We Made This

St Bride Design Auction

Ah, this looks like a tasty little number. The St Bride Library is having an auction on 19 March, with half the proceeds going to the library. No word yet on what the Lots are, but with Paula Scher, AVA, True North, Magma, YCN, Hudson Bec, Spin, Studio 8, Johnson Banks and SEA all involved, it's gonna be a humdinger.

via Ace Jet 170.

And while you're getting busy with you diary, stick in the Eighth annual Friends of St Bride Library Conference which will bring all manner of design brilliance to town on 23 and 24 April.

iPhone camera app goodness

So, for most designers, the iPhone is the mobile of choice. But for most of those designers, the phone's camera is, well, rubbish: just 2 megapixels, and a cruddy lens to boot.

But, help has arrived in the form of a couple of deeply tasty downloadable apps that let you process your shots on the phone. We've secured the services of two 'resting' members of top pop combo Gorillaz (2D and Murdoc) to demonstrate those apps.

First up is 2D and the delicious QuadCamera from Art&Mobile. This application lets you fire off a salvo of shots, just like you might with a Lomo Super Sampler toy camera. Utterly brilliant. You can adjust how fast they shoot; which layout they come in (a rectangle of four, four in a row, a rectangle of eight, or eight in a row); and whether they're colour or greyscale.

We've pushed the colour/contrast on the shots above (using Photoshop), but even without doing that, they look great.

Fantastically, once you've got them on your computer, you can download the free QuadAnimator application to create gif animations of your shots. Eat your heart out Michel Gondry. Can't wait to see the first promo shot like this...

Next up is Nevercenter's CameraBag app, which lets you apply some groovy filters to your shots, re-creating a whole variety of retro styles like Holga, Fisheye, and Lomo. (We're guessing there's some kind of copyright reason for them renaming Holga to Helga and Lomo to Lolo). It's still a bit buggy, but generally does great stuff. Here's a selection of shots of Murdoc using some of our favourites.

First up, the original shot:

Now, the Instant (Polaroid) version:

 

And the 1962 version:

And the Lolo version:

And finally, the Helga:

Lush eh? Check out the full size shots over at Alistair's iPhone Flickr set.

Thanks to 2D and Murdoc.

Clothing: Models' own

Styling, hair and makeup: Jamie Hewlett

Hype for Hype for Type

Hype for Type is the new site from the kids over at Nottingham design studio Thinkdust. It's their new online digital type foundry, and could be worth keeping an eye or two on - it launches in full later this year.

Be seeing you

Patrick McGoohan, actor, writer and director, died on Wednesday.

He's best known for his incredible work on the series The Prisoner, one of the truly great TV shows from the 60s (if you've not seen the show, go get the boxset - it really is staggeringly good). 

We only posted the clip above recently, but it seems fitting to give it another airing today.

Read McGoohan's obituary from The Guardian.

The Book Cover Archive

Loving this. It's the delicious Book Cover Archive - "an archive of book cover designs and designers, for the purpose of appreciation and categorization". It's got a heavy US slant at the moment, but that may change as they put more stuff up. You can check out their rather good blog too.

If you're looking for some other book cover goodness, check out The Book Design Review, and Covers from Fwis (who have a searingly honest way of structuring their site).

Skzzzt

A quick note - we're in the middle of doing some techy stuff in the back room of the We Made This blog. It's involving some spanners, some wrenches, a lot of grease, and a bit of swearing. So if things aren't looking quite right, they hopefully will do very soon.

UPDATE

Groovy, looks like we're shipshape again. Hopefully we should now show up under the rather more elegant URL www.wemadethis.co.uk (you'll still be able to find us under the old www.wemadethis.typepad.com URL though). If you're having any problems, do drop us a line.

Big in Japan

We're loving this home movie sent to us by Eric Testroete from Vancouver, who works as a 3D artist on video games.

The film documents his trip to Japan last October, and features most of the 3340 photographs (that's a whopping 46 gigs) he took while there, on his Pentax K20D*. 

It made us think a few things:

Digital photography is ace

As a non-professional film maker, there's no way you could afford to do this on 35mm neg. With digital, the only costs are memory cards and time.

Sharing is ace

Once, you might have toiled over a project like this for months, but only been able to show it to a small audience of friends and relatives. Thanks to the web, and particularly its facility for sharing, you can reach a huge audience in no time.

Computers

They can be ace too.

Most holiday advertising is not at all ace

This made us want to pick up our passports and jump on a jet plane more than just about any advert we care to remember. It's not glossy and perfect. It just feels real.

LCD Soundsystem are very ace

Great track!

All in all, not a bad thing to find in your inbox on a Monday. Cheers Eric.

*He then used Lightroom to process all the images, Métamorphose to rename all the exported files, Sony Vegas to import the sequence and cut it up, then Virtual Dub to scale it down and compress it.

Do panic

It's geeky as anything, but it's also super cool - the Panic Goods Spinner tshirt. Love it.