We Made This

Happy Moog Year

Tick tock goes the clock, and it's another year down. It's been a bit nuts hasn't it? Here's hoping 2009 brings some good stuff. The words HOPE and CHANGE floated around a lot towards the end of the year, mainly thanks to Obama's campaign; and the fact that he's the man in charge stateside certainly suggests some kind of cautious optimism is allowed. Fingers crossed - we reckon it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

Meantime, we'd like to introduce you to our friend Lee, also known as Moog. He's been doing the Flickr 365 project for the past year (you take a picture a day for a whole year - technically it was 366 this year, what with the whole leap year thing) - and we're quietly blown away by his stuff.

Every day he's been putting together incredibly complicated self-portraits, getting busy with some mad photoshop skills. Particularly impressive when you find out that this isn't his day job (yet!). The four above are just a tiny glimpse of what he's been up to. Check out the full Moog 366 Flickr set.

And if that tickles your fancy, why not join the 2009 365 group?

Have a fantastic New Year's Eve, and we'll see you next year.

Back to Basics this Christmas

Sorry, we're a bit late flagging this one up, but if you're heading into town this weekend, make sure you check out the Back to Basics shop run by the graduate students from LCC's MA Graphic Design Course.

They've set up their pop-up store on Newburgh Street (just off Carnaby Street - you'll find both the rather lovely Beyond the Valley and Levi's boutique store Cinch there too). It's got a fine collection of hand-printed posters (A1 for £20, A2 for £12 and A3 for £8) as well as a smattering of books and other odds and sods.

It's open today and tomorrow from 11 to 7, and on Sunday from midday to 5pm.

Flipping addictive

Okay, so cast your mind back to when you were, oh, say seven or eight. Remember how on the last few days of term at school you'd basically do no work, and mainly just played board games?

Nothing's changed.

It's so very nearly Christmas, and all across the land designers and project managers are desperately searching for ways to while away those last few hours before the next Christmas party. And heck, here come Adobe, riding in like some kind of well designed fairy godmother. 

They've created a disgustingly addictive online game in the form of Air Flip. It's showcasing their new Air technology, which lets people create cloud apps, but that's largely irrelevant. The fact is, this sucker will eat up all of your remaining hours till it's stocking time.

Give it a go. You won't regret it.

(Well, not immediately.)

FontShuffle

The rather tasty little iPhone application FontShuffle has just hit town, courtesy of the folks at FontShop.

The app lets you browse through a selection of Font categories (sans serif, serif, slab serif, script, blackletter and display), and then to pick from a list of relevant sub-categories (so serif would take you to grotesque, humanist, geometric, gothic, decorative and hybrid), and then to a list of six of FontShop's available faces. Then, and this is oddly fun*, if you want to see a further six faces, you give the iPhone (or iTouch) a shake, and a new set pop up.

Select one of the typefaces and you'll get The Quick Brown Fox text in that face, swivel the screen to the landscape mode and you'll get the glyph chart.

This is the first version of the app, and at the moment it's just a friendly little marketing tool for FontShop, without any hugely practical uses. But they're promising to add more faces, and more functionality, so it could go somewhere very interesting. 

Cheers to Caspian for the heads up.

*If, like us, you don't get out much.

Wireframe Lamborghini

How yummy is this?

A life-size wireframe model of a Lamborghini Countach. In flouro orange.

We caught sight of it on Saturday over at The Classic Car Club on Old St. It's the work of artist Benedict Radcliffe, and you can read more about it on this Jalopnik post.

Vrmmmmmm.

Ephemera Society Special Fair

Sorry for the late notice on this one, but, ah heck, we've just been busy.

This weekend sees the latest Ephemera Society Special Fair take place in the oh-so-lovely surroundings of the Holiday Inn on Coram Street in Bloomsbury.

If you've not been before, an ephemera fair is a like a big posh jumble sale where the only thing you can buy is printed ephemera. There's always a huge amount of stuff to wade through, but you can regularly find some real gems: old printing manuals, BOAC luggage labels, Swiss Air travel documents, vintage posters... they're all there.

The fair runs from 11 until 5, but get there early for the good stuff.

Pictures on Walls Open Weekend

Hmmm. Wonder if this will be insanely busy, or just ridiculously busy?

The folks at Pictures on Walls - they're the go-to-guys for Banksy's work, and put on Santa's Ghetto each year - are having an open-weekend at their print studio in Shoreditch.

They're having a lottery where four people will win an edition of Banksy's 'Very Little Helps' print, and the next hundred get first refusal on buying a copy. Which is gonna guarantee queues round the block, particularly with the tickets just a quid each, and proceeds going to Sightsavers International.

We'd be far more chuffed to get one of Antony Micallef's prints though. Lovemaker (above) and Bethlehem (below) are both up for grabs in the same way as Banksy's. The prints were created from originals painted by Micallef after last year's Santa's Ghetto in Jerusalem. Banksy might drum up the headlines, but Micallef is the man. You can pick up a tasty book of his stuff over at Lazarides.

There's going to be a stack of other new work, and there was talks of tours round their studio too. It all happens from 11am to 7pm on Saturday 6 and Sunday 7 December at the POW Studio, 16 Willow Street, London EC2A 4BH.

See you in the queue.