Physical Fiction (aka. Samuel Cox and Justin LaRosa) with their love of lego and letterpress decided to combine the two to form the fantastic idea of Lego Letterpress.
It all seems so obvious now. What designer/geek doesn’t love lego? Of course it’s going to be fantastic when its printed. Pixel art, I love it.
Buy your prints here!
Tags: 8-bit, Art, lego, letterpress, pixel art
I came across McBess a while ago whilst looking in a magazine and I remember it striking me and thinking, now this is something I really like. McBess’ style is simple, black and while, music, food and girls…oh and axes. Oh yes, axes.
Snowboard’s, T-Shirts, Dunny’s, murals, plectrums, iPad app, books, drawing, digital drawing, magazines, you name it. He has done it! Check out some of his work below or go to his blog. Now.
These above do not do him justice. I just love the use of typography as well as illustration. So awesome. View more of his work on his blog here.
Tags: awesome, axes, black and white, Drawing, food, girls, Music
Check out this great documentary about the urban decay of New York’s underground. So exciting and inspiring it just makes me want to go out and do the same.
You can visit Steves website at: www.undercity.org and even check out these photos to wet your appetite for exploration.
Another UK based photographer based in Manchester – Andrew Brooks, has done the same sort of thing and even had galleries based around this urban exploration and undiscovered hidden areas. Check out “Hidden Manchester” here for some simply stunning places just out of reach.
If you are still craving some more, there are two options, have a google – find this website, or go out and explore yourself.
Tags: canon, exploration, hidden manchester, mole people, New York, NYC, tunnels, undercity, underground, urban
Some of you may have been wondering where I have been recently, or why the drought of blog posts. Since July I have been working at B&W studio in Leeds, first on placement then full time as a designer.
(But don’t you worry I have plenty of blog posts coming soon for you to feast your eyes upon!)
During my time at B&W studio I have had the pleasure to work with an array of high profile clients including the British Heart Foundation, working on million pound campaigns among many other projects helping the BHF out, to working with fashion brand Republic, of which B&W is their go-to agency creating everything from their logo to the labels on clothes and all signage. One of my favourite projects working at B&W has been the Spring/Summer 2010 lookbook, one of the more creative projects where I was free to make something interesting that doesn’t exactly conform to the brand guidelines. (Soon to be put in my portfolio.)
This time around for the Spring/Summer 2011 Lookbook I was asked again to design something new, to refresh the design of it. So in keeping with the feel and nature of the original, along with twice as many looks I created a landscape ‘flick book’ where the looks were divided into sections with introductions.
SS10 Lookbook in progress.
When I first started at B&W I was only looking for experience, a placement, something temporary as my longterm plan was to work in Manchester. Week by week the work increased and it just never stopped so the placement progressed into a job, where I stayed until January. I am very thankful for my time there, as hectic as it was it was just my time to leave and look for a fresh start in Manchester or Liverpool.
So my search continues as I go to spread my skills and experiences in the design world.
Tags: B&W, design agency, design studio, leeds
For last 6 weeks I have been up to my neck in placements (hence the lack of updates). One in Liverpool at Smiling Wolf and one in Manchester at Raw Design Studio.
One of the giant prints lining the walls at Smiling Wolf.
The first – Smiling Wolf, I have to say has a great name for a design studio. Very original. Located in Elevator Studios (Poor designed site – but the new one designed by Smiling Wolf looks to be great.) in Liverpool, the area is a up and coming design/art/trendy sort of place with “A Foundation” located nearby. (See my post about it here) Whilst I was there I had a chance to work on a major project to do with a new music search application – that one day could possibly be huge. So that’s something good to know I was a part of. I also had the pleasure of working on a branding for a future sculpture/exhibition and initial designs for some very large wall artwork.
The second placement was at Raw Design Studio in sunny Salford, Manchester. Located in “Islington Mill“, more specifically the “Engine House” their current studio used to be home to “The Ting Tings” who lived and worked out of their converted house at the Mill. Now home to an active design agency I spent four weeks working with them.
The Mill itself.
Looking down from the upper balcony.
Artwork painted onto the walls of the Mill.
At Raw I spent my time working on a number of projects. Not often do I get a chance to work on something I love, and I got the opportunity to do just that. I was tasked with designing and starting a Newspaper or Directory for the residents of the Mill, this might sound boring but this is where design comes in. Working with newsprint and only being able to work in black and white is a challenge but fun. I was able to create simple designs with limited text and limited amounts of space to create a 12 page directory featuring artists and collaborations with the people who work in the Mill. However it might have sounded simple but the next step is to get the information from the Mill’s residents – I however left that up to Raw to finish – I wish them luck and hope to see the results soon.
Raw have their own studio run blog called “Raw Type” – which initially started out as self promotion developed into a whole typeface as well as a very nice glow-in-the-dark poster. I was asked to help out with the blog as well writing a couple blog posts about my typographic experiences, you can read one about my Coney Island trip here.
View from my desk.
They love Jon Burgerman at Raw.
Double exposure taken with my Lomo LC-A from the balcony.
In all my experiences at these different studios is always very different each time, and these were no exception. I equally enjoyed my time at both places, and hope to return and visit them one day to see how things have changed.
Tags: design studio, News, raw, smiling wolf, work
Typography has always been one of my great passions as a designer from when I first started doing design. Letterforms and typefaces have always been an interest to me, I have always wanted to create my own typeface, and only recently have I had the freedom and time (time is a important factor) to create a typeface. Initially I created a custom logotype for a web designer, unpaid as I was a returning a favour. The brief itself was completely open and the only requirement was that the name was “Pleep”, and so I could create anything I chose to.
The logo itself was created with the idea of interconnectivity, connecting people through the internet. So I settled upon a cursive style of logotype with one of the first results being a wireframe version of the logo. This also allowed me to perfect the curves so it looked right at different thicknesses as well as later being able to produce a “bold” and “light” version of the font.
The first step to creating my new typeface was to create the characters. This step was completely new to me as I was a complete beginner. Hopefully I can give you a few pointers to get you started from my own experience. I chose to keep it simple by sticking with lower case, punctuation and numbers plus a few other common characters. Choosing only lower case made it easier to create and in my case I had no need to create a set of capitals. I created the whole font in Illustrator using a graphics tablet, drawing it by hand with the pencil tool and adjusting the shape of the letterforms with the pen tool.
Creating the font in Illustrator, including different possibly characters.
Once the font was complete I was then able to resize the letters and adjust the characters as needed and apply a weight to the line giving my font some substance. The next step once I was happy was to expand the line of the font to create a shape I can then import to “FontLab”.
“FontLab” is the industry standard program to create typefaces with. It is entirely possible to create your typeface or font in the program itself without any need for a separate program. Other programs you could to make your own typeface are; “myTypeface” a free online maker where you can print a template, draw your font upload and receive a font, and “BitFontMaker” is another great free online font maker producing your own pixelated font.
Adjustments to the character in FontLab.
Once you open FontLab it might seem rather daunting, it is, but once you know what does what it is easy enough to use. Starting a new font will create a file where you can paste in your characters. In the individual character boxes you can adjust the ascender, cap height, x-height and descender – important when you come to kerning and spacing the font. You can preview and text the font in the program before you export the font to make sure it looks ok. Once you are happy with what you do, export it to a One problem I had when copying from Illustrator to FontLab was that the points would change or shift, so for the majority of the characters I had to manually adjust so it looked the same as the original in Illustrator. This was caused by scaling the letters down to fit, so do this outside of FontLab if you need to. Because my font lowercase only I was able to use uppercase to create alternate characters, for example the last ‘p’ in ‘pleep’ does not have a flick or tail, so a capital ‘p’ will be missing that. The next stage, the last and for my font, the hardest was kerning the font (or adjusting the spacing between letters). Because my font was cursive and each character joined together I had to make sure that each combination of character to character would join perfectly next to each other when entered on screen.
Eventually after every moment of free time in two weeks were used up I finished the font. Below is the current version of the font, there are a few adjustments I still would like to make, for example the spacing and some of the characters plus some alternate characters. For my first font, I’m pleased with the outcome…
Tags: logo, pleep, type, typeface, typeface design
You might have heard of or come across ‘All Tomorrows Parties‘ at some point. A music Festival at Butlin’s in Somerset. Named after the song “All Tomorrow’s Parties” by The Velvet Underground the festival hosts post-rock, avant-garde, and underground hip hop bands as well as some more traditional rock bands. Warp Films has produced and released a film about this festival documenting the many bands and the experience surrounding the festival. Laced with clips from 60′s and 70′s family holiday videos as well as live band footage, makes this a worthwhile watch and purchase. Below is the first 10 minutes of the film, check it out.
This years ATP festival starts this Friday, I shan’t be going this year but perhaps next. However this December there is a Godspeed You! Black Emperor curated festival and tickets still remain. Which leads me to say I have only recently found out that Godspeed You! Black Emperor has reformed to play ATP as well as a ‘handful’ of UK gigs. After seeing A Silver Mt. Zion live (formed my members after GY!BE) and how amazing that was, without a doubt I will try my hardest to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor soon too.
Tags: all tomorrows parties, atp, battles, belle and sebastian, godspeed you! black emperor
I think this is a great cover design concept. Designed by Hubero Kororo for the band Uceroz this CD cover creates itself. Once it is opened it breaks an ink die which then bleeds onto the cover creating an unique and highly original cover design.
Back in March I went to three gigs in three nights, almost killed me, my leg is still recovering. The first – The Magnetic Fields were pretty good, the gig was in a cathedral so it made the experience stranger. The second night, the Wild Beasts. But the third night was A Silver Mt. Zion (Formerly Godspeed You! Black Emperor) – a band I have had a long term love affair with, for reasons unknown I didn’t even know they were playing live, so pulling strings and not sleeping I managed to get a ticket. The day before I had even bought their latest record on vinyl. But to see them live that experience was totally worth the time, effort and money. If you ever get the chance to see this band live its one of the best live music experiences ive ever had. Possibly even the best. Of course I took my camera with me and you can see more photos I took on my photography site here.
Tags: a silver mt. zion, band, gig, live, Music, Photography
Even thought the above images may be fake. This new polaroid back from Lomography is really interesting considering polaroid stopped making the film, and The Impossible Project results at the moment perhaps might not be so promising. The fuji film it takes is still being made and is readily available, so thats a good sign. The polaroid back is very tempting to buy. To install it it involves a little tinkering with the LCA itself to make it compatible, but nothing the avid lomographer cant handle. But for £95 (more than what I bought my LCA for!) I might have to sell a few cameras. I think will need to see a few real shots from it as well as some reviews before I go out and buy it.
Tags: lca, lomo, lomography, polaroid, polaroid back