We hate to smug off, but our good friend Charlie over at the distinctly wonderful Tantramar has just posted an interview with Alistair as part of his series of interviews with artists, designers and illustrators, which currently also features Seripop and Miles Donovan.
Swelling the ranks of blogs by designers, Graphic Journey Blog should be worth keeping an eye on.
Our friend Andy over at Now in Colour has set up an interesting project that kicks off today.
He's been asking the great and the good of the creative industry to post up their old college work, as part of what he calls a ‘raindrop idea’, where the individual contribution is small, but where it collectively has a noticeable effect. (A good example of this being done really well is the Blog Action Day that we took part in back in October.)
Alistair’s picked a couple of projects from his time at Central Saint Martins, where he studied on the BA Graphic Design course:
First up is Bob Book, a story about “the brief life and untimely death of an elastic band”. I put this together in my first year at St Martins, and it’s still one of my favourite projects. The typography is rubbish (14pt Arial? I didn't have a clue...), and the mix of photography and hand drawn images is peculiar, but it’s got real heart to it, and that just about carries it through. And I’m still quite proud of the binding, which is just a series of elastic bands stretched across two corrugated plastic boards. You can see the full book on this Flickr slideshow.
Next up is a series of pictures I took of Simon Pegg and Jessica Stephenson when they were writing the second series of the TV show Spaced. It was just a great way to spend a day. As a project it reminded me that there’s a real freedom you have at college to get in touch with people, and it’s hugely important to make the most of that.
You can see more work from other creative folk at the Early Designs Flickr group.
Reference Library is the fantastic blog from Philadelphia based designer Andy Beach (you can see some of his work in the recent book of hand drawn type Hand Job
The blog is principally a pictorial compendium of the various bits and bobs that Andy failed to win on Ebay.
Which could be a bit depressing.
But instead of getting down about it, he’s created a rich visual feast, ranging from lettering to apparel to storefronts. (And saved a huge amount of cash in the process.)
He’s a damn fine curator. Go take a look.
Like just about every other designer in town, we've been loving the image bookmarking site Ffffound! which started up this year. We're not heavy users (you can see our meagre selection here), and there's a fair amount of crossover with our blog; but we do love the way it seems to represent the visual zeitgeist.
Our favourite image so far is the shot above, taken by Flickr user Dubstyle (also known as the illustrator and designer Luke Worley) as part of his Whiskerino set.
Whiskerino is an annual beard growing competition, curated by web designer Michael Eades. The rules are that you start cleanly shaven on November 1 2007, and then grow your beard, agreeing not to shave in any way for the duration of the competition, which runs until at least February 29 2008. Contestants then post an image of their growth to the site at least once a week, with various themed image days to spice things up. It's mainly happening stateside, with only six beards going on in the UK so far.
It might be a bit late for Blighty to catch up now, but how about next year gentlemen?
We're very much liking this application – it lets you choose some of your Flickr shots (by set, tag or group), and post them on any blog or website. And it's ridiculously simple too.
To get your version, all you have to do is click the Info link on the bottom right, create your code, and paste it into your blog or website.
Good work interwebs.
Via Coolhunting
About to make plans for the summer?
Read this first.
It's from the latest Howies catalogue, and is by Dan Germain, who's the guy who does clever things with words over at Innocent. (He also has a rather wonderful blog, which is just celebrating its first birthday.)
Apologies for the recent posting hiatus, which is due to Alistair having broken both his scaphoid (wrist bone) and radial head (part of one of the bones in the arm) in a cycling accident in Brockwell Park. The irony of the fact that he survived the rigours of Kilimanjaro only to be felled by a local park (technically by a local dog in a local park) is lost on no-one.
We're gradually getting our dusty heads round the various aspects of blogging, and the whole Web 2.0 thing.
(For those of you who don't indulge in tech lingo, Web 2.0 is a vague collective term for the websites that have appeared in the last few years which focus on social interaction and networking, and which give users far more control over their content.)
One of the big things we've been eager to work out is how to use RSS Feeds. Sometimes when you open a web page, particularly a blog, you'll see the little blue box with RSS in it on the right hand side of your address bar. That's a link to the RSS feed for that page. The RSS Feed is a version of a webpage that can easily be read by other websites.
What that boils down to is that if there are a bunch of websites you look at regularly, rather than laboriously open up each individual one, you can create a single page which loads up all the new posts from each site.
There are a bunch of different places that can do this for you, but the one we've taken to like a duck to a large wet place is Netvibes. It's one of those sites that works exactly the way you'd like - it's clean, simple, intuitive, logical, and above all, easy to get your head round.
Go play.
Alistair's brother Graeme is a copywriter and part time art director, who works with Gavin, an art director and part time copywriter, over at DDB. They've done loads of great work for VW (including this Polo made of ice) and The Guardian, and they've just put their portfolio online. Check it out.
