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Ken Robinson on Passion

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.

14 March 2011 | 4 Comments

Joy of Living

Max Fraser’s brilliant and inspiring Joy of Living exhibition for Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres opens at Somerset House on Tuesday 15 March.

The exhibition features specially commissioned work by over 100 designers, each working on a canvas of a single sheet of A4 graph paper, and responding to the theme ‘The joy of living’. The list of folks involved includes: Tord Boontje, Daniel Eatock, Michael Marriott, John Pawson, Troika and a host of others (you might even spot something by our very own Alistair Hall). About half of the artworks created are already available to view on the Joy of Living site.

The works are being sold anonymously at the show, at the price of £250 each, whether they’re by a household name or a rising star – the name of the designer only being revealed after purchase. All the proceeds are going to Maggie’s.

If you can’t make it along to the show, you can still donate at the Joy of Living JustGiving page. You can also follow events on Facebook and Twitter.

3 March 2011 | No Comments

Ephemera Society Fair

Just a quick reminder: the first Ephemera Fair of 2011 is just a couple of weeks away. It takes place on Sunday 6 February at the Doubletree Hotel, 92 Southampton Row, London WC1B 4BH, from 11am to 4pm.

(For those of you who’ve not been to, or haven’t heard of the Ephemera Fairs, they’re sales of printed ephemera. So that’s stuff like “leaflets, handbills, tickets, trade cards, programmes and playbills, printed tins and packaging, advertising inserts, posters, newspapers” and much more. In the words of the Ephemera Society’s founder, Maurice Rickards, “the minor transient documents of everyday life”. And there’s generally something brilliant to be found.)

20 January 2011 | 1 Comment

Reverting to Type

We nipped across to the private view of the fantastic new letterpress show Reverting to Type at the Standpoint Gallery in Hoxton last week. The private view was rammed, so we popped back the following day for a proper look, and to take some pictures.

The show has been curated our friends by Graham Bignell of New North Press (with whom we made the posters for the Twickenham Carnival), and Richard Ardagh of Elephant’s Graveyard (we worked with him on the London Design Guide). It features contemporary letterpress work from studios right across the world, as well as a selection of UK letterpress folk including Justin Knopp of Typoretum (that’s his Rustic Fete poster above), Hand & Eye Letterpress, The Hi-Artz Press, Flowers & Fleurons, and Mr Smith’s Letterpress Workshop (that’s his Damaged Letterpress print below; check out Creative Review’s film of their visit to his studio).

The show is really extensive, the walls packed with fine examples of work, ranging from seasoned professionals to students from local art colleges; and there are also a series of prints that have been created specifically for the show. Nearly all the work is for sale, either as one-off originals, or limited edition prints; both framed and unframed.

There’s also a range of cards and artists-books on sale, including the stunning The Travelling Bar Maid by Lisa Rahman, printed by Graham Bignell.

Take a look at all our shots from the show on Alistair’s Flickr set. The show is open daily from 10-6, running from now until 24 December, then re-opening from 4 to 22 January 2011.

13 December 2010 | No Comments

Never Judge…? at Stolen Space

We nipped over to Brick Lane this weekend to check out the new show at the Stolen Space gallery, Never Judge…? The show features a hundred book cover designs by a huge variety of artists, many of them more usually associated with the street art scene. Each artist was invited to create a one-off artwork cover for a novel of their choice, working to the standard paperback dimensions of 129mm x 198mm. The two above are Dave Kinsey’s cover for Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, and D*Face’s Doomsday Book, from a series of reclaimed books he’s used for the show.

Other artists at the show include Anthony Lister (that’s his cover for Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf below), Blek Le Rat, Eelus, EINE, and Shepard Fairey.

The show has been put together in association with Penguin, ahead of their new Penguin Essentials series which is due to be launched next April, and the covers for that series are on display too (below), featuring work by book designers and illustrators including John Gray and David Gentleman. You can pick up limited edition gyclee prints of these from the show, though when we were there the majority of the prints on display were still lo-res versions – we’re assuming the prints will be hi-res!

As mentioned in the blurb for the show, the advent of the e-readers (crikey that’s a grim name isn’t it?) like the Kindle and the iPad means that the days of the book cover may be numbered. We’re not entirely convinced by that argument. What we can see happening more is that the book cover will follow the route of the album cover, expanding from a single version out to a whole range of images that gets used across a whole swathe of media – from small thumbnails on Amazon and the iBooks store, to digital covers on the devices themselves, to dedicated websites, as well as short-run high-spec limited edition print versions of the books. Already there’s been a real boom in book-as-object publishing, such as the beautiful editions from Whites Books, where sumptuous production values are paramount. But we really hope that the cheap, disposable paperback doesn’t disappear entirely either.

All the rest of the work from the show is on sale, either as original artworks, or as limited edition prints – check out the full gallery.

6 December 2010 | No Comments

Ministry of Stories & Hoxton Street Monster Supplies

So, we’ve been kinda quiet here of late on the We Made This blog (for which you have our deepest apologies) but we can now reveal why – we’ve been entirely occupied with setting up a fantastic new project.

It’s a bit of an epic tale, so, if you’re sitting comfortably, we’ll begin…

Way back in April 2008 we posted on our old blog about Dave Eggers’ inspiring TED talk about his brilliant 826 literacy project, and asked if anyone was going to be setting up something similar in London. On the back of that post, thanks to Andrew Hinton, we met up with the wonderful Lucy Macnab and Ben Payne, and chatted loosely about how a London version of 826 might work. Things pootled along gently for a while, until Lucy and Ben secured support for the project from the Arts Council, as well as seed-funding from the JJ Charitable Trust, and things suddenly stepped up a gear, particularly when author Nick Hornby, who had been thinking about setting up something similar himself, joined the gang.

Cut to November 2010, after many, many, many meetings, and gargantuan efforts from Nick, Lucy and Ben (and a veritable host of others), and this morning saw the launch of the Ministry of Stories on Hoxton Street in east London.

The Ministry follows the model of the 826 centres: a writing centre where kids aged 8-18 can get one-to-one tuition with professional writers and other volunteers; with the centres being housed behind fantastical shop fronts designed to fire the kids’ imaginations (and generate income for the writing centres).

In our case, the shop is Hoxton Street Monster Supplies – Purveyor of Quality Goods for Monsters of Every Kind.

The shop was established in 1818, and ever since then has served the daily needs of London’s extensive monster community.

Step inside, and you’ll find a whole range of essential products for monsters.

You can pick from a whole range of Tinned Fears (each of which comes with a specially commissioned short story from authors including Nick Hornby and Zadie Smith), a selection of Human Preserves, and a variety of other really rather fine goods.

This is our favourite product though (unsurprisingly, it’s a real delicacy amongst monsters):

The project has been an utter joy to work on, letting us flex both our design and our writing muscles in equal measure; as well as working with a fantastic team of collaborators including architects, writers, designers, dramaturgs (look it up) and others.

Anyway, once you’re done shopping, you might notice that the shelves hide a secret – a disguised entrance that opens onto the Ministry of Stories.

The Ministry is designed to feel really special: the space was architected brilliantly by Andrew Lock, Catherine Grieg and David Ogunmuyiw; with fantastic wall illustrations by the very lovely Heather Sloane.

The identity for the Ministry itself grew out of an extensive series of branding workshops where hundreds of names for the project were mulled over. Lots of Post-It notes later, we eventually gravitated towards a group of names that had a slightly tongue-in-cheek air of authority about them. Alistair then happened to stumble upon his grandmother’s old post-war ration book, featuring the Ministry of Food logo, and that was that. The Ministry had found its name, mood, and identity.

The Ministry has already hosted a series of workshops with local children, all of whom seem to have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. And the press, including BBC News, The Today Programme, and The Guardian, have naturally enough, taken a fair interest.

You can follow more about the Ministry (and get involved!) on the MoS website (designed by Manifest), the MoS Facebook page, and the MoS Twitter feed. Check out more pictures of the Ministry over on Alistair’s MoS Flickr set.

We’re dead chuffed to have been involved in such a fantastically exciting and collaborative project. It’s utterly inspirational to see how freely people have given their skills and time to the project. (A big shout to Benwells, Robert Horne, Fenner Paper and Colorset UVI by the way – cheers gang!)

And if you’re out and about over the weekend, do drop by…

19 November 2010 | 74 Comments

Small Publishers Fair

The annual Small Publishers Fair is on this Friday and Saturday (12 and 13 November) with a feast of independent contemporary artists, poets, writers and book designers showing their wares; including the very wonderful Tom Gauld (above). On Saturday there’s also a series of free talks and readings. Brilliant.

The fair takes place at Conway Hall in Holborn, from 11am to 7pm each day.

8 November 2010 | No Comments

Letterpress event

There’s a couple of interesting letterpress events coming up in the capital in the next few weeks.

First up, on Friday 19 November at the St Bride Library is Letterpress: Forward Thinking – a day of talks and demonstrations ‘celebrating new ideas and practice in handset typography’. Check out the full programme.

Following hot on the heels of that is Reverting to Type, an exhibition of work by contemporary letterpress practitioners from right around the globe, curated by New North Press and Richard Ardagh. The show runs from 10 to 24 December at the Standpoint Gallery, 45 Coronet Street, London N1. You’ll be able to buy a lot of the work on show, and even have a go at creating your own Christmas card on an Adana press.

1 November 2010 | No Comments

100 Years of Iconic Posters

This looks like it could be an interesting talk: London Transport Museum’s Senior Curator Claire Dobbin is giving a talk, 100 Years of Iconic Posters, at Covent Garden’s new Apple Store, on Wednesday 27 October. “The illustrated talk will show highlights from a century of outstanding design, which transformed the Tube into London’s longest art gallery. Featured artists include Man Ray, Graham Sutherland, Howard Hodgkin and Sir Peter Blake.”

The poster above is The Lure of the Underground by Alfred Leete, from 1927.

(Thanks to Alex for the heads up.)

19 October 2010 | 1 Comment

Design Research Unit 1942-72

We nipped up to the Cubitt gallery at lunchtime today to catch the fantastic little show that’s on there about Design Research Unit, the pioneering multidisciplinary design firm best known for its creation of the British Rail corporate identity. The show features a fine selection of their work from the firm’s first thirty years.

The practice was founded by poet and art critic Herbert Read, with the desire to fuse creative intelligence with technical research, bringing ‘artists and designers into productive relation with scientists and technologists’. Read was joined by Misha Black and Milner Gray, who had themselves previously set up the Industrial Design Partnership (below); and also by Marcus Brumwell.

There’s a great selection of work on show, including company letterheads, and work from clients including Watneys Brewery, ICI, Ilford,and of course British Rail.

The show runs until Sunday 24 October, and will then be touring to Norwich, Bournville, Tate St Ives, Liverpool and Nottingham.

Read more about it in this Guardian article, and check out a few more of our shots on Alistair’s Flickr set.

15 October 2010 | No Comments

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