electric angel /design for life

if you go down in the woods today…

…you’ll discover artworks created by pupils of graham-raincliffe schools federation.

rachel and i have been delivering a creative partnerships enquiry project with the schools, responding to a desire to engage year 7 pupils in creative thinking and project-based learning. the 11 week project is based around the process of responding to, designing and delivering public art commissions that rachel and i have collaborated on such as the scarborough-whitby railway line artwork and our current series of panels for lifts in york hospital.

the focus has been on the nearby raincliffe woods with the intention that the skills required to arrive at a full proposal for an artwork cross over much of the school curriculum demonstrating how subjects don’t exist in isolation to each other. for us as artists/designers that involves generating ideas within a defined timescale and to practical restrictions, understanding materials, budgeting and time management skills and being able to explain your ideas visually, verbally and in writing to other people. and so writing, drawing, team-working, research, negotiation, decision-making, building and blogging have all featured with the young people – exactly how rachel and i work together.

following a visit to yorkshire sculpture park, to the woods themselves with a countryside officer and workshops in the schools, the first building session in the woods took place this monday with a quarter of the cohort. these are photographs of a few of the prototypes of artworks that will be the subject of full proposals.

twitter tips for festivals

coastival is only weeks away and at a recent marketing meeting we discussed twitter and i offered a few thoughts based on our experience at electric angel and with creative coast. i claim no authority or expertise here – just what’s worked for us in different scenarios and a little creative thinking but i thought theses tips might be useful for anyone planning a festival or event. so here they are…

Continue reading…

not what you think
(or how david bowie helped us design)

the group of young adults working with the ferens gallery in hull had previously been known as ‘the ferens art ambassadors’ but there was a general feeling that this sounded rather formal and none too helpful in attracting new members to the group and promoting the exhibitions they curate. we were invited to work with the group to develop a new name and visual identity that would help them promote what they do.

the starting point was look at existing logos from a wide range of sources and uses and how they conveyed a message through their choice of words, colours and style. with those thoughts in our minds we ate some biscuits, then started to write our own descriptions of what the ‘art ambassadors’ do and how it could be described. one of the techniques we used – especially good for when you grind to a halt or need a fresh perspective at familiar phrases – was cut-up technique.

i was delighted that the group appreciated david bowie and i could take a brief excursion to alan yentob’s 1974 documentary ‘cracked actor’ where bowie’s burroughsian wordplay is synced to him singing ‘moonage daydream’. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il6-mnTjAVA. any design job you bring a bowie reference to has got to be good.

plastic soul dalliances aside, it was this process and resulting discussion (shown above) and possibly some more biscuits that led us to the phrase ‘not what you think’ as exactly the sort of challenging and polysemic phrase that would work on promotional material for both exhibitions and the group. some examples:
- ‘not what you think’ confounding expectations of what’s inside a gallery
- ‘not what you think’ as to what it’s like being part of the group
- ‘not what *you* think’ as a challenge to take on other perspectives to the world
- it’s… ‘not what you *think*’ …it’s what you do. as a prompt to get involved

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also out of this process came the title ‘future ferens’ for the group itself which we thought would work well as a subtitle or explanation of the above phrase – a concious reversal of the usual name and subtitle convention.

the second stage was to take these words and develop them as a logo that could be use in various contexts. above we are trying out variations at a second workshop using dummy posters. below is the finished logo in use on the ‘unwrapped’ exhibition publicity. it’s designed to be almost used as a ‘stamp’ over the top of images or almost haphazardly on a design, to indicate the freshness of thought by the future ferens and, in time, we hope as a stamp of approval or signifier you can trust an event bearing this mark. the final artwork which will be supplied to printers and other designers is deliberately at an angle in the hope it will never look too formal or staid.

get yer tickets

the coastival website has had a make-over for 2011 and tickets are on sale there now. if you haven’t been near scarborough and able to pick up a coastival arty postcard, images and words from them are included on the website front page (or send us a nice email if you’d like one posting to you – we like posting). you can also order the free brochure-poster from the website featuring the gorgeous gladys.

the site is again a collaboration with gordon at sneakytrick who has plugged together the joomla content management system including the online ticketing system.

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]