We Made This

We Made This shiny new website

So, the attentive amongst you may have noticed we've been more than a tad quiet of late, and this is why. 

We've been tinkering around under the bonnet of We Made This, creating an entirely new site, built by the good folks at Position Absolute. 

It's got a whole heap of our latest work on it, as well as an Archive section which we'll be steadily filling up. Here's Tom from Position Absolute on some aspects of the build, which was all done in Wordpress: 

"We're believers in web standards so we've taken care to mark up We Made This to give the content the semantic love it deserves. The main logo is an image, but turn off CSS (or take a look at the mark up) and you can see that behind it there's an H1 tag, noting to SEO bots out there that this is the most important heading on the page. Subtitles are H2s and denote the title of their particular pages." 

We've decided to officially call this our Beta stage, so why not have a click around the new site, and if you see anything that's not behaving itself, drop us a line. 

We're still adding features to the new blog one at a time so that we can make sure they work smoothly. 

We've also imported all our content from here, but we'll leave this place running as a dusty archive for a while yet. (If you do have any direct links to We Made This, it'd be great if you could update them to either our home page, or to our blog home page.) 

If you're a subscriber of our RSS feed, you should just check that it's the feedburner feed and not the old wemadethis.typepad.com feed. It should hopefully still be coming through loud and clear, but if not, do let us know!

In the meantime, cheerio from here, see you on the other side...

Our new Wallpaper*

Ah, lovely - our customised issue of Wallpaper* hit our doormat this morning, and damn fine it looks too. Big congratulations to Meirion and the design team there for pulling off an immense technical challenge with such finesse. 

Photographic ephemera

A few more bits of ephemera for your viewing pleasure, all from the days when people used to take photos using something called 'film'. It came in small 'rolls' which you put into your camera, and generally allowed you to take 24 or 36 'exposures'. You would then take the film to a chemist, or specialist 'photo lab' to be 'developed', which could take between 1 hour and 1 week, and you would then get back a pack of 'prints'. Happy days.

 

 

Ones to watch: CSM BA Graphics Show 2010

Well heck. Not sure what they're feeding the students over at Central Saint Martins, but this year's graphic design degree show is a humdinger.

It's being held over at the spacious Nicholls & Clarke Building on Shoreditch High Street, and has been tightly curated so that you have a real sense of what you're looking at - which is a huge help when you're faced with such a vast quantity of work.

It's always interesting to see what the visual vibe is each year - this year there was a lot of work that had the scent of the AA Print Studio about it (sometimes huge stinking whiffs of it in fact). That's fairly natural, and just part of the ebb and flow of what's hip in the design industry at any given time... but we hope that those students will find time to develop their own distinct visual language.

We'd been invited to pick out our favourite piece from the show for the annual Joss Turley award, so got a chance to have a fairly decent wander round before the beer really started flowing. Here are just a few of the faces we think are worth keeping an eye on:

  

Maria Gruzdeva

Maria Gruzdeva has put together a frankly beautiful, hugely polished book about the Yuri Gagarin Russian State Science Research Cosmonauts Training Centre (also known as the Star City) - a secretive military research facility where cosmonauts have lived and trained from the 1960s onwards. The book features her stunning documentary photography (above and top) from the Centre, as well as a wealth of archive material. It's a hugely substantial piece of work, really brilliant.

  

Brendan Olley

We were blown away by Brendan Olley's vast photographic prints, taken on a large-format camera on a trip to Svalbard, the world's most northern town, sitting 300 miles from the North Pole. Brendan says the work "identifies the oddity of human behavior in relation to the landscape. Playgrounds and basketball courts are engulfed by snow and made redundant. Cars become reclaimed by the planet until eventually they become inseparable. It brings into question the reasons why one would wish to occupy this isolated place."

They're truly fantastic pictures, and you really need to see them at their actual size to get the full effect.

  

Jamie Hearn

Jamie Hearn has created a beautiful pair of screenprints, one showing simplified household products stripped of their lettering, and then a second print showing just the lettering, which he's hand drawn. Really delicious, and he's also documented the work in a rather fine book (above). Great stuff.

  

Helen Lovelee

We really liked Helen Lovelee's series of hand-drawn prints inspired by traditional Aboriginal philosophy - this one reads: "To stay warm on a cold desert night sleep between two small fires and close to your dog". Which sounds mighty fine.

  

Chihiro Sasaki

We were also really taken with Chihiro Sasaki's whimsical illustrations, particularly her series "The Territory of Human Being", which looked at the invisible barriers people form to distance themelves from others. The illustrations have a really distinctive and charming style. Dead good.

  

Edward Cornish

Okay, full disclosure, we've had Ed in here on a placement, so we already think his work is great - and he didn't disappoint with this series of beautiful letterpressed prints. Tasty bit of framing too Ed.

  

Stassja Mrozinski

We chuckled at this one. Sometimes graphic design is allowed to be funny. 

There's stacks of other fine work, and the show runs until Monday 21 June. Get along there if you can.

Fantastic Four in the House of Horrors

While we were at the Ephemera Fair (check out our previous post), we also picked up a brilliant Fantastic Four Whitman Big Little Book (No.19 fact fans) from the late 60s, a bizarre little thing that's a fusion of comic and book, setting single panel captioned images against facing pages of large type text. 

In the story, the Fantastic Four are pitted against the evil Dr. Weird in his House of Horrors. The illustrations, and their accompanying captions, are, well, fantastic. 

Check them out in our Flickr set. Nuff said.

More ephemeral goodness

We trundled along to the latest Ephemera Society Fair on Sunday, and stumbled upon a whole stack of labels from the Leicester chemist W. T. Hind. Some lovely stuff - we've uploaded it all to our Flickr Ephemera Set. 

The next fair is on Sunday 1 August.

That's the way to do it

We get a fair few CVs and portfolios emailed in to the studio each week, particularly at this time of year: some okay, some good, and some, occasionally, brilliant. Which is what happened the other day, when Xavi Garcia sent us his screenprinted Work:Fail manifesto.

We figured it might be helpful for other students out there to use him as a good example of how to get a foot in the door, as well as being a fine way of giving Xavi a bit of free publicity.

Often the first point of contact is an email. Some tips on that would be: always find a named person to send your email to; don't CC all the agencies you're applying to; and make sure you tailor your email to each company individually rather than copying and pasting (we have a stack of emails sent through from students telling us why they'd really like a placement at NB:Studio).

Now and then someone sends something physical through - obviously that involves more time and effort on their part, so we're more likely to take a look. Of course, it still needs to be a good bit of work...

Xavi sent through his Manifesto, and it's a lovely piece - Work stands clearly in the foreground, in both the sense of 'labour' and 'function', but it's supported by failure - a willingness to give things a go, and to experiment. Which is a fine philosophy.

He attached a friendly and informative covering letter. Some tips on that: spellcheck is your friend, but don't rely on it; don't tell us why you'd benefit from working with us, but do tell us why we'd benefit from working with you; and keep it concise. 

The letter included a link to Xavi's online portfolio, and since his poster had excited our interest, we took a look. The site's built with Indexhibit, which is a great way for anyone to get a clean and functional portfolio site up and running. But blogs (Typepad, Wordpress and the like) work just as well. Heck, even Flickr can do the trick.

His site has some really lovely work on it, so we invited him to drop by and show us the real stuff, which included some handmade banknotes (above), and an editioned notebook (below). 

Some tips at this point are: check you're going to the right address; arrive on time; and bring physical work with you - we've already seen your stuff on a screen. 

From that point on, it's down to your work...

Now, Xavi has only just finished his Foundation course at Central Saint Martins, and normally we'd say, well, go do a BA, and give us a shout after that. But his work's really great, and he's already got a Business degree under his belt, so we reckon the normal rules don't apply. We don't have room to take anyone on here at the moment, but we're going to find some way to do some work with him, and in the meantime, hopefully this post might nudge him in the right directions.

So. That's the way to do it.

An Ace package

Postal happiness! This little package of loveliness arrived this morning from Richard at Ace Jet 170, as a swap for one of our Twickenham Carnival posters. Tastily wrapped in a French route-map, it held a stack of lovely print stuff, including a Penguin book with a cover illustration by Milton Glaser. Very lovely all round - so thanks Richard!

   
 

Google: more is less

Google's homepage has gone all pictorial this morning, with a full-bleed image cluttering up their normally pristine page. You can change the picture, choosing from a range of pre-selected shots (including shots of work by Dale Chihuly, Jeff Koons, Tom Otterness, Polly Apfelbaum, Kengo Kuma (隈研吾), Kwon, Ki-soo (권기수) and Tord Boontje, as well as shots from Yann Arthus-Bertrand and National Geographic.

You can stick in your own images too (that's one of ours above), choose one from a public gallery, or set it to a single colour (as below), or even back to white (which is actually quite elegant, leaving a shadowed logo, rather than the usual mulitcoloured one).

Except if you're using Safari, which isn't playing along at all, just showing the classic Google homepage. Wonder if that's a tech issue or just a low-level skirmish in the browser wars...

And frankly, as Safari users, we're happy with the standard page: we don't want our search window to be anything other than a search window. Less, as ever, is more.

GF Smith archive show

We nipped across to 33 Portland Place yesterday to check out an exhibition of delicious archive material from the paper company GF Smith.

They've been producing paper stocks for the design industry since the 1880s, and have an archive collection that includes work by Sir Peter Blake, Saul Bass, Paul Rand, and Milton Glaser. It was interesting to see how their various bits of promotional material had changed over the years, but also to see how much had remained the same.

The show is invitation only, but they're touring it all over the place, and they're also digitising their archive, so there's more than a chance that you'll be seeing much more of this stuff before long... 

As little design as possible

We found a bit of time this weekend to catch up on the BBC's Genius of Design series, which is available on the iPlayer for just a few more days.

The first show took a look at the birth of the design industry at around the time of the industrial revolution, and we were particularly taken with the No.10 Double Bow Drummer Boy sheep shears, which they picked out as an exemplary piece of design. 

The steel shears are made by Sheffield firm Burgon and Ball, and have been hand-made in more or less the same way since 1730. They're designed to be used single handed, so that the shearer's other hand can hang onto the sheep. As they point out in the show, they have been stripped back to their absolute essence - two single pieces of steel, shaped and sharpened, part rigid cutting blade, part flexible handle. A truly beautiful instance of form following function, fitting well with Dieter Rams' Ten Principles for Good Design (which feature earlier in the programme):

1. Good Design is innovative

2. Good Design makes a product useful


3. Good Design is aesthetic


4. Good Design helps a product be understood


5. Good Design is unobtrusive


6. Good Design is honest


7. Good Design is durable


8. Good Design is thorough to the last detail


9. Good Design is concerned with environment


10. Good Design is as little design as possible


We've been musing on the idea that products can evolve into a perfect form, much as an animal might, given a stable environment. 

We'd love a shop that sold only those distilled, pure products; the ones that exemplified the form. Somewhere where you could get the most perfectly evolved mug, glass, watch, chair... 

Lovely stuff.

The Ride Journal: Issue Four

The latest issue of the delicious cycling journal The Ride (No. 4) launched last week at Look Mum, No Hands! 

We've been gently wheeling our way through it since then, and it's the usual brilliant mix of engaging stories and beautiful illustrations, from a whole range of bike folk. It's not showing up on their website at the time of writing, but you can pick it up from Magma in the meantime as well as a whole bunch of other places.

We Made This Wallpaper* cover...

Well, sorta. 

The clever kids at Wallpaper* magazine have done some mighty clever technological tinkering and created an online app that lets you design your very own one-off cover for their upcoming August issue - though you'll need to move quickly - designs have to be created by Tuesday 8 June. 

The app is hugely intuitive, with a selection of elements to drag and drop: texts from Anthony Burrill (including WE MADE THIS, handily for us), shapes from James Joyce, textures by Nigel Robinson, patterns by Kam Tang, and images by Hort. You can customise things to a fair degree, particularly by layering, scaling and colouring the elements. Dead good.

Be warned though: once you start playing, it's fairly hard to stop...

Central Saint Martins Pop-Up Store

Degree show season is just about to swoop down on us, so it's good to see the second year students from Central Saint Martins BA Graphic Design course getting in ahead of the game - by more than a year.

They opened their 2060 pop-up shop yesterday at 99 Clerkenwell Road (just along from Magma), and it's a corker, selling multiples by 103 of the students (each of them producing 20 of their individual product - hence the 2060 name). The shop is the final part of a six week project, and they're also going to be hosting a series of design events while the shop is open (until 7 June).

If this is their second year show, the third year show should be a belter...

Eight:48 & Gym Class Magazine

Is it just us, or is there a bit of a flurry of zines and newspapers going on at the moment? Feels like there's a real wealth of new stuff out there. 

We picked up the first issue of Eight:48 from Magma last week. It's from the folks at Counterprint (the online seller of out-of-print and hard-to-find art & design books), and is split between editorials about the issue's theme 'Print is Dead?', and a series of profiles of designers and illustrators.

Steven Heller writes briefly about why books matter; James Pallister (from Meat Magazine) writes a well-informed piece about the future of magazines (and how design blogs can help create sales...); while Dan Rolfe Johnson (from Grafik) discusses how magazines will need to work from the blog up. The profiles include HelloVon, Julien Vallee and Anthony Burrill.

Obviously there's a danger of a newspaper/magazine about newspapers/magazines disappearing up its own well designed arse, but the essays are well considered, so it pretty much gets away with it. Be very interesting to see where it goes next...

Treading some similar ground, but with a slightly more informal tone, the latest issue of the very lovely Gym Class Magazine (For The Guy Chosen Last) features a mix of illustration, design and photography, as well as an interview with MagCulture's Jeremy Leslie. (They also do a tasty Chosen Last t-shirt, which Alistair has been sporting round the studio.)

Print is dead? Not by a long shot.

Redesign BP's logo

Loving this - Greenpeace UK have set up a campaign to redesign the BP logo, to more accurately reflect its current tarnished status, as well as to raise awareness about the company's plans for extracting oil from tar sands. 

These are our attempts at it, and Greenpeace have already posted almost three hundred entries to their Flickr set (they haven't provided links to show who's created each design, which seems a shame, but is perhaps wise), and that's just in the first week of the competition. You can download .eps, .tif and .pdf files of the logo, and there's a template as well, so that they can use the designs across lots of platforms. The competition is divided into three categories: design professionals & students; the general public; and Under 18s; and it runs until 28 June.

Twickenham Carnival Posters

We've just picked up a batch of posters we designed for Twickenham Carnival, which is organised by the London Borough of Richmond Upon Thames. The posters have been printed up from original woodblock and metal letterpress type by the good folks at New North Press, and we're dead chuffed with them.

Richmond Council asked us to put together the posters for the carnival based on the theme 'Heritage Now!' So by way of research we took a trip to the Local Studies Collection at Richmond Library, which is a real treasure trove. We unearthed some giant scrapbooks which had a whole series of fantastic original posters from local carnivals back in the 1920s, which was too good a gift to ignore.

We discussed the idea of doing purely typographic posters with the client, who could see that it fit snugly with their heritage theme. We then put together a rough layout, and took it to New North Press, who matched the type where possible, and proposed some great substitutions where not. 

They printed an all-black version for us to scan (so that we could create artwork for a large run of digitally printed posters), and then created a short run of original two-colour prints.

See the full set of shots of the reference imagery and the printing process on Alistair's Flickr set.

The carnival is at Orleans House Gallery, on Sunday 13 June.

Arcade Fire + Sergio Leone

It's a bit old, but we're loving this edit of Once Upon a Time in the West, used as an unofficial promo for Arcade Fire's My Body Is A Cage (from their fantastic Neon Bible album), by Chicago based designer J Tyler Helms.

And it give us a chance to link to this little promo piece the band have put together for their upcoming 12" double-A side, The Suburbs/Month of May:

(Sorry, doesn't seem to be any way to make that fit into our grid. Grr.)

2012 Olympic mascots launched

So, after the hoo-haa about the 2012 Olympic logo, here's the next big part of the Olympic branding, the mascots, Wenlock (on the left) and Mandeville. They've been designed by the folks at Iris, and given a back-story courtesy of children's author Michael Morpurgo.

Our first response on seeing them was "One-eyed aliens? Phew! Not a cuddly lion." 

They're far closer to fully realised characters than we were expecting, and slightly bonkers, which is great. There's a touch of Al Capp's The Shmoo in there, a fair bit of Futurama's Leela, and also a bit of Umberto Boccioni's magnificent Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.

They're obviously styled to be emblematic of loads of different stuff - Wenlock's head represents the three podium positions, as well as a taxi light, and the Olympic stadium roof; while Mandeville's head has three prongs representing the Paralympic emblem. Both of them have eyes that apparently double as cameras, and they are built for online customisation, so that people can create their own versions (here's hoping for physical versions of that customisation, a bit like Kid Robot's Munnys). We'd like to see an unembellished version, a bit cleaner, simpler.

And of course, they come in life-size versions too - which we reckon might scare the hell out of younger kids...

Overall though, we reckon these two are (relatively) cool - perhaps not up there with Jamie Hewlett's Monkey animations appropriated by the BBC for its coverage of the Beijing Olympics, but not a million miles away. What d'you think?

D&AD Sharp'ner

This looks like it could be good: the first of the D&AD's Sharp'ner events, The Future of Books & Book Design. It's got folk like Unit Editions, Penguin, Fuel Design and the Caseroom Press, having an informal chit chat. It's on at Corbet Place Bar & Lounge (at the Old Truman Brewery), on Wednesday 26 May, at 7pm - entry is a fiver, or free to members.

Get your tick'ts here.