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

FIN.

Above is the final edited video of mine and Hunter's anamorphic typography installations we created in the morgue corridor and our studio both in Chelsea college of art & design. Big thanks to Ed Gill who let us borrow his awesome homemade tripod tracker which is essentially a triangular piece of plywood with three skateboard trucks attached to it. RAD.

It's a point of view

Here are some shots of mine and Hunter's anamorphic typography studio installation which we were asked to complete by our tutors at the start of last week in to be ready for the private view which took place last Friday. For this piece we incorporated some geometry into our design as well as copy. Videos to follow of both our pieces soon. 

"There's so much wall on the floor"

Some slightly more professional photographs of mine and Hunter's anamorphic typography installation in the morgue corridor in Chelsea. We're still working on getting the video done of this piece which I am pretty psyched about. Last Monday we were asked by our tutors to create another installation in the vis. com. studio for our exhibition. Below is a quick snap shot of the work taking place with photos of the finished piece to follow on Wednesday when I am invidulating the exhibition.

It's more than just print

Above are the pictures from mine and Hunter's collaborative FMP final piece. We were incredibly lucky to be allowed use of a whole corridor in Chelsea College of Art & Design to carry out our anamorphic typography installation. Completed in exactly one week from start to finish our work covers the entire corridor as well as venturing into the fire escape it's without doubt the biggest work I have ever undertaken. Some of the letters cover more than one surface, with the 'M' actually hitting 4 walls overall whilst some letters are left untouched by anamorphosis and perfectly formed ('J' in the fire escape). The biggest letters without doubt are the 'A' and 'U' on opposing walls of the corridor around the 4 to 5 meter mark - "Anarchy" as Ed put it. The phrase we chose reads "it's more than just print". We chose this phrase for a number of different reasons. It's supposed to challenge what people consider to be conventional graphic design, working with flat 2D surfaces and designing business cards, posters etc. as well as being a comment on the process we used to create the piece. Below is a really rough video I took with my phone to give a bit more of an experience to the piece. Hopefully next week we will be recording it properly using a triangle frame and videocamera. It will be on show as part of the Chelsea Foundation Show from the 29th of May to the 3rd of June, which is completely free and should be great fun. For more info. go to 

http://www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/summershows2010.htm

Anamorphic Typography

So over the past month I have not posted anything on my blog. This is because I have been busy working on my Final Major Project which started just over 6 weeks ago and still has another two weeks to run before being marked and presented at our final exhibition. I am doing a collaborative project with my friend Hunter Thomson based around anamorphic typography which happened totally by chance as we found out we were exploring exactly the same thing since returning from easter holidays. My original project title was based around the relationship between architecture and graphic design and Hunters was around typography and shape. I am confident that we can both answer our self initiated briefs within this project whilst creating some amazing and interesting work around Chelsea. The photos above are a test piece completed last week in the Fashion studio. I have a hundred more photos of this piece taking shape but I think it's more intriguing to show the finished piece and leave you to decide how we did it.