Jam Master Joe

No more jam till next year. Promise.

Snow business

when life gives you lemons, make...

Ok so, in addition to the numerous and wonderful presents I have already bought my family for christmas this year I decided to make a batch of lemon and lime marmalade as a sort of nice homemade thing that everyone can enjoy. The ingredients are pretty simple but the process itself is somewhat more complex and time consuming. Don't attempt if you have any sort of cuts on your hands, citrus and open wounds do not mix well. I got the recipe from my housemates Leon cookbook if anyones interested in making some of their own. As well as making the marmalade I have designed labels for the jars which hopefully I will be printing tomorrow and will post here once they are all done and photo'ed. I have designed the labels around the idea of myself starting up a jam making company called king of preserves. and am super happy with the results, the jam tastes alright too which is good news.

Golden Boy

Above is the final outcome for our iconic photo project where we had to choose and recreate an iconic photo with the only condition being that it had to be 'properly iconic' and not just a photo of a modern day celebrity. We had to organise all props, clothes etc ourselves then each  student had a group session in the photography studio with the awesome Alex Madjitey. Basically a short introduction to the photographic facilities, each student would shoot another's photo while Alex would sort out lighting etc. I actually made it to the studio 3 times no less to complete shoot for this photo but it was totally worth it with Alex now referring to me as exclusively 'golden balls'. YES I did actually paint myself Gold.

Props to Alex for his awesome lighting and general photography skills, Paige Shaw for shooting my golden boy photo, Vanille VDC for shooting the suited photo and Julia Salotti for being my Bond girl.

Below is the original film poster which I based my shot on. I spent hours trying to find the right weight of Gothic to match the fonts exactly but to no avail. 

XL

SNOW

DISCLAIMER: The white powder you see in the images above is icing sugar NOT cocaine or any other illegal narcotics.

Ok so now that's done with time to explain. Above, for the most part is the final set of images for one half of the Destroying Bad Typography brief. The brief states we must make our allotted letter (mine is capital E in Times New Roman if you're in any doubt by now) in using two different materials. The first material was wood which each person has to use by way of an induction to the workshop which I  posted a few weeks ago. The second material is completely up to each individual person and is where this project really comes into it's own, the only rule for both letters is that it must be white and that you must destroy it yourself. Below is a detail shot of the 'E' itself before being cut and snorted by me.  Massive props to Ben for helping me set up and shoot the whole thing. 

Charlie

Experimentation for an ongoing project based around destroying bad typography. More to follow this week.

Let Her Press

Last Friday I was lucky enough to spend the entire day at the New North Press in Hoxton with Graham Bignell and a few of my course mates working on our class letterpress project. Collectively we are a class of 52, which handily is 2 alphabets worth of people. The project is called Cockney Alphabet, each student is given a letter with a cockney phrase to go with it:

'A for 'orses'

'B for mutton'

'C for miles'

etc...

If you don't understand it then don't worry, neither did I at first. Took me a good few minutes to work it out by saying the examples over and over again. I was given the letter 'i' and went with the phrase 'I for looting'. Slightly more sophisticated than your average, it tried to subtly hint at it's meaning, avoiding anything too literal which wouldn't have worked as well and arrived at the final scan you can see above which I am really happy with. Setting type is something I had never done before and it was just amazing how technical it was and the sheer amount of stuff Graham had in his workshop. Thousands of tiny (and not so tiny) metal and wooden letters in hundreds of draws is quite daunting at first but once I was shown how to do it and got the hang of manoeuvring round the studio and found where everything it was dead easy & super fun.

At the end of this project the typographically best letters of the alphabet will be chosen by Graham and our tutor Nigel and then compiled into one Cockney Alphabet poster. This poster will then be printed and editioned to around 30 copies and be shown in the exhibition 'Reverting to Type' which will be running from the 10th till the 24th of December 2010 & 4th till the 22nd of January 2011 at the Standpoint Gallery in Hoxton. Now all that remains is to see if my letter makes it onto the poster!

E is for Egan

Spent my Friday morning in Chelsea's wood workshop making this roughly A4 sized Times New Roman capital 'e' out of mdf. Essentially it was our hands on induction to the workshop and went amazingly well, I used a nice selection of bandsaws and sanders that could quite easily have taken my hand off but managed to avoid that happening thankfully. Next will be painting this white and bringing it in for a collaborative project with the rest of my class in December sometime. Till then however I am going to be making a (much) smaller version of this 'E' and finding an awesome way of destroying it.

Gif City

One outcome from my now completed logo project.

More results and explanations to follow shortly.

The Typographic Dictionary

We have just spent the last week starting a logo project which is continuing into this one. Above is one of my 100 outcomes which gave me this idea, click the link, read the brief and submit something!

http://thetypographicdictionary.tumblr.com/

Hi, my name is...

First post since starting my BA in Graphic Design Communication at Chelsea. This is what we got up to on our first day, put into groups by the first letter of our surname and told to make an image which spelled out or involved that particular letter. I am the only 'E' in the class so was put with Luke Fitzmaurice and Anna Fearon and the above image is what we came up with. Two and a half weeks in now and it's intense but RAD. 

THE NEW GAP LOGO

My housemate just told me to look at the the new GAP logo (no the above is not it but it could be). Back in the day at school if you wore GAP it used to mean that you were Gay. And. Proud. - smart logic I think you'll agree. Here's my own parody of the logo which took all of 1 minute on illustrator, can't believe that they probably paid a 6 figure sum to some advertising agency to come up with this. It now looks like GAP are an I.T. services company, specialising in data storage FUN. Obviously brands these days are constantly looking to keep the look and feel of their company 'fresh' but BLACK BOLD HELVETICA?! How original.....

Here's a cool link for you to vent your rage over:

http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/new-gap-logo-met-with-outrage-general-indignation_b9152

Also if anyone from GAP reads this ever:

1. What on earth was wrong with your first logo? 

AND

2. If you really do desire to change it, please employ me. Despite being only a first year design student I will 100% do a better job than the retards you employed to design this one. 

OK, rant over....

A Magazine

So I haven't update this blog in almost three weeks now. However since the last post mine and Hunter's anamorphic typographic work has been featured on a number of pretty high profile creative blogging sites and now things are starting to get interesting to say the least. Last week I got an e-mail from the editor of Maru interior design magazine asking us if we would be interested in featuring in their latest issue. Sent all the stuff off earlier today and now waiting to hear back from them. More to follow shortly about some pretty amazing things that could be happening for us soon.

17.5 point

I found these books in the world's smallest, dustiest & most amazing bookshop a long time ago and thought it would be cool to share some pictures of them with you. Hopefully I will get the chance to use them sometime this year. 

Fish 'n' Chips & Salty Lips

Wear & Tear