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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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)

(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.

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.