how did you get here?
chalk stencil in Scarborough town centre. more on the the CHART Scarborough interventions soon.
Archived entries for how we work
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
watch this space
we seem to be always popular with work placements, perhaps partly because so few design studios offer them (shame on you!). and we like to give our placements something fun and real to work on if we can.
recent 6th form placement sabina impressed us with her photography so we suggested working on a centrespread for the july/august issue of ‘scarboroughs future’ that encouraged people to look at possible future renaissance projects. these include the spa and surrounding area taking in the roundabout [possible future use as a surfers changing and shower area?] and controversial disused cliff lift, the far harbour area, the ‘argos building’ [space better put to use as a market square?] and the grand-daddy of them all – the futurist on the seafront.
sabina created this photomontage with the addition of our words and typography. it’s a little different to some of our previous scarborough-focussed projects in that we’re not trying to make scarborough look good, but rather encourage people to reimagine spaces and how they might be transformed.
for us this also hints at some future projects we have lined up in which we’ll be exploring space in scarborough and in one instance, helping the physical transformation of an area.
art is a messy business
i’m kneeling in a pool of seawater, getting wet shoes and jeans, taking photographs of mirrors stuck in the sand. was the likelihood of this mentioned when i first started down the path of being a designer? no it wasn’t.
but working with rachel at least gets me out of the studio. we might tell you what we were doing and why later in the year.
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.
enterprising britain – planning the visit
the national judging for enterprising britain involves a judging team visiting each of the regional finalists – our judge was internet entrepreneur james murray-wells. as part of the planning team we continued the theme that personal stories are the best way of explaining the renaissance of scarborough and set about identifying the people and places that would best tell scarborough’s story and who we would introduce to james.
[image: woodend creative workspace, one of scarborough's newest success stories and the obvious starting point for the judging visit]
we had to be quite brutal about ignoring protocol – it was quite clear that meeting the usual dignitaries might be the ‘proper’ thing to do but it wouldn’t help tell the story in the limited time we had. we may have put a few noses out of joint… another issue was where to take james and his judging assistants – there was some concern from the council that we should avoid scarborough’s less pretty areas but we insisted that these were part of the story and places where change was happening and transforming lives – the ‘real scarborough’, if you like. if we just showed the places that have already been transformed there’d be no contrast and less of a story to tell.
our watchword at all times was ‘no spin’ – we would show scarborough’s enterprising attitude in all walks of life and tell it like it is. if scarborough has one big challenge, or even one constant failing – it’s that it’s rarely any good at shouting about itself. we were glad to be able to help that process.
