today

2012-01-20T21:38:00.000+01:00

Stykker af Stumper - Pieces of Bits

The first Denmark-based workshop for a secret club of the year is a mere week and two days away and I'm very, very proud of this one. We are presenting a miniature programme of films at a cinema to fuel imagination before playing. The programme consists of a surprise short by the Quay Brothers, followed by Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus - links to trailer, tickets and info on a secret club's website.

Image from schhh.org

When the house lights go up, our Automatic Collage Material Vending Machine will be purring like a kitten and ready to provide the punters with everything they need to make a collage of unimaginable beauty and cleverness.

If you're in Aarhus, and want to spend a Sunday morning like it's meant to be spent, buy your tickets here.

This one is more for the grown-ups as the films are, but if any kids want to drop in at around 12.30-1.00PM when the film is over, we're not known to stop you.

2012-01-06T08:13:00.004+01:00

Super Duper Zine

The Super Duper Nova zine is now finished and shipping.

The cover

Elkeland

Xavi Garcia

Anna Walsh of Garudio Studiage

You can still pre order to be sure that you get your copy.

2011-12-30T08:34:00.000+01:00

Happy Super Duper Nova New Year

This morning I finished my collage for a secret club's upcoming collage show Super Duper Nova using the materials sent to me by Garudio Youth. Garudio Youth is the intern "wing" of Garudio Studiage so what they sent was a collection of Peckham placemats, plasters and plastic coated stuff - all hideous, but good fun to try to turn it around.

The Super Duper Nova show opens on 18th January at the cinema Øst for Paradis in Aarhus, Denmark and runs until 29th January. We got more than 25 artists and designers to send random bits of paper to each other and then create a collage from what they received. For the show we're publishing a limited edition catalogue/zine (32 pages) which can be pre-ordered from the new schhhop of a secret club.

Here's a mock-up preview, not at all final layout:

2011-12-05T07:54:00.000+01:00

offline online advent calender

Last year around this time a secret club created a little online experience or activity every day for our advent calender playing with the idea of taking an online activity and method of delivery out of the computer, there were paper kits, collage challenges and so on.

This year, our advent calendar is running on the four Sundays leading up to Christmas - this is major thing in continental Northern Europe and this time, it's even more removed from the internet that hosts it: It's a geographical game (we love geographical games) and by following the instructions posted on the website, you will find a creation of ours in the landscape in and around Aarhus.

This was the first one, now taken offline, so the directions to it are gone, but the little house is still out there for passers by to see.

2011-11-05T20:37:00.001+01:00

on the bus with the drunks
A cool thing about having moved to Denmark is that the drunks often are harmless and genuinely kind people, so on the bus yesterday, we needed a space for Mio's now Danish ship like pram. (if you're not familiar with Danish perambulator design: They are huge beasts.) The following exhange took place:

Very drunk drunk whispering woman: "What's his name."
Me, sober: "Mio."
Woman: "Mio, eh. Sometimes people give their children strange names. My eldest granddaughter is called Naninja."
Me: "Oh." I fought hard not to speak of deathly silent killers.

Long pause

Woman, staring at the green buttons on Mr Mio's jacket: "Little amphibians jumping around."
Me, thinking she's halucinating: "Sorry, where?"
Woman, still staring: "Aren't Naninjas little green amphibiams jumping around the sewer and a giant rat is their boss?"
Me: "Oh! No, they're Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but I see what you're getting at."

Pause

Me: "That could be a cool, modern name."
Woman: "Yes, the name of the child is...da-da-da da-da-da da-da-da"
And then we came to the place where the drunks hang out and she got off.

2011-11-01T08:45:00.001+01:00

I Am Legion - For We Are Many

Quick and dirty post to let you Son Franciscans (Daughters too) to get yourself over to 1AM gallery on 4th November as the A3 custom show I Am Legion - For We Are Many opens.

As mentioned before, my last custom toy will be on display, seeing the mad skills of the other artists, quitting seems a good idea, some of this work is astounding.

My little scene, showing the museum of dismantled warheads is called "Lemonade" for a number of reason that you no doubt will have figured out before reading this.

Huge thanks to J Brown/Anubis2night for making me do this.

2011-10-13T10:46:00.000+02:00

The Last Job

you, know. The one that goes wrong in movies, the one were people get hurt. All of this might still happen, but so far it hasn't been too bad.

in 2004 I entered a design competition to design the graphics for a designer toy, so did my wife - whom I hadn't met then. We both won and we didn't meet until years later, but that's another story. In this story, entering that competition was just another way to use graphic design, but through it I discovered the world of designer toys, I quickly decided to produce my own toy, this became the Antlor paper kits but that's also another story, because the real story is that it got me started making "customs" - existing toys you cut up, subtracted from, added to, painted and exhibited. I had a blast, I worked with techniques of my childhood, but better, wiser, faster. I learned a lot about materials and methods through this. I met many a good guy or girl and some not quite so good, as you do no matter what you do.

a few years on, I started to tire of the whole thing, during a talk with Matthias Hübner we discussed how narrow the scope of these toys is, how they're all based on cartoons, how it's a stagnant art form. I decided to quit - every now and again I'd make a custom because a friend asked. Once you quit the scene, you're fast forgotten.

I wasn't aware of it, but my creations lived a quiet, but appreciated, life on an online discussion board. Through this, I was invited to create work for the exhibition "I Am Legion - For We Are Many" and I lurked the board and the stuff people wrote put a smile of my face. "They like you." My wife said. "I think you need to do this." she said. I knew. I had to do it, but it also had to be the last job and doing a last job feels very good. The aerosols are empty, the old model kit parts are all gone and this is what's left.

There's a very pleasant interview up on Spanky Stokes

2011-10-11T08:29:00.000+02:00

the streets of Aarhus
It's no secret that I miss the art, design and inspiration of London and that Aarhus is lacking edge. I've ranted about crap galleries before and it made me very happy that Art Snob has now shut. On Sunday, however, Aarhus showed itself from its good side and gave me this:

First is a page from a porn mag, made harmless with plasters. This made me smile, the porn is disarmed but in a slight off putting way.

Second is a couple of Lego 19s added to already too many, turning it into a Paul Hardcastle song. I read about the guy doing these and the article mentioned that he repaired buildings with Lego, i figured it was just another rip-off artist, ripping off Jan Vormann but his house numbers are good. Why do so many Danes think we don't google the same stuff they do or look in the same Die Gestalten books?

Anyway, last image is an ornamental Jack White, I do love this model kit urge to accurize your house's ornaments, crap as it may look.

Actually, that's not all we found, we found one of these little unmanned shops you usually only find in the countryside too, we bought a metal fish-mould and an old tin that used to be the home of some ice cream that went under the name Tripoli, but more about them later.

2011-09-22T14:15:00.005+02:00

Jam sessions
Summer is truly over and one of the studio/family's autumn activities is foraging, well, foraging and scavenging is an all year activity, but autumn is more foraging for foods that scavenging for building materials and each progressive year we gather more and more food.

Making jam, jellies and syrup may have little to do with art and design, but the more varied stuff you do, the more varied thinking you will be capable of.

also, the better the stuff you smear on your bread in the morning, the happier you are. So far this year we have made rosehip jam, rosehip syrup, apple/rosehip jelly (quite stiff due to high pectine content in the apples), pear syrup, elderberry syrup (and elderflower cordial in spring) and chunky, cardemommy apple jam and finally these ten jars of blackberry jam, they need to last until next year:

It's funny how you get national differences in jam making, traditional Danish way is to rinse the glasses in some stuff with amazing packaging called Atamon but there's really no need for this chemical if you just sterilise your jars well.

Annabelle will have a more substantial blog post on this including the great labels she makes for all these goodies at some point.

2011-09-08T12:46:00.000+02:00

24 hours in Svendborg, Denmark

About a month ago I spent exactly 24 hours in the small harbour town of Svendborg for a course development meeting for one of the places I teach, I say course development meeting, but it was way more than that, good food, good jokes and a lovely hotel room that was stripy:

When I looked out the window I could see a stripy building and when I took a walk on the harbourside, I saw a star surrounded by stripes. This town is all about sailing and shipping and the building of ships and it's all over town. This place is filled with drunk ghosts brawling and Gods trying to save their souls, its workmanship and its tall tales and sights you wouldn't believe.

This place holds its history dear, there's a part of the harbour reserved for tall ships, but they move on too - it's not a tacky tourist trick, this maritime back story, it's just part of what this place is, many a Danish town, including the one that's currently my home, could learn from this.

Something I've found in several of the smaller towns I've been to, is that developers are beautifully absent - developers are currently destroying the soul of my town, everything is made slick and pretty, so most things that are left alone gains a certain interestingness here - merely because there's so little of it. (Which is sad from a creative point of view.) I walked around the next morning to explore before heading home, chatted to the amazingly friendly people of this town and stumbled across this old-shop-turned-subconscious-artwork:

Two drunks approached me and told me that the guy who owns it made the door our of an old fireplace, but that he'd never really done any more work on it.

There are good shops too, possibly the most interesting bookstore I've seen in Denmark is here, it's called "Troels"and the geeky staff was throwing pop-cultural references at me as if they were Kevin Smith characters, there's heaps of ornamental architecture everywhere and there's a bakery with no less than three signs out for reasons that escape me.

From this place you can sail to a number of small Islands and I'm very tempted to take a secret club around them, but we'll need a bigger boat, or just any boat.

2011-08-30T21:35:00.000+02:00

make medals - fake medals - part II

We are breaking out the old medal faking kit that last saw action about a year ago at Port Eliot Festival but this time in Aarhus, Denmark as part of Aarhus Festuge.

We'll be in Tivoli Friheden on Sunday 4th September from 12.00 and the last fake medal will be started at 17.00 so drop by to get the honour and glory you deserve!

We'll be bringing a lie generator this time and new and improved medal faking materials, so drop by and brings your wits, the lie generator feeds of wits.

2011-08-15T17:25:00.000+02:00

Tale of the severed head

Today I picked up a parcel from the post office, they'd sent me a letter that I had to pay some import fees - the danish postal service like their fees, this one broke down like this: Customs: 33 dkr, handling fee (that is, determining that I had to pay 33 dkr): 128 dkr VAT on handling fee: 32 dkr. A customs declaration was on the package so determining the value was not a 160 dkr job but when I saw the box, I couldn't really blame them for wanting to open it:

Despite the typo it's still a disturbing box to get your paws on, I should mention that the box was roughly head sized too. I'm not sure people who mail severed heads to people get boxes printed for them, though.

Once opened the contents were less disturbing:

More as it happens. I will be customizing vinyl again for the first time in a while, this head is a bit daunting.

2011-07-29T21:07:00.000+02:00

2011-07-21T14:39:00.001+02:00

Studio tour: The stuff around us
We have finished (well, we still need to make a movie) our "Spirits of the Forest" project, school's out, so no more teaching and most clients are away on holiday so let me use the time to show you round the place, you see, we moved about 4-5 months ago and sadly the new place didn't allow for a separate studio so we've engaged in a strict Not-too-much-stuff regime as the boundary between work and living has been blurred. This doesn't mean minimalist Scandinavian living like in the mags - objects feed our brains, so here are some objects that made the cut:

Don't be fooled, the clipboard look neat here, but the truth is that the photo was taken RIGHT after they got up in that old magazine rack. Also, we have more than one magazine but one is allowed in the rack at a time - at the time it was an issue of the always mind blowing Raw Vision. Right now, there are two issues of It's Nice That (3+4), Latest issue of CUT, an old Lodown, a print sample of a parenting mag and The Guardian from June 11th (We miss The Guardian so Chris of Garudio Studiage with whom I used to teach at Central Saint Martins sent us a copy back in June - If you want to send us a copy of The Guardian in exchange for anything bar our souls, please get in touch.

The candle was Mr. Mio's christening candle - a German tradition. The standard ones were pretty awful in that religious way so we made our own.

The glasses were from an optician that closed shop, they're carved in wood and the hands are from an old glove factory, someone I shared studio with once got them for a project.

Ah, the odd mix of light switches and plug sockets from different eras , the fake Pikachu one and the feather one are pretty random, the tache one was in our old studio too.

Art we like.
Some from friends, some from former students, some from former versions of ourselves, some are just nice, like the Letraset sheet there are a few things that ought to be there that aren't.

Wallpaper archeology.
I stripped of some of the newer layers of wallpaper - probably in impulse stemming from my childhood. On that wall are a couple of jumping jacks Annabelle made and a big green F that I found in a town called Ebeltoft which sounds a bit like someone the Moomins might know.

A mirror that still hasn't been put up reflects Annabelle working on something by the window that hosted The Sage, The Basil, The Rosemaries, Helen's Tomato, Pale Dill, Father Thyme, Dead Hot Chili Papas and a toner cartridge waiting to be sent to the recycling place.

That's it, I need to design some stickers for a secret club now. And you need to scoot over to that same club to join the mailing list, we have good things coming. Including stickers.

2011-07-14T14:54:00.001+02:00

stadig et par pladser til Skovens Ånder

Der er stadig et par pladser til vores "Skovens Ånder" eventyr på lørdag.
AOA har et lille stykke om det her.

De rå masker er landet fra trykkeriet og siden billedet blev taget er de blevet maskificeret.
The raw masks have arrived from the printers and since the taking of this picture, they have been maskified further."

2011-07-05T21:37:00.000+02:00

- kommer gratis i biografen

Den 16. juli inviterer en hemmelig klub alle børn over 7 år til at blive forvandlet til skov-ånder og gå på et magisk eventyr. Samtidig rydder ånderne, iført masker og nysgerrighed, lidt op efter menneskene og møder nogle af de andre åndevæsener der bor i skoven. Dagen efter er alle ånderne inviteret i biografen til at se den Japanske tegnefilm Chihiro og heksene.

Det er gratis at være med, men man skal tilmelde sig på www.schhh.org og der er kun begrænsede pladser.

English translation:

The forest spirits go to the cinema for free

On 16th July, a secret club invites all children over the age of 7 to be transformed into forest spirits and embark on a magical adventure.
At the same time the spirits, showing masked faces and curiosity, clean up a little after the humans and meet some of the other spirits of the forest. The day after, all are invited to the cinema to watch the beautiful Japanese animation 'Spirited Away'.

It is free to take part, but you must sign up early at www.schhh.org as there are only limited spaces available.

2011-07-04T20:31:00.001+02:00

Shane Brox at Den Gamle By

Let me introduce you to a man that may have turned thousands of kids to scouring the streets for trash - or what other people call trash. His name is Shane Brox and I first came across him a few years back around Christmas when I was visiting my family in Denmark. In Danish TV Mr. Brox had a show where he told stories with an eclectic mix of mismatched toys and sets + characters made using his trusty hot glue gun and found objects.

It's no surprise that I like anyone working with reclaimed materials on national TV, but this guy is good - not just with the glue gun, but with his stories too.

Now I'm living in Denmark and Shane Brox happens to have a show at Den Gamle By in Aarhus.
There are slight critiques of society in this show, little snidey remarks - mostly about paranoia - that add another layer, but also just that kind of weirdness that sits well with my brain.

According to what I've heard, he's been given free access to a huge archive of toys owned by the museum, this might not be the case, but if so, that's a major and interesting step for a museum that usually insists on historical accuracy in it's displays. (Except a few - I don't think a 1864 bakers mostly sold cake for instance.) This kind of stuff is the way to get people interested: Show them wonder, not facts. If it strikes a chord, they will look for/at facts themselves.

If you're anywhere near, I recommend this, it's one of the few little ways to get your mind blown in Aarhus.

2011-06-03T13:14:00.003+02:00

A secret clubhouse opens

We've been working hard in a secret club and our pop-up opens tomorrow in Aarhus, Denmark. Let's hope the kids here like our games as much as the London kids did.

2011-05-26T10:30:00.003+02:00

Subconscious art at Aros Art museum - a rant

Since moving to Aarhus, I've been baffled by the dumbed down attitude towards art here. First off, theres the shop at the art museum Aros. What they mainly sell is cook books, nick-nacks and babba-pappa toys. Not that there's anything wrong with either cook books or babba-pappa toys, there's just no connection to the art - it's like any other slightly out of it "design" shop, catering to slightly out of it customers. You could argue that a shop isn't an important part of the museum, but why not use this amazing opportunity to continue the vision you have for the museum in the shop Like they brilliantly do at Design Museum in London? You learn about design in their shop - at Aros, you learn about cooking with a Weber grill.

In town, the galleries aren't helping either. Far too near to my home a gallery called "Art Snob" has opened, here's a few of their paintings

And there's a gallery that advertises: "design your own painting" - send them a holiday snapshot and they get their band of Chinese craftsmen to copy it onto canvas - I'm tempted to use this service to see what they'd do with a broken jpeg or a gif animation.

So, on to the good stuff:
Tomorrow at the smaller and edgier art museum Aarhus Kunstbygning the graduation show of the art academy opens, including work by Ea Borre whom we'd very much like to work with for a secret club, but until then, I recommend going back to Aros where they currently are having an interesting exhibition of subconscious art. (a notion nicked from Matt McCormick's brilliant film "The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal".)

some of the work on display at Aros a few days ago

The piece sits somewhere between perfomance and sculpture, and that's an interesting place to sit. I've been back to see it a couple of times and it is ever changing, but the magic of it is that you rarely see anyone changing it.

Trust me. Start looking at subconscious art - and be honest about it, don't do it wih a snidey, ironic twinkle in your eye - and your world will become a lot more agreeable.

2011-04-20T09:10:00.003+02:00

a secret clubhouse pop up/et hemmeligt klubhus pop up

It's with great joy I can announce that a secret club have its very own popup (work)shop in Aarhus, Denmark in June. We'll be playing games, building things and telling stories and when I say "we" I mean both you and us.
Spread the word, more info on schhh.org

Det er min udsøgte og håndplukkede glæde at fortælle at en hemmelig klub har sin helt egen popup (work)shop i Aarhus i juni. Vi vil lege lege, bygge ting og fortælle historier og med "vi" mener jeg både jer og os.
Spred ordet, der er flere oplysninger på schhh.org

2011-04-19T08:42:00.002+02:00

A Storm in your Hand

Things are really slow here as you may have noticed - due to a certain little fella arriving with winter, but now spring is here and it's high time I got to work. Most of the work at the moment is for a secret club as that is what I enjoy mostly at the moment for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it feels good to be part of a collective, to rid myself of "my" personallity and don the gelled personallity of a secret club. It also feels good to design in a way where I haven't got the full control, where I am not meant to have the answers, but instead we must find them together, but lastly - and probably most importantly - it pushes the work in new directions, and the method of working in new directions.

Well, enough soul searching, on to the work.
We recently designed a whirligig for the children's at and science magazine OKIDO and it ended up like this

The vigilant reader will notice some conceptual recycling from an old collage:

but it was a long way to get to that - first thoughts were on a tornado tearing up a house Wizard of Oz/Twister style, we also thought of wind gods and cloud surfers but in the end, we created our own little story of ships that are fish and the weather being considered "good" or "bad". A mostly did the illustration and I made the mechanism work and squeezed it all in to on page in the mag.

it's been a fun little project, making a a paper mechanism that actually worked. I am aware that we may have overcomplicated things - kids will need help form their parents to build this, but designing a piece of communication that takes collaboration to use is very close to what we're all about.

Now, go buy OKIDO and support their and our mission to make this place magic.

I'll be back soon with exciting news for those living in or visiting Aarhus...
//EARTH ASTRONAUT OUT

2011-04-07T14:21:00.001+02:00

You wouldn't believe the things I've seen...

I've been teaching font design the last couple of weeks - this is a returning gig that I got back when I was really into font design, but I have rarely repeated the projects from year to year, both because that would bore me and leave me stuck with something that isn't nessecarily the best way to run the project, but also because there are some important skills I feel I need to teach these students, including the simple skill of looking - or rather seeing.

Since my own student day I have been convinced that there is inspiration to be found everywhere and that we have seen and learned so much that even the most isolated and boring place will somehow spark ideas, but that doesn't mean you should stop looking.

Here are a few of the things I've seen during my time here:

17th century wood carving graffiti inside the cathedral and a 17th century lenticular painting

Severed leg as a communication in the Cathedral, I'd love to know the meaning behind this.
Also, an old sales exhibition of tiles to frame your stove, now a place where bicycles are parked.

a fishmonger's logo - a drawing of a happy fish. There's something disturbing about animals we consider food to be absolutely fine with that. On the roads of Denmark you sometimes see pig transports with an illustration of two happy piggies playing football and the strapline "another batch of pigs on their way to the goal."

A hairdressers sign. In Forest Hill, London I once saw a handwritten sign saying "entrance next to the hairstressers" or similar, this one is showing, not telling. Also the sign of a saddlemaker. There's also a book printers here, not just a printer, a book printer.

Oh my God, it's full of stars.

2011-03-10T20:47:00.001+01:00

Kikkassen

Ah, the wonders of childhood. Let me show you the intro for "Kikkassen" and no, it's has nothing to do with kicking ass.

I grew up with this and I loved it. This is possibly one the earliest typographic input that I consciously loved. I loved every bit of it and only by revisiting it I understand that part of its awesomeness is due to the fact that you get three title sequences in one:

First this one where the K's are dancing their dance with the I and finally presenting us with "Kassen". That would have been enough for a title sequence, we'd gotten the title of the show in a catchy way, type with eyes, man! I loved those eyes and that dance. Well, this was followed by the second sequence:

Even more letters, each with their own personality going crazy in their ever changing grid, Every week my eyes were peeled to take in as many as possible of these, the overlapping S's at the bottom had a special place in my heart. After this craziness it all calms down a bit:

And the sequence is almost over, but not before an electric shudder shoots through the type and all but one eye disappears.

I do not remember much of the contents of the show, but this sequence has been with me my entire life, it may even have formed my interest in graphic design.

One time, my sister and I were ill, we probably had fever and we'd been given 1970'ies/80'ies cough medicine and I remember watching this in a couch syrup stupor, it didn't get less crazy, but I soon fell asleep.

Now, sit back and allow you mind to be blown:

2011-02-18T09:21:00.005+01:00

Repotting without tearing too many roots
As our move to Denmark gets closer a very Scandinavian melancholy is creeping in and mixes with hopes, so I figured it would be sobering to write these thoughts down, you see, wherever you are, there are things that bug you - here it's stuff like the quality of bread, housing standards, the government and rush hour travel, it's watching people letting crisp bags fall from their hands when they're done and the realisation that you might get knifed if you say something. In Denmark, it's the selfishness of people, the quality of art, the government and people littering, but I want to focus on the good stuff, because going away from your native culture for a bit is the best thing you can do to your brain, I have learned so much in these few London years and what I will miss from London is:

The edge. There is so much of it here, it's a hard place sometimes, but accept that and London opens up.
Victorian/Edwardian/bodged aesthetics. I cannot yet full explain this. I've sometimes tried to tell students that "Things decay differently here." and gotten blank stares. Fretwork is a part of it, handwriting a sign instead of printing it in Comic Sans and laminating it is another.
Connectivity. Whatever you do here, there's someone who will understand

What I will appreciate more than I used to in Denmark will be stuff like:
Roots/Tradition There is some crazy stuff there that I've taken for granted.
The sea I'm baffled by the fact that we have all this sea and very few of us seem to use it.
Quality of life. It's the little things, heating that works, a fridge that can hold more than 4 pints of milk, a small town where you can walk anywhere in 30 minutes.

So there you have it. It looks like I'm giving up on inspiration for comfort, maybe a bit, but in doing that I am forcing myself to bring some London to the table, I must be the edge, I must be a driving force of an interesting aesthetic, I must connect.

The cool thing about these two lists, is that it wouldn't work the other way around, I couldn't bring the sea, a Scandinavian quality of life and folk traditions here to the same extent.

a secret club badges, if you'd like one, it's yours.

A secret club will be a major part of this, we will continue and expand our work with playful communication, collaborative play, memory and alternative teaching and this will have to happen in whichever way possible, both on an official level but also in more guerrilla ways.

We will not sever our roots in London, Aarhus is not far away and we have some brilliant projects lined up, so I will be seeing you.

2011-02-12T23:01:00.003+01:00

Our friends over at The House of Fairy Tales a hosting an exhibition this coming weekend. and we have a couple of things there as well: Our Sea Signaling System and Antlor will be for sale as will artwork from an impressive list of artist including Fiona Banner, Sir Peter Blake, Adam Dant, Simon English, Georgie Hopton, Cornelia Parker, Bob & Roberta Smith, Gavin Turk and Rachel Whiteread.

The thing goes down in good old Clerkenwell, 68 St. John Street, to be exact from the 18th to the 20th - private view is Friday from 6PM to 8PM, if you want to see it at any other time, call 07957 138 354 or email for viewing appointments.

This will be a good chance for some behind the scenes stuff and an equally good chance to meet some wonderful folks.

2011-02-08T20:14:00.001+01:00

The studio is moving to Denmark for a while and before the move, the studio needs clearing out so head to ebay for some very limited edition The See prints, starting price is 14 squid - normal price is 150 that's more than a 90 percent discount (unless there are more of you that really want this.)

Until 15th February you can get your paws on some misprinted screenprints + rare extras at the bigcartel store. After that date they'll be recycled. (except I might want to keep a few, some of them are pretty amazing mistakes.)

Lighten my load and get some good stuff on your walls.

2011-01-18T14:14:00.001+01:00

designing the other way round

After having created an interactive cover for the printing magazine AGI we had a half-page ad to play around with and decided to use it to promote a secret club, so it seemed interaction was, once again, key as we wanted the ad to be half about us and half us, if that makes sense - we wanted to advertise without stepping out of the creative realm we were advertising, so interaction it was. being pressed for time, we looked to the advent calendar we had made in December for recyclable ideas and we chose to revisit the most minimal of animations: The Thaumatrope.

a minimal bit of planning of format and communication.

Annabelle's sketches for the Thaumatrope.

What would make sense would be to have the illustrator design the image for the 'trope and the the designer do the ad, and that was how we started, but what made this design process interesting was that after initial sketches, we swapped.

Kenn baring his chest to create the thaumatrope.

Not only did we swap roles, we also pretty much swapped the order you usually make these things in, starting a rough layout in Illustrator (of course initial ideas had happened in the sketchbook) before creating the artwork for the ad as a collage, building the ad as an oversized object.

Kenn's initial Illustrator sketch next to Annabelle's finished artwork.

This is obviously a time consuming way to work, but not massively slower and the exercise of swapping thing around benefitted the ad immensely, looking through an issue of the magazine, this will surely stand out, although this is very much an attempt to promote the work we do and ultimately to get more work, we decided not to put our name on the ad. Working under the name a secret club obviously makes that decision easier, but our experience with memory work also suggests that although fewer people who will have looked at the ad will know our name, the ones that have checked out the website following the ad will have a much clearer memory of us - spoon-feeding is not good for your memory, exploration is. Furthermore, this effectively filters out the less passionate and curious members of our target audience, the ones that wouldn't be interested in working with us anyway.

See the finished ad and make the thaumatrope here. (pdf)

2011-01-07T21:50:00.005+01:00

(the above means "keshi gumo")

As so many things do, this started by chance. I'm still not quite sure how, but I think I was researching British folklore and was reading a wikipedia page on Herne the Hunter - I think possibly to see if Herne Hill was connected to the myth in any way. What happened was, all the way down in "Other references" I saw the words:

Herne the Hunter is Monster in My Pocket #59.

I figured it must be the original Pokémon as I remember that being a Japanese abbreviation for Pocket Monster (I love this way of shortening double words) and clicked the link.

What I found was not Pokémon.

What I find is a toy range I didn't know but that echoes my childhood, it's an impressive and bizarrely ecletic range of mythical monsters from Greek, Norse, Russian, English, you name it myth and lore. (And some gods which proved somewhat controversial.) This is possibly one of the best educational toys I have ever seen - My brain is filled with odd bits of knowledge and this was the way I gained it - or one of the ways. I saw and played with something cool, and then wanted to find out more about it. School teachers didn't understand, they would be dismissive of knowledge of Baba Yaga gained at the toy shop - I knew that president Ulysses S Grant was a general in the civil war, not because of history lessons, but because of FineScale Modeler

I'm fascinated by these simple Keshi toys, there's no articulation, the early ones have no paint job, they are small, they are numerous and some of them are just ridiculously, insane crazy concepts - especially the series of figures called M.U.S.C.L.E. (Millions of Unusual Small Creatures Lurking Everywhere). These were based on the Japanese line Kinkeshi and feature wrestlers, but not as we know them, there's one made of tires, there's one made of tiles, there are spinning tops, walkmen-men and bodyless heads, there's a Rubricks cube one and a spring one and something between a sneaker and an alligator - like I said - crazy stuff. (I am waiting for a small bunch of these, so no photos yet, here's a pic from the ebay auction I won, courtesy of ebay seller cisavtr.)

Keshi figures, as they are called, originate in Japan and they make me think of Netsuke - The V&A has a beautiful Netsuke collection if you're ever near London and even though these cheep, mass produced rubbery plastic toys are far from netsuke in craftsmanship, there is still similarities and I see keshi as miniature sculpture. I like the iconic qualities of some of the Monster in my Pocket figures and the shear ingenuity of the M.U.S.C.L.E. figures is mind blowing.

New keshi are still being produced and out shopping I found Gormiti and bought one. (The one on the far right in the picture.) I'm very precious about my childhood and in my unfortunate, but usual way I thought that these were going to suck, NOBODY dares to be that kind of Sneaker/Alligator, man made entirely out of tires crazy in mainstream toys, i thought, all this goes through focus groups and play tests and has to pass grown up who, when you'd show them your new Amanaman figure will tell you he looks horrible or doesn't make sense. I am happy to say I was wrong. The Gormiti figures are (sort of) based on the elements. Fire is Lava, there's a Forest element and some of these designs, especially the forest ones are almost as crazy as the ones from the olden days, there's a guy made of rotting leaves, there's a tree trunk fella and so on.

Of course, these new ones lack the charm of very simple production methods, they are glued together by several parts and they have paint jobs, but they are still interesting. The figure I bought had two small metal pins under one foot and if you place him in a sacred temple playset, he will apparently speak. (It begs to be taken apart.)

There's a gaming element to these figures too and that is something that I'll explore further soon as that could prove to be every bit as educational as Monster in My Pocket.

2010-12-27T20:23:00.001+01:00

advent calendar goes away

Just a quick post to let you know that this is your last chance if there's anything you want from the advent calendar over at a secret club

After that, some new stuff will appear and the story will stay - there are plenty of hidden downloads there.

Expect a post on the few things that have caught my attention over Christmas.

2010-12-11T18:05:00.002+01:00

BEARD UP (santa style)

A secret club is making santa claus beard with, well, everybody who'd like to at Garudio Studiage's Christmas Extravaganza.

Drop by to make a beard for your face - it's sure to impress even the hardest Shoreditch hipster.

There'll be nothing else for sale and no other mask designs than the beard, so no hard choices, we will, however, hand out free hand decorated shopping bags to anyone who needs something to carry their ware home in.

It'll just be me tomorrow (with possible helper), but baby Mio may make an appearance along with fellow member of a secret club Annabelle

2010-12-07T20:23:00.002+01:00

Advent in a secret club

Over at a secret club we've silently launched an advent calendar - updated daily (sometimes a bit delayed as this is being heavily interfered with by the newest member who'll turn one week old tomorrow.)

We've hidden the advent calendar in the story already on the site, but for those in a hurry and not up for seeking it out on foot, it's here

Spread the word and take part, email us anything you've found or made and think would fit in and you might find it behind one of those tricky numbers.

What you'll find in the calendar is a mix of interesting objects, things to make, pictures and stories. Even though we're nesting here happily with the little guy, we're hoping to include some cool little experiments there.

Enjoy.

2010-11-24T10:04:00.003+01:00

luddite web design

This post could be seen as a shameless plug of the new website of a secret club

But it's also an exploration of an idea born from a mistake: When I made the first in incarnation of the website, it was merely a splash, but I wanted a minimum of content so I added a pdf paper kit that you could download, but made a typo thereby creating a broken link, A secret club is about play and creativity, so this broken link became a riddle and I warmed to the idea of designing in this "wrong" way - you could easily figure out that "downolads" would mean "downloads", in fact, you might go one further and have a peak inside the "downloads" folder - you could add content here that would only be accessible to curious souls.

The idea of designing riddles that were based on very basic functions in the browser instead of clever flash could easily be expanded, URLs would not be clickable, you'd have to type them in, you could have QR codes that directed your mobile device to a site with instructions for you to type into your computer's browser - leading somewhere not accessible by smartphone, you could have text the same colour as the background, you could have several windows that would have to be placed next to each other in order to make sense. This would make the web more manuel, it would be walking by asking directions instead of by sat nav. It would be going to the library instead of googling. Not that I don't like sat nav or google, in the same way I don't dislike beer, I just like to drink other things every now and again.

When I designed the story for a secret club I thought I'd use these tricks, but it didn't fit in. The story is a fighting fantasy style mini-adventure that had been tested on Twitter and it involved you embracing a setting where you walked around a flat. Adding difficult luddite navigation would take you out of the fantasy, there are still some hidden features and harder to work out tricks, but they all fit within the concept of the story.

Furthermore, I was worried about the user, whether he/she/it would be able to figure it out and that's the really dangerous bit, something in me wanted to make this accessible to everybody, cater to the lowest denominator and that is a horrible thing. If we are are so obsessed with things having to be easy, we are going to be spoiled, if you're spoiled, you get lazy and ultimately you'll forget how to solve problems.

2010-11-20T12:42:00.003+01:00

Bag a bargain (but more importantly: Bag a bag)

Opening Saturday 27th November and closing again 11th December is the Tea and Make pop up shop in New Cross.

We'll be selling Antlor kits and stuff like the Son of Ar and our The See Screenprints are going for, well, next to nothing. Fellow a secret club culprit Annabelle will also be selling goods there, including miniature shrines, porcelain pieces and Qee figures

With every purchase (if you're fast) you get a special paper bag - all participating artists/designers have been asked to design ten and ours were done as a secret club.

This, of course, means play and craft so our bags can easily be transformed into either a monstrous finger puppet (the small bags)

Or a medal for the big bags.

Only after having made these did we realise that the designs had to be the same for all bags and we're sorry that we've messed with the system, but this way you'll get a lucky bag style lucky bag.

These bags are re-visits to some of the projects a secret club have worked on through 2010 and bring back great memories of making medals with kids at Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall and monsters with grown ups at V&A.

The medal making will get a another revival very soon in Scandinavia - point your eyes here.

Please drop by to raid our stock so we can get space for new products.

2010-10-23T21:11:00.000+02:00

A New Haunt
31st October, 2pm-6pm, Watling St. near St. Paul's Cathedral

Regular readers of this highly irregular blog may remember when I briefly mentioned taking "Fighting Fantasy" storytelling to the streets - this is now happening.

image of the flyer - see it at the website for a secret club

For The House of Fairy Tales a secret club has developed a ghost story. The original brief said "treasure hunt" but this was the perfect opportunity to play around with the format and this one also offered the chance to include a progressional making-experience - participants are basically applying for a Permission to Haunt and must go on a quest to learn the necessary skills and to fill out their application form.

some of the stubs, forms, appendices and marks applicants will meet

The format is a story - participants are presented by a series of texts, but because we're mainly dealing with children and want this to evolve throughout the day, some passages are played by actors and "readers". Kid (of all ages) who play are informed that they take part in a story, they have a couple of choices that exclude some activities and I think that this will be interesting to observe. I still want to explore this method of delivery further and am thinking of a time-limited run in that format.

It is great to finally have formalised these activities as a secret club and we are going to throw a lot of things at you in 2011. We have learned a lot from our collaborations with The House of Fairy Tales and we share their idea of teaching things that schools tend not to value.

2010-09-29T15:20:00.002+02:00

hidden gems

This summer, we went to a small island off the east coast of Jutland (Denmark.)
On our way there we passed a building that caught my eye - it was an odd mix of different building styles and looked something like this:

In passing, I saw a sign that said Glud Museum. After a bit of googling I found the website and on leaving the island on our way back we decided to pay a visit, mostly because of a certain folk-arty influence that flows through our work at the moment, but also because a bit of reading had convinced me that the founder of this museum was an interesting fella - he built the strange house and produced work like this:

At various points of his life, he had been submitted to mental hospitals and he had been banned from teaching drawing to a group of students. This guy was not technically mentally ill - he was just hot-headed and had strong opinions (Anti drink, smoke, coffee, meat).

He had a great love of architecture, of crafts and of preserving buildings for the past and because of that we had the chance to see this hidden gem of a museum. I had never heard of it before, but it would leave an impression and would directly influence the building of our Signalling System: We based the colour scheme on objects seen at Glud Museum - being a non-dane Annabelle was better at noticing things I had been accustomed to all my life - it takes an outsider to notice.

We'd like to return with a secret club, we'd like to organise some event there - these things shouldn't just be for big cities. Of course the eternal problem of funding will arise, but we will see if we can figure that out.

We will also need to investigate - if this little wonder escaped our eyes for so long, what other amazing stuff is out there? There's a communication task here too - why haven't we heard of it? there's a similar, but higher profile museum a bit further north - should these cooperate? Should Glud Museum target people nearer to the other museum?

2010-09-23T13:24:00.004+02:00

rejected proposal: The Sign Bearer
or
Help fund our The Sign Bearer

earlier this summer, Annabelle Hartmann and I pitched a "sculpture" to Sculpture by the Sea in Århus and a few days ago we received an email saying that they had rejected it, now - this is not one of those bitter rants-posts. It's fine, it was a long shot and what we wanted to do wasn't really that arty.

examnination of combined signal - oh and the head of a fish.

Questions
You see, what we proposed was a re-think of the signalling system we made with The House of Fairy Tales: The purpose was different - where normal systems at sea give answers, facts - our system would ask questions, instilling a longing in people, a longing for adventure and everything but the mundane. It would also hint at a story about one exciting soul; the ever absent operator of The Sign Bearer.

Oh, by the way, it would have looked a bit like this:

It would be the tallest structure we'd ever built, we'd work with unknown (to us) techniques, but we knew that we could pull this off, but not how - now our problem is a different one:
How do we get to ask people these questions we wanted to ask them?
One very obvious solution is to do it anyway - we'd probably get in trouble for erecting a seven meter structure amidst "real" art and this version would require a crane, logs, a warehouse and several hard-hats so we will have to re-work again and make a much more hidden and subversive system with much smaller questions - whispering rather than shouting - which I am looking forward to.

Funding
With our rejection, funding vanished too so in order to do this, we will either have to do it on the cheap or raise money or a combination of both.

Therefore we will try to sell the model - everything we make from it will go into making The Sign Bearer. We will see if we can find other sources, but first off, we're ready to part with this

Offers welcome, big or small. Otherwise, you'll see it on ebay soon.

Also ready to leasve us is our Thames Festival signal system - with 6 two-sided signals and a Skull and Crossbones double signal. it's 2.7m tall and comes with ground spikes. Assembly required. Pickup only. Ebay Auction here.

2010-09-07T09:35:00.001+02:00

claim your prize you green skinned sea maiden!

As summer is ending, there'll be one final chance to play with us in London at The Mayor's Thames Festival which is on 11th and 12th September. We will be there as part of The House of Fairy Tales' Waterwheel project.

Our little game will be about signals and curses and tattoos, and while we don't want to give too much away here, we can show you a few pictures of us making it.

the shape of cursed signals to come

Annabelle's colour work

The above two combined...

Some structure being painted

We haven't yet the exact times that this game will run, but stay tuned.
We worked with two South East London primary schools on this, basing the work on drawings and exercises they did, you will probably also meet these amazing mariners if you visit us.

Prepare to get your sea-signal legs.

2010-08-30T11:33:00.004+02:00

Photographic Lies
As a student, I found Dave McKean's Mr Punch - a comic book about childhood memories with some dark undertones. For those of you who don't know Mr Punch, it's part photography and part drawn, the photos are all heavily shopped but the clue is that everything that's told with photography is false, lies, made up and everything that's drawn is the truth in this book.

Walking Photoshop
Later I found Fotomarathon which was part photography, part "24" (but without torture as such) and part making/building/customizing stuff on the go. We were a small group of people who did this for a few years and we worked on perfecting small, lightweight "In-Camera-Photoshop" kits.
I photographed a lot back then, carried my fotomarathon kit with me, because of the 24 picture limitation and the fact that you had to cash out to see your photos, I took care, I experimented, but I made sure my shots were as good as the could be. I never had a camera capable of doing double exposures and I've always missed it.

Going Digital
My skills went down the drain, I didn't take care anymore and photography became documentation. Sure, every now and again I went analog and took a few polaroids or played around with a 35mm plastic camera, but I never had one thing I had always wanted to explore: Double exposure and to me that seemed to be where you could really "photoshop".

The Unreal Camera
When my sister and her family gave me a Diana F+ I was forced to think again: 12-16 pictures on each roll, about 10 quid to get them processed and no automatic easy-way-out. There's also very little choice when it comes to exposure time and F-stops.

The camera has a plastic lens and is "badly" made, it produces random effects, combine with expired film and you let go of more control. Letting go of control is part of the "Lomography" ethos and it may seem silly, but it works, if you don't set out to take precise and "true" photos you gain the freedom to play, you give yourself the right to screw up and make something that looks nothing like what you photographed. I have taken a few straight photographs with it, but they are incredibly boring. That's what I like about this camera, it can't handle the truth - it is a "Mr Punch" camera. The above series of photos is from my second roll shot with the Diana, from about the middle of the film.

To me, this camera is for taking those "Mr. Punch" photos - documenting lies, fibs and tales. (The photos above are from my third roll.) This camera is my sketchbook camera, it is all about ideas and experiments, about creating something new out of the reality that lies before me, creating sights that don't exist.

A small "In-Camera-Photoshop" kit is coming together, but it'll be different this time as I now have my beloved double exposure. The above is what they call a Splitzer, named after a 10 quid image-splitter that they Lomography people sell.

The Blind Layout
It would absolutely be possible to use this as a layout tool using a series of masks, gels, lights to compose a book cover, a poster or any other piece of design, Instead of shoving things around in indesign, you cut out out your headline, mount it on black - or construct it of letters found in the streets, take a picture, then you dress up your model - you might want to use a dark haired model so you don't mess up the headline, you black up her face, take her picture, find a single cloud in the sky, construct a mask around it and position your camera so that the cloud will be where the model's face is. You wouldn't see your layout until it's processed.

I still carry my digital camera around, even more it's become a tool for documentation as I am not interested in the camera when I take these snaps, they are merely an extension of my memory where the Diana is an extension of my imagination.

More Diana shots on flickr

Anything you think I should try out, let me know.

2010-08-20T18:33:00.003+02:00

Tweeting Fantasy

Over the summer, I've been thinking about games and the current sketchbook is slowly filling up with ideas for playing and what games can be used for.

One of them started when I saw this splash on an issue of WIRED and ultimately was disappointed by it. In the mag, however, they did use the good old Fighting Fantasy system that really, really, REALLY rocked my world when I was a kid, so based on my own flat, I created a mini story in the sketch book as a test. Developing it, I thought of how this could be used to reverse the ARG thinking - they usually import a fictional world into the real world in order to connect you to a videogame, film, TV-show or whatever - my test had small bits of information about reality imported into the fiction.

I thought of the potential of this way of telling stories and there are some pretty decent things you can do with it - these will be revealed when they happen, but one that sprung to mind was:

I wanted to have the same sense of leafing through the book (or some of it) so I decided to ask a bunch of twitterers to join in and each host a segment of the story, leading them on to the next - At this point I was thinking about how the story could be used as marketing - how this could work as a way to get your target audience to visit certain places - obviously, this system can be linked to facebook pages, blogs, flickr accounts, websites for a more versatile system, I used Twitter because Twitter is flux - the story would be gone within an hour, or at least very difficult to find (I could have used hashtags if I wanted it to linger on.)

At a set time, my fellow storytellers and I tweeted first message, directing readers to the start, then a part of the story.

Marketing-wise, this generated very few new followers for the participants - I got a few, but mainly for the hype before the actual event, what it did was to tie the participants closer together, people checked out each others IDs, but non-participants reading the story did not, they focused on the story - probably also because of the Twitter pace - the fear of loosing something.

As for the storytelling in the twitter format, it works with certain kinds of stories, amnesia-stories are good, where you don't need any background, where you figure out snippets along the way. The system is very fragile - you're in trouble if one person forgets to tweet, so in order to make it work, I had created numerous IDs so I could re-route the story if that happened.

I'd like to thank my fellow storytellers: @sewkate, @tikaro, @nick_fu, @equisgarcia, @nerdmeritbadges, @ET_lives, @steveBussDK, @drhypercube, @p8tch, @guerilladrivein and @thisisnevermore

Prepare for "Running Fantasy"...

2010-08-19T10:54:00.006+02:00

the new blog on the blog
As part of the (slowly) ongoing overhaul of the website, we're seperating out the blog. The blog started out before blogs, by me uploading a small thought, update or observation every morning, then came blog software and we started using that - to also include images, but mostly, the updates were the same old format - a random thought of a plug of new site content.

Then came Twitter which is just that.
I like Twitter. I'm old-tech so I own no iPhone and thereby my tweets are of a different kind - they are exactly those observations I started posting back in the day, before the blog was a blog.

Now, Twitter has taken over the job of the blog and the blog has no purpose - for a while I've been wanting a place to write longer texts, observations and so on, something the blog wasn't really able to do (because I had stripped it all down - after three posts, the contents were gone - this fitted the format then) so now I'm re-doing it, making it a proper blog.

It's take a while to get into this, so bear with me. Updates will be more scarce, but hopefully longer, with more pictures and stuff. Sketcbook pages will probably go here.

I've deleted the old posts - they were meant to be flux and now they're gone. On with the new.

Be seeing you

2010-08-09T21:11:00.000+02:00

off the line
I'm offline for a bit, emails will be checked but sporadically...
Things are being brewed up, thought out and looked at again.

2010-08-05T17:11:00.004+02:00

Århus blues
I am back in Århus, as I have been a couple of times a year for a while now and it gets more and more depressing. What I increasingly notice here is a lack of caring - only the wheatpasters seem to still have it, shops, people in general advertisers, they don't care to be clever, smart or good and it reminds me of all the disappointment this place has thrown at me, I wonder if I'll ever fit in here again, or rather, if this place will ever fit me again. I have tried to help it out, I have truly made an effort to make this a nicer, better, cleverer, more positive place but I am increasingly thinking that it's a waste of energy.

This place used to be a nice, clean break from London, no feet on the seats and less fear of stabbings, the feet are on the seats here now too and at least Londoners apologise when they nearly take out you eye with a brolly.

2010-08-01T21:51:00.000+02:00

The Sconut + medals

To the right you see a Sconut I developed and tested in Port Eliot, to the left you see some medals adorning our medal making den.

2010-07-28T08:02:00.003+02:00

Port Eliot Festival
We are back from Port Eliot Festival and that has got to be the most beautiful festival I've ever been to.

These guys know what they're doing: Every morning, very early a massive and efficient crew roams the grounds and pick up litter, they pick it all up, and get rid of it so that everything looks good for a new day. Not that it's a lot compared to other festivals - people litter less because theres less litter, good old Broken Window Theory - nice to see it in action.

The crowd should have some credit though, the people at this festival are civilized, probably because they have an open mind, because they are interested.

2010-07-21T10:56:00.003+02:00

Port Eliot Festival

We'll be mostly offline for the next week or so, do email us, but we'll be slow to reply as we're with The House of Fairy Tales at Port Eliot Festival making and faking medals. Drop by if you're there, if not, watch this space as I'm pretty sure there'll be a write-up once we're back. In the meantime, here's a few impressions of the stall sign coming into existence:

I haven't designed type for a while, so this quick little blackletter was fun to do.

2010-07-20T00:07:00.002+02:00

amazing urban nature
Today was a pretty spectacular day - I had just bought a suit for my wedding and was walking through Soho. On a corner a group of people were twit-piccing away and I thought it was some celeb or a campaign, but it did strike me how in-yer-face they'd be if it was a celeb. When I turned the corner, I saw what had spellbound all these people: A swarm of bees had taken temporary residence on a lamp post, evenly covering about 50cm of it. It was beautiful and it was beautiful to share the moment with a bunch of strangers.

2010-07-16T22:31:00.002+02:00

Making and faking
For events like The Artic,A Monster For London,Spin A Yarn signage has been temporary, well, for you and me, that's cardboard. For the next event - that will be outside for three days, we can't rely on lucky sunshine so we're making bona fida wooden signage right now. It'll be nice to not have to worry about rain.

2010-07-11T14:25:00.002+02:00

TROLLS
For your convenience we have installed a new electronic system to keep trolls on site

The new system will ensure trolls are always available for you

Trolls will move freely in the store and carpark

However, trolls will lock if taken beyond the red line across exits from the store.

2010-07-09T15:50:00.002+02:00

A luddite use of social media
I'm currently exploring the idea of games and playing as a way to communicate. During the immediate future, I'm trying different things out - hopefully this will benefit clients and audiences. One such experiment is going down Monday at 4PM GMT on my twitter

One of the things that interest me in terms of playing is timing and although the small test game will technically be available on, say Wednesday morning or next year - I'm making it impractical to dig it up again. The test-game is best played Monday afternoon. Besides, it's just a test.

2010-06-30T10:31:00.004+02:00

The cover of Design Week (1st-7th July) features a DIYking beard - not unlike the ones from The Artic that you can make and keep as a souvenir from a perfectly normal week.

But wait, there's more: If you email us a photo of you wearing your beard, you may win something. We're not quite sure what yet, but there will be a screen print for the best photo + other goodies there's bound to be some stuff for the runners up as well - possibly something like this and possibly some strange objects lying around, so include your postal address in the email.

RULES rule
No purchase neceessary. If you don't want to buy Design Week, fake it.
Be as many or few as you want in the photo, props are allowed and encouraged.
Photoshop is definitely allowed, but this is not a photoshop contest and photoshop is just the easiest way out.
No sucking up.
Descriptions are allowed.
Deadline: 16th July

Judging criteria:
Viking awesomeness
Fun
Ingenuity
Style

2010-06-29T21:25:00.000+02:00

Daddy Jones's Lottery Eggs
If you've ever read the Moomin books you may remember that in "The Exploits of Moominpappa" they go to The Autocrat's party and that said Autocrat, who goes by the name of Daddy Jones, has organised a lottery.

The lottery is in the form of hidden eggs, each egg has a number on it and Daddy Jones then gives out prizes according to the numbers. Moominpappa is surprised to see that everybody get what they want, some get chocolate, Hodgkins wins a fret saw (fret saws feature a lot in this book) and Moominpappa himself gets useless stuff. This seems like magic, but Daddy Jones explains that he hid the eggs in a manner so that they would be found by the right people - He doesn't magically know what each and every one of them want, he just has an idea about the psyche of someone who looks for lottery eggs in plain view (They're lazy and want something edible) the more tricky eggs are found by crafty people, so these eggs are linked to tools, like a fret saw or other useful stuff and the last category is for the "outside the box" thinkers, the ones who look for eggs in the stream, they get silly things that only they see beauty in.

I'm not going to put a marketing slant on this, and I don't think you should either, just appreciate the beautiful mind of Tove Jansson.

In one or two days something exciting will happen here, so check back.

2010-06-27T10:49:00.000+02:00

What you haven't got.
When I grew up we didn't have much. We had enough, but my dad worked hard to make sure we had enough. I know that it was always on his mind that he couldn't let down his family and my mum made us clothes, kept the house in order and made ends meet.

What I had was my imagination. I would make my toys, I provided paper kit BMX bikes to the kids in the street - the kids that had laughed at the strange, thick paper that wasn't the graph paper they knew, their parents bought paper in the shops, my dad brought home these old stock-taking cards from work, but the thicker paper made excellent paper BMX bikes.

When you have little, you have to use your imagination and this, it seems, doesn't come naturally. This must be taught and it must be taught early because we need to change the thinking of the less privileged kids, we need to get:

"I haven't got what I want - I will have to make it."
instead of:
"I haven't got what I want - I will have to steal it."

And this responsibility belongs not to the government, the council or the schools.
It belongs to the family.

2010-06-24T22:14:00.002+02:00

2010-06-18T09:12:00.000+02:00

My job is becoming my childhood
Yet another Friday of amazing meetings! First up is a meeting with 30 kids about sea creatures and monsters, then I'm planning out a storytelling adventure-trail in a park - more and more often I get the question: Is this graphic design? And more and more often I push the panic button called: "It's visual communication, graphic design is just a method." I'm working of plenty, proper graphic design too, though.

2010-06-14T19:08:00.000+02:00

Stream of consciousness design
Whoa. Got to work on a flyer design this morning, had the concept nailed and had an idea of what I was after, but then, after a hectic day, when it was done, I looked at it and it was a page from my sketchbook, only made in Illustrator. This has never happened before, but I have worked in my sketchbooks a lot the last couple of years and I've always thought that my work and my research where two very different things. This is another of those things that convince me that my questioning the quality consistency is the right move: Someone who sees what I did today, may not realise that it is my work even though it does have a "style".

(The next bit I deleted because it turned into mad ramblings about a design method that's like a dog running with a stick - and that didn't help anybody.)

2010-06-13T22:38:00.000+02:00

Lemons into lemonade
It seems that my Antlor system for Kensington Palace has been destroyed - but that is what I get for exhibiting an interactive paper model. I had anticipated this and was ready to produce a new version if this happened, only now I'm thinking that I'd like to replace it with another interactive work, with the More Money. So if all goes well, you'll be able to print money in a royal palace soon.

2010-06-11T09:47:00.000+02:00

then we take Croydon

Off to Croydon in a few hours to steal ideas from kids - or rather, guide them to give us some input that we'll then turn into a piece for the Thames Festival this autumn. We'll be going through various things on communication, I'll be playing a sample of my beloved foghorn of Århus, and we'll do some inspector Morse code.

Sorry that the blog is lacking in interesting observations at the mo, but things are too damn busy, like yesterday when I designed a flyer for a well known Swiss army knife manufacturer - yet to be approved, made about 40 blank flags and constructed a Morse Code Remembering System.

2010-06-06T12:17:00.000+02:00

WARGH! my ride
This week I was teaching a bunch of graphic designers, the project was an exploration of typographic moviemaking. A hundred meters away, budding product designers were pimping rides and I was later asked to help judge these... things.

The winner was the Ford Viking ship. (Complete with wooden dash featuring stairs so you could access the stern.) Close second was the Warhammer-inspired junk-car that, for reasons I don't quite grasp had an additional porn themed interior.

2010-05-30T21:32:00.000+02:00

Up North
I'm in Denmark right now, will start a week of teaching tomorrow, but also planning goes ahead on events this summer, lots and lots of planning, so it's a good thing it rains all the time, that way there's little temptation to just go outside, before that started; I'd been for walks and runs on the seaside because one of these projects will focus on the sea, so these walks count as "research", but all they make me realise is:

1) I'm beginning to miss the sea.
2) This sea that makes me miss the sea is nothing to the North Sea coast of my childhood.

2010-05-28T09:24:00.003+02:00

PLAY WITH US

We are currently looking for people to take part in a one day play/explore/make event with kids in this lovely park at the South London Gallery on 26th June. In particular, we would like to get in touch with musicians or instrument makers who would like to come up with an activity involving string, this could be improvised instrument making, sound experimentation and so on - I'm not much of a musician, so I'd leave that to you. If you would like to be part of this event, please get in touch for more information.

We will also need volunteers to help us produce ridiculous amounts of colourful cord, we'll provide the wool and biscuits needed for this.