news for a feature. thanks to ben for inviting us to take part and blow up the balloons.

wishing you all a happy christmas and peaceful new year. from adrian, charlotte and rebecca.

interpretation panels for the recent ‘landscape revisited’ exhibition in scarborough art gallery featuring photos by joe cornish and paintings by kane cunningham.

the text was pretty much a conversation between the two artists reflecting their working methods that created the body of work for the exhibition. we took a typographic approach that helped break up the large body of text and highlight some of the common themes.

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the ordnance survey style contours feature shutter speeds and paint reference numbers rather than topographic data and run across the artwork labels too. larger contours on the gallery walls helped tie the exhibition together and were created on the fly responding to the hanging with jan, the exhibition’s curator, who had the original idea to team joe and kane together.

some photos from ‘echo funnel’ at enchanted parks 2011 in gateshead. what began as a clever yet charmingly simple idea from lizi patch blossomed into having a life of its own in the park with people queuing up to share their thoughts, christmas wishes or just have a fascinating (and rather addictive) conversation with the tree. you can tell a tree anything, you know.

we were also delighted to create some confusion and mischief with people wondering how on earth it worked. one of the most enjoyable aspects of making it work over 5 nights was the suspension of disbelief – people want to believe that a little magic is all that’s needed to chat with a tree.

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‘the tree’ talked to thousands of people over the week with many return visits and promises that people would come back for a chat when they were next in the park, although we can’t guarantee the funnel will always be there…

some thanks are due: to prop maker extraordinaire scotty for turning my rough sketch into something wonderful, to mark for the initial technical gubbins, dan and the tech team for saving the day and to robin and lesley at magnetic events for having us.

by the way – we’re on the look out for other opportunities to make trees (or rocks, or buildings, or vehicles or…) talk, and to do some more hand-painted lettering. get in touch and the echo funnel could be there… be there… be there…

whilst charlotte holds the fort back in scarborough, i’m up in gateshead this week with theatre director-writer lizi patch. together we’ve been commissioned to produce an artwork we devised called ‘echo funnel’ as part of enchanted parks.

enchanted parks is a festival that runs 7-11 december when you’re invited to explore the delightful saltwell park transformed by magical lights, sounds and artworks. just some of the wonderful things this year include the chance to meet medusa in a copse, discover a strained glass rose window made entirely of ice, watch a 3-D snowman zoetrope and, of course, have a conversation with a tree.

opening night was magical with children and adults alike suspending disbelief to tell the tree what’s on their mind through the funnel and hear its response. the tree will be listening and replying every evening until sunday so if you find yourself around the north east of england do pop along and tell it what’s on your mind.

you can catch a glimpse of echo funnel in action courtesy of the BBC by clicking on ‘wonderful things’ above. i’ll add some of our own photos as the festival progresses.

the final element of mine and rachel welford‘s commission to design and produce panels for lifts at york hospital was in the theatre lift. this takes patients to and from the operating theatre, usually on a bed and so in keeping with the intention of providing a welcome distraction for patients on a short but potentially stressful journey, this design is applied to the ceiling of the lift.

it continues the theme of native british trees that have a link with healing, in this case silver birch and the birds likely to nest in its branches, here represented by text.

the third of the york lift panels, based on the horse chestnut tree. we had a little fun with this – the text woven into the layered leaf & flower design are the rules for playing conkers. the original photos that the artwork is based on were taken around north yorkshire by rachel.

pics of the ‘cherry’ panel in york hospital created with rachel welford. this was the first we completed and was initially used as a prototype to check our creative response to the DDA issues that come with lifts, glass and hospitals in general. it got the thumbs up from the hospital users group and staff and thus the green light for two further glass panels and a ceiling-based artwork.