Food Hub Logo design

This summer I designed a logo for the Manchester Creative Collective (MCC), Food Hub. 

Established in March 2009, MCC focuses on bringing together networks and community projects for mutually beneficial collaborations. The food hub itself creates 'growers co-ops' based on permaculture techniques. They  promote herbalism through educating the community on the endless health benefits of plants.

http://mcc-hub.org/

Triangular thinking.

 

 

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Triangular

via swissmiss by swissmiss on 11/3/10

Triangular Design Manifesto, by Conceptual Devices:

00_ Design should not be based on formal principles – but always on an idea of society.
01_ Designed forms represent possible social orders and a lot of their contradictions.
02_ Design is everything. Anything could be designed. Everyone is a designer.
03_ Design allows social innovations. Often it is not made by designers.
04_ Design has not scale. It could be small and have great impact.
05_ Design is not an innocent practice. Designers are wicked.
06_ Design should engage people and interact with them.
07_ Design is an interdisciplinary applied science.
08_ Design produces visual consciousness.
09_ Design is a triangular manifesto.
10_ Design makes you smile.
11_ This is the top.
12_ Enjoy!

 

 

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Points of Transition – Anti-design Festival

Photography thanks to Marjo Loponen

WHERE IS DESIGN TODAY? AND WHY?

—Michael Oswell

Today’s setup does not seek directly to answer these questions; rather it is an intuitive response to a given situation, a situation where economic meltdown is met with frantic attempts to maintain or reinstate the status quo, where educational and public sector institutions are ‘streamlined’, where designers as professionals are expected to play along, and those entering the profession are expected to play along for free.

As recent graduates we are plunged into a situation of considerable uncertainty often masked with the rubric of flexibility. We are literally in a point of transition between imperatives – the assessment criteria of education and the fundamentally profit-led requirements of business. Where we go from here is a matter of personal choice, yet it is rarely a choice made freely.

In recent years designers have transitioned from being a productive force to being a discrete consumer category. As such, today we are focussing on production processes - the core of what we do as designers. Various workshops; letterpress, screen-printing and digital stencil printing are today put to various uses by students and alumni of the LCC, often in configurations that fall outside the requirements of professional practice.

Nearly twenty years ago, Gilles Deleuze wrote that when one is faced with a new sociopolitical situation, ‘there is no need to fear or hope – only to look for new weapons’. The task here is less to find overt weapons than to attempt escape routes from the prescribed forms of practice that are presented to us by industry; to find from our points of transition, a new space in which to operate.

22nd September 2010

Anti-Design Festival

RADLAB Londonewcastle

28 Redchurch Street

London E2 7DP

Opening night – Anti-design festival

Work from floor to ceiling, animal impressions through megaphones, children rolling paint, DJs in the back-room, red lights in the front. This was the most entertaining opening night I've been to in a long time!

Fresh(ers) Workshop

Wonderful day running a silk screen-printing workshop in the red container outside LCC with Michael. Didn't realise I could be so patient!

Sweeet Coffee!

Experimental flocking–coffee and sprinkles–with Marjo.

xyxx

 

 

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xyxx

via It's Nice That by Alex on 24/08/10

A love letter is one of the oldest (and still most special) ways to make someone's heart flutter. But, what happens when words are no longer surprising or initmate enough? xyxx happens. In the originators own words, "xyxx is a living visual, open ended love letter between two slightly twisted lovers who would rather take pictures with their iphones than talk on them." They never, ever manipulate them on the computer, relying solely on the apps on their next-gen walkie-talkies to tweak and deliver.

www.xyxx.tumblr.com

 

 

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Cutlasercut cutting

I should have done this ages ago. 
—A poster concept for the London based laser cutting company Cutlasercut.

sebastian errazuriz: american kills

 

 

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sebastian errazuriz: american kills

via Designboom - Weblog on 19/08/10

'american kills' installation


'american kills' by chilean-born new york based artist sebastian errazuriz is a public
installation showcasing the suicide rates of US soldiers. after searching on official
war sites on the internet, he accidentally found out that 2 times more american soldiers
had died in 2009 by committing suicide than those killed during that same year in the
war in iraq; an alarming comparison that errazuriz had personally never read or
heard about before.





according to the artist, a first google search showed only reports of media alarm about
suicide rates, but the information was always comfortably presented divided into months
and generally separated by statistics from the army, navy or air-force.





'when I first found the overall statistics summed the 304 suicides by US soldiers during
2009, I was shocked. I tried to find a number to compare that statistic. to my surprise
the suicide statistic doubled the total of 149 US soldiers that had died in the iraq war
during 2009 and equaled the number of soldiers killed in afghanistan.' - SR





errazuriz's first instinct was to post the statistic on facebook, dumbfounded by the lack
of response and interest, he bought can of black paint and decided to 'post' the news in
the real world on his own wall outside his studio in brooklyn. equipped with a ladder,
he marked a black strip for every dead soldier, until both the suicide rates and war rates
occupied the entire wall and were registered as a single image.





'the counting of dead soldiers outside my studio was long and surprisingly eerie; it was
hard to forget that every brush stroke was a soldier who had died the previous year.
a lot of people stopped to read the mural and were immediately impressed by the reality
portrayed. most of them seemed quite shocked and approached me to ask if what I was
painting was real. I tried to explain that I simply wished to create a physical image that
could capture people's imagination, creating awareness of the current numbers in death,
war and the infinite discrepancy between the resources and energies destined to fight and
protect soldiers at war versus the energies invested in protecting their mental health
and stability.'- SR

 

 

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World Cup Lecture

Throughout my degree at LCC I've known this place as the main lecture theatre – today it became a cinema to watch the World Cup. Hmm, I'm not sure what else to say really.

Friday = D-day

Friday was delivery day for the end of year publication – all 1000 copies, each with perfectly letterpress printed covers. The fact that designing these meant extending my sleep deprived, end-of-year routine a little longer than I had prepared myself for can now be considered worth it – they look good.

Letterpress prep-work

Letterpressing the cover of the degree show publication brought a few more complications than expected, led to conflict with the University bureaucracy, and has required a few more team players to get the job done quickly, but will be more than well worth it when beautifully completed. Tomorrow will be a long day!

Super Graphics 2010 Publication

Recent weeks have involved a sustained consumption of energy drinks, a sleep deprived routine and daily visits to Uni in the quest to complete the degree show publication – quite similar to pre-hand-in deadline really. 


Thankfully the Heidelberg press we're printing on is up and running again so the job can progress – slowly, with long hours from Toni in the print department – and fingers crossed may actually be completed on time (possibly even in budget).


Now for the cover…

Super Graphics 2010

Counting down to the GMD final year hand-in. http://www.supergraphics2010.co.uk/

Screen-printed envelops

One day, four colours, multiple disasters = exhaustion. Sleep would be beautiful but the clock's ticking too loud.

Flocking fun

The final posters for the collaborative turned out brilliantly – and quickly with two-pairs of hands working away on them. Enough to donate one to the screen-printing studio wall.

Flesh-toned overprinting

Layers of CMYK flesh – twenty-two to be exact – found in my chosen section of Bronzino's allegory.

Burlesqued CMYK

'…the poet who surpasses the painter in praising onions, can add a zero to my nine.'

(Bronzino. La cipolla)

Developing my transformation of Bronzino's Venus, Cupid, Folly & Time I researched the painter's other creative love – Burlesque poetry. Known for its obscurity – a highly coded lexicon and reference to cultural ideas and practices inaccessible to readers today – Burlesque poetry applied erotic significance to numbers due to the resemblence of their shapes. In the quote above, Bronzino is not suggesting that such poet is 10 times greater than said painter but utilising the roundness of the 0 and the phallic 9 to convey a much more controversial statement.

I applied this reference to my original CMYK translation with the intention of transforming more than just the aesthetics of the piece – it seemed ignorant to leave behind the complex undertones of the artwork.

Visual rhythm

In developing the past,present, future project, Marjo and I explored the idea of subverting the sensory measurement of a space to interpret the illusion of time.

'Time cannot be perceived – only changes or events in time and their temporal relations'

Our sculpture presents the subtly changing visual rhythm of Brighton's old West Pier area – a 360 degree perspective of the space rotating in measurements of 20 i.e. 20 angles shot 20 times in repetitions of 20. How much documentation of the past is required to predict the future?

Faceless actions