electric angel /design for life

pyschogeography, postcards and place

to accompany the production of the CHART Scarborough map and to follow the success of the workshops with local residents which amongst other things, sought to identify the essence of scarborough, a postcard project was launched. this teamed local residents – a mix of teenagers and older adults – with a poet and photographer to talk about and photograph the places that had resonance for them.

photographer tony bartholomew took the final photos used on the postcards and john w clarke shaped the verbal and written material into prose and scratch-poems for the rear of the cards relating to that place. some poignant, some playful, the wordplay also extends to the minutiae of text often seen on postcards such as the publisher – we designed logos for some. each is addressed as if travelling to the place but using ‘mind map’ directions, not a conventional address. we designed each card in a slightly different style based on postcards we randomly found, the ‘postmark’ and ‘stamp’ linking them into a set and to the map.

the cards are scattered around public buildings and cultural venues in Scarborough, there are 12 to collect if you fancy hunting them down. the 12th will give you the CHART Scarborough map references of the places the photos were taken so you can visit for yourself.

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no boundaries

we have some bad habits at electric angel. we often get so wrapped up in a project that it crosses that boundary between business and pleasure. actually, pretty much everything we do involves not knowing where that line is – that’s just what happens when you’re doing something you love for a job. and so a project that begins in the studio will quite often feature in our leisure time too. this seems to gain us respect from creatives in other disciplines and causes accountants to have fits. (but what do accountants know – if they get creative it usually ends up in time at her majesty’s pleasure.)

anyway, such it is with CHART Scarborough. we’re having to dissuade james from spending every spare hour mapping the rest of the town in microscopic detail (wait until someone pays us to do it!) and i’m on some kind of pyschogeographic tip – one of those occurrences where you’ve been doing something for a while and not realised that it had a proper name.

so here’s some links for you that i’ve come across in my internet and real world wanderings:

phantom city
the blurb: ‘phantom city uses personal digital devices to transform the city into a living museum’. my iphone says it needs a holiday in nyc to check this out. ‘other futures’ is the first such tour – allowing you to wander the city looking at buildings that never were. ace.

soundwalk
beautifully done walking tours of nyc, paris, china and elsewhere by locals for the iphone.

stephen walter
the lovely hand-drawn map art of stephen walter – i first saw his stuff on the recent couple of excellent BBC series about maps and map-making which were perfect timing for us working on CHART Scarborough.

history pin
simple idea but it’s the front page images that capture the imagination – wonder if this could be made to work just like those with google street view?

london poetry game
because in london you’re supposedly never more than 10ft from a speaker of a foreign language, ross sutherland has translated each line of a new poem into a different language. the idea being you find someone to translate a line for you. the finish poem will be assembled from every translation phoned in and broadcast at the national theatre this sunday.

coastival365
scarborough photographer tony bartholomew’s ongoing documenting of the town over the course of a year

blipfoto.com/ah2010
and evening news photographer, andrew higgins’ photoblog

the devils plantation
a story as puzzle, navigating ‘glasgow’s secret geometry’.

and here you can download my own pyschogeographic trail of scarborough, although you could use it with any map of any place really. james is currently writing a trail based on almost-disappeared wall painted signs that we’re often spotting around the town.

stacks of work

stacks of the CHART Scarborough maps lining our windowsill in preparation for tomorrow’s launch. we’ll show you the whole thing after the launch (gotta give people some reason to come…*)

also we forgot to give our customary work placement shout out to emma, who right now is working on the visuals for the launch. she’s with us for the next fortnight.

*actually, a unique performance by sjt outreach and some moves from scarborough hip-hop school are pretty good reasons. wine too. and food.

bridlington poetry festival

no, that’s not a close-up of dodgy printing but rather hand-painted colour forming the background of this leaflet for a new festival starting this year. i think the idea was suggested by john clarke, festival director and sometime collaborator on such as ‘the shop of priceless things‘. i say ‘think’, because quite often ideas for a design come out of an initial cuppa and a chat – i do know we went away with john getting out his brushes to paint and cut some potential backgrounds (he recently exhibited at scarborough art gallery).

the intention is to suggest the craft reflecting the creative process of creating a poem and a sense of the elemental with the bold geometric shapes. we also consciously kept the typography quite simple in keeping with the relatively conservative tradition of setting most poems. the leaflet opens out into a poster.

how did you get here?

chalk stencil in Scarborough town centre. more on the the CHART Scarborough interventions soon.

what is a creative?

synchronicity – you gotta love it. whilst on a short break in liverpool this last week rebecca and i visited the tate to see the seagram murals but also took a look at this is sculpture as seen it was on having no idea what would be exhibited.

you never leave work behind, even on holiday and i’ve had wayne hemmingway‘s philosophy on designers being thinkers, not just do-ers in my head since he spoke at the opening of woodend. i imagine it’s his off-the-shelf speech but it struck a chord because electric angel is becoming more multidisciplinary with each passing year and a tightly defined perception of what a designer does or what medium he/she works in is increasingly irrelevant. you’re known by what you do, not by how you describe yourself. if you can think creatively about a problem, it doesn’t really matter if the end result is to be drawn, printed or built – you can learn a new practical skill or even better, utilise another’s expertise to help realise an idea, but the ability to design is nurtured over time and through experience.

wayne had curated one of the rooms in the sculpture exhibition (hence the synchronicity), complete with disco-funk soundtrack and colour-changing dance floor. has anyone told him he’s a designer and should stick to boots? not for years. he’d done a good job at the tate and brought his trademark man-of-the-people approach to the sometimes stuffy and clichéd world of art galleries.

so wayne’s philosophy was in my head as i wandered round and had a quick boogie, not least as i knew i’d be returning to a studio where the job list includes designing maps, concrete paving and school uniforms.

and posters and leaflets of course.

[image: sketches for possible uniform styles at graham & raincliffe schools]

is social media worth the effort?

we’ve had a few invitations recently to propose social media strategies for organisations or events. it’s not a service we’ve ever advertised, but then that’s never stopped us in the past. it’s our own approach to promoting electric angel via such as twitter, this blog and facebook that has caused people to ask us if we could do something similar for them.

the image above is part of my sketch showing how we approach our social media profile. which makes it sound all very calculated – in truth we take a very intuitive approach and i tried to explain this with icons showing how the corporate and more personaility-driven aspects of ‘the electric angel brand’ work together. the different paths and arrows show how they interlock and routes of interaction. to be honest it’s not something we’d have normally analysed other than the occasional over-the-monitor conversation, but once someone asks how you do it you have to take a step back and look at how it’s all working. and working it must be, or folks wouldn’t be so interested.

below is a part of a perhaps more understandable diagram that plotted a possible social media campaign along a timeline, in this case for an arts council exhibition. the crux was understanding the two essential purposes – reaching the intended audiance, and keeping them interested. the former is about knowing your audience and what they do online, the latter requires some more creative ideas. interestingly we’ve had quite polarised views on social media, with some doubting they have anywhere near the time needed to even bother trying it and others thinking it’s pretty simple stuff.

oh, and while we’re on the subject, we’ve finally worked out a proper use for the electric angel flickr [featured in the right hand column of this blog]. we’ll be using it to show snapshots of life at electric angel, work in progress, days out, that kind of thing. not great photos, but hopefully a bit more insight into who we are and how we work that will compliment this blog and our tweeting.

crazy, the legacy

following on from the ‘crazy, damn right i’m crazy’ exhibition, we were asked to design a legacy document that documented the process which resulted in the exhibition. the intention is to provide a resource for others planning a similar process or exhibition.

our design is a pack of booklets, collated in a black envelope with orange print matching the exhibition’s publicity material. the envelope also contains the poster and promo booklet and a ‘found object’ – namely one of the t-short comments visitors left at the exhibition.

we were also invited to write about our approach to designing for the exhibition. you can read that excerpt here.

straight down the line

we’ve set up a separate blog for the public art project that rachel and i have been comissioned to deliver on the scarborough-whitby old railway line. you can track progress of the project on the blog and get a sneak view of the designs as they evolve. poetry workshops with users of the track begin this week and we’ve been out grafitti-ing [in rather windy weather] to advertise them. more at: www.railwayart.com

our next project…

…will be the area shown below.

we’re pleased to announce that we will be working artist rachel welford to provide a piece of public art on the old scarborough-whitby railway line, now part of the national cycle route and an increasingly used alternative transport route into urban scarborough.

the artwork will form part of a new track surface near the road bridge at the bottom of woodland ravine in scarborough at the intersection of several routes. the work’s function is to act as a waymarker and signpost and will be visible to users of the line and by pedestrians and vehicles from the road bridge. adrian and rachel [taking a snap on the pic below] produced the winning design in a competitive submission with rebecca providing some vital technical insight to bring the idea to fruition.

the project will involve local community groups who use the track working with poet john clarke to generate text for the artwork. this project will be something of a new venture for us and we hope, lead to us applying for similar work in the future. we’ll blog progress on here as it develops. workshops with the community groups should begin in the next couple of weeks with completion of the project in october of this year.

some links:
friends of the old railway line
the cinder track – a project by university of sheffield students. summary of the cinder track project in this issue of renaissance news.
sustrans