poster for the forthcoming andy warhol artists rooms exhibition at the ferens gallery in hull.

we’re working on a whole range of marketing material for this exhibition with the future ferens group plus kids activity sheets, a timeline, banners and more. so you can expect plenty more of the lovely cow on this blog, plus some info as to how we worked with the future ferens to develop design ideas and choose this image.

a little bit of warhol trivia for you – in 1966 andy printed wallpaper of this cow in pink & yellow and covered a whole room with it at the leo castelli gallery. although as far as we know, it’s not currently available at B&Q. but you wish it was, don’t you?

we’re delighted to have had some of our work selected for the first yorkshire graphic design exhibition.

we’re exhibiting three prints created in collaboration with rachel welford which seemed appropriate given the starting question for the exhibition: “is graphic design art?”. the prints are based around tree forms combined with typography and came out of our commission for glass panels at york hospital. they’ve been reworked from the original glass and mirror designs into monotone prints with the addition of technical markings that originally arrived on the designs by chance but provided an interesting contrast with the nature imagery.

also exhibiting is scarborough-born si billam of unit, formerly at the designers republic, who also created one of the ‘junction‘ artworks in leeds last year. the yorkshire graphic design exhibition is at cafe 164, munro house, leeds and runs from 14 may – 23 june.

[exhibition poster/flyer by split]

that’s ‘spring’ as in springs of water, but it’s the right time of year to venture into the hidden beauty of the yorkshire wolds and perhaps discover a poem or two whilst you’re at it.

part of the ‘wander’ project, six benches designed and built by angus ross and featuring a poem sequence by john w clarke were installed last year at spots along the wolds way. we were delighted to be invited to design the typographic setting of the poems.

this seemed to be a project that required a simple approach in harmony with the bench designs, the spirit of the poetry and the landscape setting. our solution was sturdy flowing lines of sans-serif text with hedera’s picked out in red marking the line breaks – this enabled us to make use of the length of the bench slats and have the text large enough to catch the eye of passers-by.

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the benches are constructed from steam-bent english oak and designed to weather into the landscape. james and i wandered in search of some of them last autumn hoping to capture the process of the oak silvering and the etched text softening into the material, these photos by james are from that stroll.

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there’s a little more about the project here in the Yorkshire Post including a nice pic of one of the benches featuring etched back rest slats with John waiting for the muse to appear.

so i was thinking… what if you took a pixelated lettershape (such as you see if you zoom in on text on your computer screen) and made a 3D model of it treating each shade of grey as a layer – the paler the shade, the lower down the layer would be?

it would look like this.

[laser-cut gill sans letter 'a'. part of a proof-of-concept model for the candidate world heritage site public art commission at monkwearmouth that rachel welford and i have been shortlisted for. cut at zapp! by don french signs.]

poster/flyer and visual identity for the first in a series of concerts at hackness village hall. we love the idea of this – top quality music, village hall atmosphere and you can bring your own booze.

— you’ll need to defend (and explain) your creative thinking. to your clients and your colleagues. everything has to have a reason, make sure you know yours.

— good design has nothing to do with fashion.

— typography isn’t about choosing a typeface. it’s about understanding how words work, how people read, how to present information. accept that you probably know very little about it. understand that you need to know a lot about it. rectify the situation.

— you’ll have to be able to get on with people. or at least pretend to.

— you will spend large amounts of time doing stuff that you don’t actually consider ‘designing’.

— those tough deadlines you had for college projects? they were ridiculously long.

— you’ll need to know how to lay out a basic page that’s accurate, legible and visually engaging. and you’ll need to be able to do it within half an hour.

— you’ll need to know how to set up and lay out a long document that’s accurate, legible and visually engaging. and you’ll need to be able to do it within a day.

— you will make dreadful mistakes. you will pay for them. it’s not that bad. you learn. you get better at what you do.

— you need to be thick-skinned. at some point someone will hate your design and say so to your face.

— you’ll require a reserve of tried-and-tested design approaches. not every job will give or require lots of time and creative freedom. sometimes you’ll need to deliver solid results very fast. it helps if you know you can do that and how you will do it.

— learn to ask for help. soak up all the knowledge you can. never stop.

— it’s important to celebrate your successes.

— design is the easy bit of the job. all the stuff you have to do in order to find, keep and manage the work is the tough bit.

— ethical decisions will become a major part of your life. from how much to charge per hour, to gauging how much a job is actually ‘worth’, to what mark-up to put on printing and whether to let your client know it’s there…. decide if this stuff matters to you. and if it does, decide how you’ll deal with it.

— you have to learn to listen to your soul. if you feel compelled to be a designer, you’ll suffer if all you’re doing is chasing work that pays the bills. learn to look for work that satisfies your soul as well as your bank balance. the trick is to achieve both at once.

— it can feel like the best job in the world. if you want it to.

just before christmas we were invited by north yorkshire council’s 4youth service to work a small group of teenage boys in whitby. the youth leaders and young people alike were finding coursework based around life issues uninspiring and wondered if we might be able to bring a more creative approach to exploring some potentially difficult topics – in this case, the worries and emotions that might arise with an unplanned teenage pregnancy and where to get help.

i’ve always found comics and graphic novels an interesting way of telling a story, particularly where a narrative might have to start and be resolved within only 8 or 9 frames and decided to use this as a format to explore the theme. i was hoping the group might contain a few comic fans, or at least they’d seen recent superhero movies, but was greeted with blank faces when i asked. undeterred i whipped out a dog-eared copy of ‘batman : the dark knight returns‘ and we began…

we started by looking at example of storytelling in comics, particularly those in newspapers that deal with limited space – both judge dredd (in the daily star) and calvin & hobbes were great examples of condensing a lot of interest into a small number of images. we then each developed a composite character for our own strip taking visual elements from both people we know and those more famous and then giving them a behavioural identity and finally, a name.

some of the potential concerns and issues from the previous week’s coursework were given to the character to base a story around within a defined number of frames using some of the visual and narrative techniques we’d observed in the examples. moving the different stories along one stage at a time, we purposely left the penultimate frame until last to provide the crucial ‘revelation’ moment where the character realises they can get help.

we often find ourselves working in situations where we might be forewarned that ‘they’re a difficult group’ or lack concentration, so i was delighted to be told afterwards by the youth leader that this group’s engagement in the activity and thus the subject was way beyond normal.

digital scarborough is back – this saturday at woodend from 2pm. it’s great to see the event return, this year with a strong business focus to the daytime followed by a glorious fun packed evening of music – it’s not just for techies & geeks!

keynote speaker is ajaz ahmed, founder of freeserve, including opportunity for an informal chat with the man over coffee. there’s work on display by an emerging generation of digital creatives and i’ve been asked to be on the ‘ask an expert’ panel. so come and along and judge if i’m actually worthy of such a lofty billing… i’ll also be percussioning in the evening as part of everyone’s favourite dada-inspired freeform funk collective, the jawline of julianne moore. busy day! full info at: www.digital-scarborough.co.uk

oh yeah, the organisers asked us to design a poster, so here it is.

for the current exhibition in our tiny gallery – tickle my fancy – we’ve covered the windows with felt, laser-cut with text and a lace pattern to announce the exhibition and provide peep-holes into the gallery. we’ve worked with artist jan bee brown aiming for a holistic approach to the window panels, publicity, interpretation and exhibition itself so they work as a whole.

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it’s been an experiment in terms of processes and materials, particularly in the size of text you can cut out of felt – too small or too large and it loses structural integrity – but we’re pretty pleased with the results. the gallery lights up at night inviting passers-by to ‘take a peek’ through the lace.

the top photo here is of the interpretation panel using red vinyl lettering on copper-hued mirror to compliment the bath that is part of the installation.

thanks to camira fabrics for the red felt, the cast iron bath company for the bath, and don french signs for the laser-cutting and interpretation panel idea and fabrication.
there are more photos of the exhibition over on the electric angel gallery website.

invitation for ‘tickle my fancy’ – a textile art installation by jan bee brown in our tiny gallery space which opens tomorrow night.

the installation explores the relationship between victorian lace ‘tatting’ and sexuality so we’ve sent out invitations for a later then usual ‘very private, private view’ in the spirit of the exhibition. we hoped to capture some of that sensuality in the design with a laser-cut lace pattern and typography peeping through to a photo of one of jan’s felt and lace artworks. please do pop along should you find yourself in scarborough tomorrow evening – it’ll be a slightly different display of sexuality to that found in the bars nearby but no less intriguing.

oh, and don’t forget to bring a dainty tea cup with you…