This Is Up in the Air

The next This Is event, This Is Up in the Air takes place in just over a week. We've received some brilliant work already and have the awesome Guy Page Trio playing live. Should be a great night. Below is the poster for the event.

Seven Seas

A piece I created for This Is Nautical Nonsense showing varying interpretations, from different periods and across the world, of the popular phrase 'the seven seas'.  Better quality PDF available here.

This Is Nautical Nonsense

Back at the end of November, This Is put on our first event at 60 Million Postcards in Bournemouth Nautical Nonsense. 

The main focus of each This Is even is the print sale and exhibition of the work of up and coming artists and designers from the Bournemouth area. They are encouraged to create a piece based on each event's specific theme and submit it to us. The response to the Nautical Nonsense brief was overwhelming as we received double the number of pieces we had the capacity to show.

You can view some of the awesome work people contributed here.

The night went pretty well, it was a shame not to see a few more people through the door but those that did attend enjoyed a night viewing (and buying alot of) great work, hearing sweet DJ sets and spoken word artists and socialising within a group of like-minded people.

Below is the event poster I worked on with the This Is team.

November

Trying to balance 3rd year uni work with working on This Is whilst having a life has meant that this blog has dropped to the bottom of the to-do list and hasn't been updated for a while. I've been pretty busy since the last post but I don't want to cram everything I've worked on into one post so in the coming days I will post up the various pieces I've been working on.

November was split between arranging This Is Nautical Nonsense and working on a uni project with the brief of creating a cycle navigation system for cities. The system I devised can be seen in an overview below and was created to: a) be distinct from navigation systems for other modes of transport in our urban spaces, b) be clear, legible and accessible, c) have a friendly, encouraging and positive tone of voice to promote cycling as an enjoyable way of getting around, and d) Allow user participation to create an active cycling community with a say in what routes are signposted.

This Is...

This is... is a newly formed brand/collective that I am part of. It aims to make Bournemouth a more culturally interesting town to be in by putting on events, competitions and collaborative projects and other things which serve to draw together people from Bournemouth's present but dissolute creative community.

It is just starting to take off at the moment, with our awesome website designed by Richard Moody having just gone live, the first brief for our themed monthly exhibition being released and a Stencil piece, designed by myself, being spray painted on the wall at 60 million postcards, the brilliant venue for the event, to advertise an upcoming competition. 

Above : stencil being applied, and original stencil design developed from sketches which was scanned, vectorised and subsequently laser cut from card to create the stencil. 

Don't Blame Me, Blame Jack Black.

On Saturday I was lucky enough to see the brilliant film 'The Town'. Directed and lead by Ben Affleck, it revolves around the story of Affleck's group of professional bank robbers in the Boston neighbourhood of Charlestown, an infamous haven for this trade. This taut, multi-faceted thriller was however, had the impact of one of its most tense and engaging scenes destroyed by me, or to be more precise my phone ringing.


I rifled through my bag, mortified, for what seemed like forever. Luckily the film quickly reabsorbed us and thus was good enough not to be ruined by one spoiled scene.


However, after the film had finished, my thoughts returned to my faux pas and how usually, I am reminded by those Orange ads to not let my phone ruin the movie and swiftly silence it. I realised however that there had been one of these ads, but why didn't it prompt the usual response?

The ad in question is a kind of pseudo trailer for the upcoming version of Gulliver's Travels starring Black and quite clearly states at the end to turn off your phone as in previous Orange ads. 


However, where the previous ads with the irritating executives hellbent on ruining the scripts and ideas of a host of excited Hollywood figures were clearly distinguished from the block of trailers played either side of them, This ad was not as it starts off as a very plausible and exciting trail and fades into a comedy featuring the striking visual of a humongous Jack Black being strung up like a puppet by tiny people, which I feel somewhat distracts from the central message- there is too much noise.

This is part of a wider situation, with many brands creating adverts that prove entertaining and memorable, but fail to communicate their key information to the viewer. Brands like Cadbury's can get away with it, as due to their massive status and the fact that almost everyone is familiar with their products and distinctive purple branding, their adverts mainly serve to imaginatively re-assert their presence, not to communicate new information. However, information is the purpose of many a whacky, zany ad, a purpose which, unless the ad is handled cleverly it will almost certainly not achieve.   

The Fundamentals Of Typography

During the summer break I did very little of the design projects that I had set myself back in May. One useful design-related thing I did do was read a few design books. 

One which has directly helped me, in the few projects I did attempt, was Gavin Ambrose and Paul Harris's Fundamentals Of Typography. Definitely a worthwhile read for anyone with an interest in graphic design as a thorough understanding of type is a boon when executing a piece of design.

In the book is alot of useful basic stuff as well as interesting little pieces of type trivia, some of these facts that were new to me include: 

-The point size of a typeface measures the block that the letter would have originally been set in, not the letterform itself.

-An 'em' is equal to the point size of the type, an 'en' is half an 'em' whilst a 'hyphen' is a third of an 'em'. All these units of measurement are used for spacing, indents and dashes.

-The optimum length of a line of type (for readability and integrity of a block of text) can be found by multiplying the width of a lowercase alphabet written out in any given typeface by 1.5-2

-An 'italic' is a specially drawn, slanted version of a typeface whilst an 'oblique' is the standard typeface skewed to the right

-À This accent is a 'grave' Ą this accent is an 'ogonek' Ç and this accent 

is a 'cedilla'.