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Hoxton Street Monster Supplies: now online

Ever since it opened its doors a year ago, customers have been clamouring for an online store for Hoxton Street Monster Supplies. And now, thanks to the brilliant work of a team of hugely talented volunteers, the online shop is alive.

And just in time, as we’ve recently created a whole new range of products for the shop*:

These tins of fear are perfect as a top-up for any monster who’s not feeling quite as scary as they should. As well as a batch of fear, each tin also contains an exclusive short story by a top children’s author, so they make rather good presents for kids.

The Night Sweats features a tale by Andy Stanton; The Chills a story by Jeremy Strong; Alarm has a story by Meg Rosoff; the Night Terrors tale is by Eoin Colfer; and Creeping Dread features a story by Charlie Higson.

The boxes of Cubed Earwax are ‘A true delight at any monster’s table’; but we’re more partial to the bars of Impacted Earwax.

The shop is also selling these jars of Daylight – perfect for vampires suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). You simply leave them out in the light during the day, and as soon as dusk falls, they light up. They also come in a Moonlight version for werewolves who don’t want to wait around all month for a full moon:

And just in case you have a really sweet tooth (or fang) there are a couple of new jars of sweets:

You can also pick up some of the original range of products, including T-shirts, Zombie Fresh Mints, Fang Floss, and of course, some of the books written by the kids at the Ministry of Stories, including the new Awfully Bad Guide to Monster Housekeeping.

The site was designed by Gavin and Jason Fox, built by Simon Pearson, project managed by Chris Meachin, user experienced by Mike Towber; and art directed by We Made This.

*Not all the products are available from the online store; and shipping is only available for UK addresses at the time of writing.

3 November 2011 | 1 Comment

The Awfully Bad Guide to Monster Housekeeping

Just under a year ago, the Ministry of Stories, and its fantastical shop front, Hoxton Street Monster Supplies, opened its doors to the world. (You can read all about that on one of our earlier blog posts.)

Since then, they’ve both been doing really rather well.

The Ministry has helped thousands of kids with their writing, whether in group workshops, or with one-to-one mentoring. The kids get help with all kinds of writing – stories, lyrics, journalism, and even soap-opera scripts. They’ve published a book or two already, as well as a newspaper all about Hoxton Street.

The latest fruit of their labours is the fantastic Awfully Bad Guide to Monster Housekeeping. The original guide was rather tragically burnt to a crisp by a dragon called Vera, so the young writers of the Ministry were tasked with writing an entirely new guide, divided into four separate books: The Alphabet, Fashion & Grooming, Food & Recipes, and Home & Recreation.

They were helped out by a ridiculously talented selection of volunteer illustrators (Nadia Shireen, Katie Cleminson, Alexis Deacon, Hannah Shaw and Chris Wormell) and poets (Ross Sutherland, Polarbear, Laura Dockrill, Naomi Woddis, and Charlie Dark).

Each section is full of tips to help monsters manage their daily lives, and the books also feature pages where the readers can add in their own ideas.

The books were brilliantly designed by Ed Cornish, with art direction from We Made This.

The books are being sold individually for £3 each, or as a collection of four for just £10.

And heck, they’d make a rather fantastic Christmas present for any young monsters you might know. (Just saying.) You can pick them up at the Hoxton Street Monster Supplies shop.

2 November 2011 | 1 Comment

Central Saint Martins pop-up shop

Kate Goodridge, a second year student on Central Saint Martins BA Graphic Design course has been in touch to let us know that they’re running a pop-up shop next week at the City Arts & Music Project, selling a mix of limited edition, bespoke and handmade items. The show is part of their Off Sight exhibition, created for their campaign (which we recently posted about) to keep the printmaking facilities on site when the college moves to Kings Cross later in the year.

The pop-up shop runs from Wednesday 8 to Friday 10 June, and the main exhibition until Tuesday 21 June. All the profits go towards their final year show – it’s a good cause, but more importantly, you might find some great work from an as-yet undiscovered talent…

Lovely flyer too.

2 June 2011 | 1 Comment

Much ado about Alfriston

Living in London is generally a huge pleasure – but one of the best ways to make sure that’s the case is to leave regularly – particularly if you leave and head to the country. So this weekend we jumped on an early train and headed south.

Our starting point was Alfriston, a small village between Brighton and Eastbourne. And it turned out to be one of the finest villages we’ve ever been to. That was thanks largely to the presence of Much Ado Books, which is definitely the finest book shop we’ve ever been to.

The bookshop, run by Cate and Nash, is that perfect mix of new and old books, all picked out with real love and attention.

It’s this love and attention that led to the shop winning the Independent Bookshop of the Year award a few years back. And deservedly so. We’ve never wanted to hug a shop before, but we really wanted to hug this one. Just check out their shelf of old design books:

We picked up a gorgeous facsimile edition of the Specimen of Modern Printing Types by Edmund Fry 1828, published by The Printing Historical Society in 1986.

Just fantastic.

After such heady delights, we wandered across the road to Badgers, a frankly terrific teahouse (with a gorgeous garden), were the owner Michael served us up a delicious breakfast of scrambled eggs on wholemeal toast.

Nourished both in body and mind, we were perfectly set up for a wander along part of the beautiful South Downs Way, a trail which follows the chalky ridges that run from Winchester to Eastbourne.

Cut to a few hours later, and we made our way back to Alfriston for a late lunch at The George, which served up quite simply the tastiest Welsh Rarebit we’d ever eaten.

We made our way home tired and happy, aware that while London is great at some things, Alfriston is more than its match.

16 May 2011 | 1 Comment

Out of Town – Shop, cafe, bar

We were out for a wander at the end of last week, and came across a rather fine little shop on Great Sutton Street, called Out of Town.

Sort of a shop. But sort of a cafe too. (And they say they’re sort of a bar too). It’s a lovely little place, with a fine collection of vintage clothing, magazines, furniture and objects.

9 May 2011 | 1 Comment

Pick Me Up 2011

We’re a bit late getting to this, but this morning we nipped along to the Pick Me Up show, currently on at Somerset House.

The show features work by a host of graphic designers and illustrators, and is part exhibition, part shop, part gallery, part performance space.

This year’s artist in residence is Anthony Burrill, who has a room dedicated to his work (above, and below). Incidentally, the show itself is designed by Michael Marriott, who also worked with Burrill on his recent show at the Biscuit Building.

Screenprinting cooperative Print Club London have also set up a studio space at the show, and have a range of limited edition prints on sale for £150 each.

We particularly liked the room set up by Evening Tweed (a “design collective of sorts”) consisting of the very talented Jez Burrows, Owen Gildersleeve, Sarah King, Tom Rowe, and Thomas Forsyth. We chatted to Owen about the show, and he said that it was a really great opportunity to exhibit work to an audience who wouldn’t otherwise get to see it, which seems like a good thing- though to our mind Somerset House still feels just a bit too dainty for this sort of event. (It’d be great to see a show like this as part of the London Design Festival too.)

Downstairs at the show the gang at It’s Nice That had set up a live drawing studio, where we caught up with Tom Gauld, who (naturally) was busy drawing robots.

The show is only on until Sunday (27 March), so if you want to check it out, better get your skates on.

25 March 2011 | No Comments

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

Present & Correct Pop-in Shop: damn lovely

Well heck, sometimes Christmas really does come early. Just downstairs from the We Made This studio, the guys from Present & Correct have opened up their first Pop-In shop, and quite frankly it made us feel like the proverbial kids in a candy store.

The shop is a treasure trove of design goodness, ranging from stationery to prints to books: some of them are created by Present & Correct, some are sourced from around the world; and there are even a few one-off items.

You could pick us out just about anything from this place and we’d give you a great big hug. (We’re just saying. You don’t have to get us anything. You could… but you don’t have to.)

The shop is open until 21 December, Monday to Saturday, 12 to 6.30, with late opening on Thursdays till 9pm. If you can’t make it along to the shop, they sell through their site too.

7 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 | 73 Comments

Nobrow

We trundled over to Great Eastern Street yesterday to have a chat to the folks at Nobrow about a rather exciting project we’re working on (more on that mighty soon), and to check out their lovely shop, which opened in the summer.

Nobrow has fingers in various tasty pies: there’s Nobrow Press, the small independent publishing company which specialises in low edition illustrated books; Nobrow Small Press which creates extremely limited edition screenprinted books; a magazine (called Nobrow, naturally enough); and now the shop, which stocks all their publications, as well as a range of delicious silk-screened prints.

We particularly like Jack Teagle’s Jeff: Job Hunter, the story of a man who’s forced to retrieve the skull of the half-man half-beast from the dungeon of terror, just so that he can claim his job-seeker’s allowance.

Lovely stuff.

21 October 2010 | No Comments

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