Just a quick note to mention that tickets are on sale for the 10th Annual St Bride Library Conference, which is themed around the idea of ‘critical tensions’ – and the ways in which designers attempt to balance them.

Speakers include typographer, designer and lecturer Phil Baines; designer and typographer Jonathan Barnbrook; graphic designer Zoë Bather from Studio8; photographer and art director Amelia Gregory; letterpress guru Alan Kitching; typographer Gerry Leonidas; graphic designer Vaughan Oliver; lecturer, author and poster collector Paul Rennie; designer and author Lucienne Roberts; tech and ideas man Jack Schulze from Berg; Steve Watson; design lecturer Rebecca Wright; and illustrator Derek Yates.

That’s a fairly solid collection of wisdom and experience – should be good.

The conference is on Thursday 10 and Friday 11 November 2011. Get your tickets here.

There’s been a whole lot of craziness going on in London town (and now across the country) these past few days – selfish acts of wanton destruction, looting and violence. Even as we type this post, the constant soundtrack of sirens is forcing itself in from outside our windows; while at the same time a police helicopter scours the sky.

There’s been a whole heap of distinctly alarmist media coverage (after all, rioting is incredibly photogenic), and Twitter has been buzzing with little else (much of it inaccurate hearsay – it’s incredible how quickly fiction and rumour are propelled to the level of fact).

There’s no denying that there’s some bad stuff going down.

But, we just wanted to say, we love this city.

We love the mix of a thousand different cultures. We love the wilfully haphazard sprawl. We love the city’s creativity, its energy, its glum good nature. We love its heft. We love the view from Waterloo Bridge on a late summer’s day. We love the gentle buzz from a throng of drinkers outside a pub on a Friday evening. We love the museums, the galleries, the clubs, the pubs, the cinemas, the theatres, the libraries and the markets. We love the magnificent parks, the undulating river, and the historic buildings that litter the streets.

This is where we live. And we damn well love it.

So this looks interesting: D&AD have teamed up with Hewlett Packard (or HP as they now call themselves) to create the Graduate Academy for final-year students and recent graduates: a five day creative bootcamp in London, running from 22-26 August this year.

The specifics of the Academy are presumably still being ironed out, but they say “The invited attendees will be tested and trained to the limit by leading practitioners from the creative industries… The Graduate Academy will teach graduates about their role in a creative organisation. It will show them how to bring their education-based skills into a work setting, how to view their work objectively and how to contribute as a member of a team.”

There are places on the Academy for 100 students, and of those, the best 50 will go on to be offered 3 month fully paid placements with top creative agencies (though as yet they’ve not specified which those agencies are), running from September.

To get onto the programme, you have to complete the brief that’s been set, and it’s a fair old humdinger: “Use your talent to show how HP’s Workstations can connect with creatives everywhere”.

We’re guessing that boils down to: how do you convince a Mac-loving creative community that they should ditch their Mac Pros for HP Workstations?

Looking at the webpages for relevant computers from each of those companies, you get a very quick sense of how differently they currently communicate:

Even the URLs are a fair indication of where they’re at:

http://www.apple.com/macpro/

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/uk/en/sm/WF25a/12454-12454-296719-4270224-4270224-3718645.html

It’s a fairly open brief, and the prizes of a place at the academy, and the placements, are hugely valuable, particularly given how many graduates are competing for jobs at the moment.

The deadline for entries is Friday 27 May, and entry costs £15. Students who graduated in 2009 & 2010 (as long as they’re not already working full-time), or who graduate this year, are all eligible.

We made our way to Conway Hall in Holborn yesterday to listen to the School of Life’s secular Sunday Sermon by the wonderful Sir Ken Robinson.

We first came across him a few years back thanks to his brilliant and hilarious TED talk: Schools Kill Creativity; so we were really looking forward to catching him in person, and he didn’t disappoint. His talk, based on his new book The Element, focused on passion. He very clearly and wittily explained his belief that everyone is full of extraordinary potential, but that that potential is often unrealised. Our education and upbringing often fails to locate the magic place where our talents and passion combine – the place where we’re truly in our element. You might be doing something you’re good at, but if you don’t enjoy it, then you’re not really fulfilling your potential.

It was a great talk in itself, and much enhanced by the School of Life’s Sunday Sermon overall vibe. We were greeted at the hall by a man dressed as a devil, and before the talk we were asked to stand and sing the first ‘hymn’, Eye of the Tiger by Survivor – which could have been awkward and laboured, but was actually just damn good fun, mainly thanks to the leadership of Marie Benton from The Choir With No Name. At the end of the sermon, we stood again to sing Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen. Fantastic.

Check out some of the previous sermons on the School of Life’s Vimeo page.