the shop of priceless things
our most recent public art commission – a collaboration with poet john w clarke. the shop of priceless things is in rotherham town centre.
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when is an annual report not an annual report?
not a joke from a christmas cracker but artworks creative communities annual report 2008-2009. similar to the report-cum-calendar we designed for coast and moors voluntary action, our solution for artworks responds to the challenge of keeping a report in people’s hands throughout the year.
it’s a little unusual in that most of the pages are blank. artworks trade in creative ideas so we thought it appropriate that they gave away sketchbooks in which other people could put their ideas. inserted at intervals throughout the book are pages of handwritten and stuck-in information on specific strands of work that can be discovered by chance. the covers both fold out to reveal the generic information.
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opening soon
photo from the press call at ‘the shop of priceless things’ in rotherham on friday. poet john w clarke admiring some of the stock collected from the people of rotherham, me dressed as a tugboat captain for no reason other than it’s the warmest jumper i have. james behind the lens.
as you can see, this was taken part-way through the window graphics being applied – which was proving to be a struggle at only 5°. there are some tweaks being applied this week and we’ll have pics of the whole shop – all nine windows – early next week.
we’re opening a shop
we’re moving into the world of retail with a shop in rotherham town centre. the ’shop of priceless things’ [formerly burger king - above] opens this saturday and is a collaboration with poet john w clarke.
we’ll blog some images next week.
chart in print
this month’s renaissance news includes a centrepsread about CHART Scarborough so far – or you can catch up on the blog. it’s the first time the logo has been seen in print and gives a hint as to how it’s designed to be used as a containing shape as well as traditional logo. it’s going to be cropping up all over the place shortly – if you see us wandering around town measuring up various windows and signboards on monday you’ll gather something is cooking…
more names, more faces
photos of our two full walls for the ‘name to a face’ exhibition. the mood of two distinct areas of the exhibition was of piecing together information, notably about victorian society photographer sarony, and making sense of a vast archive of material from a scarborough family. visitors to the show were encouraged to add any further enlightenment to the material on display.
to echo that theme we developed a chequerboard approach to the interpretation panels that was both very cost-effective and allowed some freedom for extra works to be added. initial layout ideas for the two walls were produced in the studio and then we helped place and fix the panels in the gallery.
other interpretation panels for the exhibition match in style and all the prints have a textured laminate and are wrapped to give the effect of canvases to tie in with the paintings that formed the rest of the exhibition.
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below you can see one of sarah venus’s wonderful wall paintings in the background – we incorporated a corner frame design by sarah into the panels for a cohesive look.
an interesting project
first public outing for the CHART Scarborough logo, on the side of woodend at last night’s creative coast mobile phone treasure hunt.
making an entrance
occasionally we are approached to work on something that doesn’t exactly fit our business model of working with public sector clients and charities, but the subject matter of the job gets us so excited we have to say yes. when we were approached by local engineering firm unison to help them make their reception entrance a bit more dynamic for a series of visits from the USA, thoughts of cladding the walls in dual-layers of images and text flooded into our heads. they’d never go for that…would they?
well, yes, they would!
unison’s clients include huge names in world aviation and vehicle manufacture such as boeing and alexander dennis and they recently began running tours across the UK taking in their facilities at eastfield industrial estate, alexander dennis, GKN aerospace and the university of sheffield’s advanced manufacturing research centre. we first helped them create a brochure for these ‘tech tours’ and this formed the basis of the reception area designs. our suggestion was to use the large wall at the back of the area as a kind of introduction to the tour, showing the places visited. this would be in two layers, a bottom layer carrying on the smoke design from the brochure and a second perspex layer showing the current tour itinerary and clients.
the use of the perspex layer serves 2 purposes. it creates a separate focus from the purely aesthetic background images, allowing important information to be displayed, literally standing off. it also takes into account the possibility that the tours could change venues and therefore the perspex can be replaced or amended without adjustment to the rear panel. bay area sign and image solutions were helpful as usual in making the idea work.
the total effect of the reception area was added to with door signage and another board showing unison’s key client, which sits behind the reception desk, visible as soon as you enter. in the future we hope to be adding more signage to the factory, including a 5 metre long glass wall and banners throughout. it’s exciting to work on such large scale things with clients who don’t see anything as an impossibility and like to see nice, big design as much as we do!
some other nice, big design will be revealed soon when the railwayart project is put in place.
meeting the locals
we were in scarborough art gallery to take photos of our interpretation panels for the ‘name to a face’ exhibition and were able to snap this school visit using the ‘meet the locals‘ activity guides we designed. they hadn’t got round to building them into pinhole cameras yet. the chap on the wall is captain browne bushell – a royalist privateer (that’s pirate to you and me) from whitby.
the work experience dilemma
a Q&A session at the york ‘cultural evolution’ symposium this week brought up the issue of creative businesses taking on work placements.
a young creative asked how he could get some real world experience and a business owner replied that it was common to work 8am-11pm as it is and would really struggle to take on placements. that tends to be the common excuse. but i disagree and i think small creative businesses who think like this are losing out.
i think it helps for both parties to understand the ‘arrangement’ of placements. i confess we’ve never actually explained our expectations to any placement assuming they ‘get it’ already, but here’s how i think it pans out…
