We Made This

The Dog & Wardrobe

You ever have one of those days where aimless meandering leads you to find untold and unexpected riches?

We were out and about in the London Fields area on Saturday, and had exactly that sort of experience when we stumbled across the brilliant and wonderful The Dog & Wardrobe.

It's a little shop that only opens on Saturdays, from 10 to 5 (though you can visit by appointment during the week) and is crammed full with vintage and contemporary furniture and curios, as well as contemporary art and fashion. You could pick up an old canvas backpack, a Decemberists screenprint, a vintage animal skull, a retro tricycle, and... well, the list goes on and on. It's one of those shops you just want to hug.

The stock changes constantly, so there's always something new to check out. And the owners of the store, Vishal Gohel and Jane Money also offer a full spec design service.

Deeply lovely.

Supreme T-shirts

Looks like the design kids over at Supremebeing (watch out, noisy link) have got all printy for their Spring Summer Collection.

There's their CMYK Process T-shirt up top, with registration marks and everything, available in grey and white, from Stand-Out.net.

And then there's their set of individual Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black Ts, available from Urbanindustry.co.uk.

Very tasty. Thrill your friends with your great fashion sense, then bore them for hours with explanations about the intricacies of lpi vs dpi, spot varnishes and stochastic screening.

FOOTNOTE: We're still hankering after a rather lovely CMYK T that the V&A shop was selling for a while, which had a circle for each of the CMYK letters, each of which looked like they were dripping slightly. If anyone knows who did them, or where they're available, do give us a shout. Cheers!

FOOTNOTE UPDATE: Ah, how good is this? Danny Heffer, the designer of the V&A CMYK T-shirt, reads this blog, and got in touch. Find him and his stuff at the We Make It Better blog (we're really hoping that name's not in reference to us...)

Loving the interweb.

Seeking inspiration

Ready for another huge dose of design goodness?

The Seventh annual Friends of St Bride Library Conference is almost upon us, taking place on Thursday 15 and Friday 16 May 2008, and focusing on the subject of Inspiration.

The programme has just been announced, and it's a fantastic line-up of wonderful design folk, including Karl Martens, Jake Tilson, Erik Spiekermann, Rian Hughes and Susanna Edwards.

We went along last year, and had a fantastic time. Read all about it here.

Tickets for this year are £100, or £50 for students.

Looks like this feed is not valid

Humble grovellings to readers who subscribe to our RSS feed – there’s a problem with Feedburner feeds today, which Typepad assure us they’re trying to fix. Hopefully, normal service will be resumed shortly.

Thankyouverymuch.

UPDATE
Fixed now. Cheerss for your patience.

Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press

First off, apologies if you’ve already seen this posted over on AceJet170, but it's just too good to allow even the smallest chance of you missing it.

Last night BBC4 screened a fantastic show with the ever wonderful Mr Stephen Fry going in search of the story behind Johann Gutenberg, the man who created the printing press, and so brought about the existence of mass communication.

We taped the show, part of BBC4’s Medieval Season, and only watched it today – it’s simply brilliant. Fry travels round Europe discovering how Gutenberg put his press together, and gets down and dirty creating type matrices, hand-making paper, and teaming up with Alan May to re-create an original one-pull press, just like the one old Johann would have used.

Fry’s obvious enthusiasm and wonder for his subject are utterly infectious.

Now, if the show had aired just a few months back, none of this information would do you any good. But thanks to the brilliance of the BBC and the power of the interweb, you can still watch the show on the BBC’s iPlayer.* You’ve got until next Monday to catch it. We highly highly recommend you do so.

UPDATE - Philip Crocker from the production company that made the show, Wavelength Films, has been in touch, and the programme’s being repeated on Friday April 25 at 9pm on BBC 2. Hoorah!

And, that’s not all. On Tuesday 6 May at 6.30 the British Library is hosting a demonstration by Alan May of the one-pull press created for the show. Full information and booking here.

Printing history goodness all round.

*Except if you’re living outside the UK. Sorry.

Radiolab

Regular readers of the We Made This blog will by now know that we’re all about visual culture, in its myriad different forms. But we’re also aware that there is some other incredibly good stuff out there; the sort of stuff that doesn’t always enter your head through your peepers.

So we wanted to share a bit of aural pleasure with you, in the form of the fantastically brilliant Radiolab show coming out of WNYC public radio in New York.

They desribe the show like this: ‘Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we'll feed it with possibility.’

The latest season has explored laughter, lying, man-made life, and the various incarnations of War of the Worlds. Each show is around an hour long, and each one is a conceptual and audio delight. They’re available as downloadable MP3s and also as podcasts. Go listen.

Linksplats

After reading this article over on the Creative Review blog, we were reminded that we'd been meaning to do a bit of research into QR codes.

QR (Quick Response) codes are a bit like barcodes, but instead of needing a barcode scanner to read them, you can use a mobile phone camera (either one with the software built in, like the Nokia N95, or by downloading a code reader onto your phone). The QR codes generally contain a machine readable version of a URL, so that your camera decodes the image and opens up the relevant website in your phone's web-browser.

It's essentially a physical hyperlink, or 'hardlink'. (So if you use your phone to take a picture of the code above, it should shoot your phone's web-browser across to the best design blog in town.)

This tech is big in Japan (where mobile technology is generally a few leaps and bounds beyond ours), having been developed in 1994 by Denso Wave. But it's gradually popping up over here, and will probably become more and more popular as phone technology catches up. (Nokia pre-installs code readers on its N93, N93i, N95 and E90 phones, and this page from their site lists places you can download readers for their other phones.)

If you're not rocking a Nokia, Kaywa produce one of the leading code readers, which you can try installing on your phone – though it doesn't work on iPhones yet. (But if you've been naughty and have a jailbroken iPhone, you can download the iMatrix reader.)

You can also create your own QR code over with Kaywa.

(And the Kaywa blogs are pretty informative too: mobile.kaywa.com and www.kaywa.com/vnews.)

People are finding all sorts of interesting ways to play with the codes. Here's just a few of the bits we've discovered so far:

Semapedia is encouraging people to create QR codes as stickers to put up at physical spaces, linking back to the relevant Wikipedia articles. (The Semapedia site has also got a useful drop down list of phone makes and models, linking to the code readers that work with them.)

The Creative Review article mentioned up top is about Emma Cott, who creates clothing with codes that link to your online profiles (Facebook, MySpace etc.)

On a bit of a sidenote, we reckon this area is potentially a gold mine for networking events. We've always wanted to be able to pass a scanner across a crowd of people at a party to see who's who. We can really see a market for a small smart badge versions of QR codes, so that you can advertise yourself to a room. And since you get to choose which webpage the badge links to, you're in control of the information people can access about you - it could be a page you've posted just for that event, your business website, or even something entirely unrelated...

There's another Facebook application "Add to Friends" Gear which does a similar thing, creating some rather dubiously designed stuff that features links to your profile.

For those with a little more fashion sense, you can pick up The Invader, a limited edition scarf, which is a collaboration between Kaywa and Office Lendorff.

2d-code.co.uk is a blog with lots of stuff about QR codes, including a story about how you can screw with your QR codes to make them look more intersting, as they allow for up to 30% deterioration of the code while remaining readable. Which means the BBC could stick their name into their code.

qrcode.es is a Spanish site all about QR codes, inluding a feature about using them as an updated version of laserquest in a battle round a shopping store, and a short story competition, where you have to create short stories (just 100 characters including spaces) that can be embedded in QR codes.

They also do some t-shirts and products, inluding this baby's bib which decodes as "My parents are freaks. Please, adopt me!". Which is, frankly, genius.

And finally, there's a (currently fairly shallow) Flickr pool of people doing interesting stuff (stamps, stickers, artworks) with the codes .

We love these little linksplats.

Admittedly at the moment they tend to be ham-fistedly stuck onto adverts and posters rather than properly integrated, which looks rubbish; but hopefully as people start playing with them more and more, they'll start to appear in more refined and witty ways.

Pirate Supplies Store

Inspiration. It's a good thing. And this TED talk from Dave Eggers has it by the bucket load.

Dave Eggers is the guy behind McSweeney's Quarterly, and the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

McSweeney's is based in San Francisco, and they found themselves needing to rent some office space. They discovered a great place, and decided that they could use part of the space as a tutoring centre to help local kids with their writing skills.

Part of the rental deal was that the building had to be used partly for retail. Since the interior of the space had stripped floorboards and wooden beams, and reminded them of the inside of a boat, they opened up a Pirate Supply Store, kind of as a joke, though they now find that it's making good money. You can pick up eye patches for day and evening wear, peg legs, and supplies to combat scurvy.

The tutoring centre, 826 Valencia, is doing fantastically well, allowing kids to hang out with professional writers, and even to publish books together. And other similar centres have been set up across the US, including a Brooklyn Superhero Supply Store where you can get fitted for a cape and buy a complete secret identity.

The TED Conference gives out grants each year for its TED Prize - created as a way of taking the great ideas from the conferences, and making them bigger and better. The winners of the prize are granted a wish, and this year Eggers was granted one:

"I wish that you - you personally and every creative individual and organization you know - will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have 1,000 examples of innovative public - private partnerships."

Which is pretty damn brilliant.

On the back of that, he's set up the Once Upon A School website to coordinate the project.

Eggers' TED talk lasts twenty-five minutes, but heck, it's Friday - take a bit of time, and get inspired. And if anyone in London fancies doing something on the back of this, or is already doing something, drop us a line. We'd love to be involved.

Print Liberation

A rather lovely thing about running a blog is that people from all over the place get in touch out of the blue to tell you about projects they're working on. And we reckon we've been pretty lucky so far, as nearly all the stuff that's been sent our way has been dead interesting.

One such project is the new book coming up from the Print Liberation studio in Philadelphia. It's a primer on how to start screen printing using really basic elements, and is written by Nick Paparone & Jamie Dillon from the studio, in collaboration with Luren Jenison, with illustrations by Tim Gough. It looks fantastic - we can't wait to get our hands on a copy.

Print Liberation is published on July 25, by F+W Publications, the kids behind How, ID and Print magazines.

Sterling designs

It's all change at the Royal Mint today (sorry, there's just no way to avoid that pun), as it revealed the new designs for for the coinage of the United Kingdom.

Rather brilliantly, the designs are the work of a 26 year old graphic designer, Matthew Dent, chosen from an open competition that attracted over 4,000 entries. We wonder if he'll get a Blue Peter badge for his efforts?

The coins all use a heraldic shield as a linking theme – the £1 coin has the full shield, and the rest of the coins feature segments from it, making up a sort of gappy jigsaw puzzle that'll set you back 88p. It's a kind of post-heritage feel.

The new designs will be hitting your pocket gradually during the coming year.