We Made This

Outsiders

The folks over at the achingly hip Lazarides Gallery have got a new permanent space opening on Charing Cross Road, and are kicking things off with a new show called Outsiders, featuring bits and pieces from the gallery's entire roster of artists, including Bast, 3D Del-Naja, Stanley Donwood (above), Faile, Conor Harrington and Paul Insect. The show launches on Friday 23 May, will be open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 to 7, and runs through to August 23.

RDI Summer School 2008

Crikey, is it that time of year again?

Applications have just opened for this year's RDI Summer School, and anyone with between 3 and 15 years' professional design experience can apply. 

The RDI are the Royal Designers for Industry, a gang of the brightest and best from the worlds of design, architecture and engineering. They include Jonathon Ive, Derek Birdsall, Peter Blake, Thomas Heatherwick, Alan Kitching, Marc Newson and Mary Quant amongst their number, as well as a host of others.

The school takes 12 or so of the RDI, throws them together with 30 young(er) designers, and then basically lets them play for four days. The exact nature of the school changes each year, so it's tricky to explain exactly what happens. But, heck, four days in the country doing creative stuff with incredibly talented people - what's not to love?

The school runs from Thursday 4 to Sunday 7 September, down at the stunning Dartington Hall in South Devon. Because it's subsidised it only costs £100 per person, which includes transport from London, food and accommodation. The deadline for applications is 25 July.

You can find out more at the RSA website, and can check out some of Alistair's photos from last couple of years here.

Moments of inspiration

We made our way along to the St Bride Annual Conference at the end of last week, and we were going to post a long, fascinating, detailed and critical analysis of it all, but fortunately Ministry of Type has beaten us to it.

The event was a bit of a hit and miss affair, with moments of brilliance mixed up with moments of not-so-brilliant, and we agree with pretty much everything Aegir at Ministry of Type has to say about it, except that we thought Lizzie Ridout's talk was really interesting, and that she's lovely.

We particularly liked the talks by typographers Jeremy Tankard and Rian Hughes. We'll post later about the gorgeous stuff Rian Hughes showed, but in the meantime, here's some shots of the book TypeBookOne that Jeremy Tankard gave out free to everyone (how great is that?) featuring a variety of his typefaces.

The Shire Types are especially tasty.

Overall, despite a few dud talks, the event was a great success - you get to meet a fascinating mix of really talented people, and are given a whole heap of what Tankard called 'mind-candy'.

Inspiring indeed.

FontStruct

Dear Internet. We find that we have waaaay too much time on our hands. It would be really splendid if you could find a way to suck away some of that time. Perhaps a few hours each day? Or, you know, more? Excellent, thanks!

Oh. Dear. Lord.

Say goodbye to lunch breaks, coffee breaks, tea breaks, going home early, idle chit chat, or frankly, any semblance of a life. Those clever kids (well, actually, the insanely clever Rob Meek) over at FontShop have created FontStruct, a quite brilliant online type generator.

It's a very Web 2.0 UGC (User Generated Content for the lo-tech among you) kinda thing. You play around with a deceptively simple interface to create your own geometric letter forms. It uses a set of 'bricks' and... well, heck, go take a look. You have to register, which only takes a minute or so, and then you're off. You can browse other people's (frankly astounding) efforts, and even download them (as a .ttf file) for free. Or go the whole hog, and create your own typeface. You can keep it just for yourself (if you're a bit of a grouch), or share it with the world.

Fontastic.

Le Tour de Blanche

We’re not going to be posting for a few days, as we’re heading down to the Isle of Wight. (We’re convinced that it could be the UK’s version of The Hamptons, but no-one’s agreeing with us on that one so far.)

We’re not just heading down for seaside rock and coloured sands though – on Sunday we’re taking part in the first Tour De Blanche, a round-the-island cycle ride in aid of the wonderful Teenage Cancer Trust. If you’re a good cyclist it’s a pleasant day's ride; if you’re not so hot, it’s a gruelling 8 hour marathon up and down an exhaustingly hilly coastal route. We’ll leave it to you to figure out which group we fall into.

If you feel like donating a bit of your hard-earned, just go to our Justgiving page and punch in your details.

Have a great weekend.

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.