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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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"...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.