Created in Birmingham

Punch Records ran a competition to design the ident for this year’s BASS Festival and the winner is Pretesh Mistry:

The two runners up are here.

JamFactory aka Gavin Strange is a brilliant designer from Bristol, but he’s launching his new vinyl toy collection, Droplet, here in Brum which gives me a good excuse to write about him here!

I first discovered JamFactory on Flickr, I think after one of his ‘Free Art Friday‘ pics showed up in Flickr’s interesting pages and have been following him ever since. I had seen the above flyer come through on an RSS feed of my Flickr contacts’ photos, but dismissed it at the time thinking it must be a Bristol-based event. Anyway, serendipity fans, I also happen to be subscribed to a feed of all Twitter ‘tweets’ (posts) that mention Birmingham and while doing a very rapid skim read of that, JamFactory’s name jumped out because he was talking about visiting Birmingham. So I didn’t miss out on him coming to Brum :)

Free Art Friday btw is an excellent idea, hint hint, Brum creatives!

click for context

The Big Picture are seeking artists/design teams to help with the following projects:

World Record Attempt (deadline for proposals 18th March)

Audiences Central wants to appoint an artist or artist/design team to break the world record for the largest photo mosaic in the world, as the culmination of our ‘Big Picture’ project.

The current record is 94,392 photographs covering an area of 562.85 m2 (6,058.46 ft2). Both numbers need to be surpassed in order to break the record.

MMS Upload Project (deadline for proposals 25th March)

Audiences Central wants to appoint an artist or artist/design team to produce an engaging online concept that will drive MMS photo uploads to the ‘Big Picture’ project.

The same artist/team may apply for both projects.

Skimming through Cassie Leedham’s Graphic Design website I see she did the posters used on the sets of the Control movie, which, I think you’ll agree, is worth noting.

From the Midlands with Love is a postcard book put together by BCU’s Media Content Lab brought to our attention by TAK! (who have a card in it).

Media Content Lab felt that too much of the design world’s attention is focused on a handful of London companies, so decided to do something about it. We put together a postcard book featuring the artwork of graphic designers, illustrators, web designers and character designers based in the West Midlands. The best computer artists from across the region were invited to submit their work before a final selection of the top designs were chosen to go into the book.

It’s currently winging its way to 100 PR, marketing and advertising agencies along with publishing companies and agents. If you’re not one of those lucky people and you’d like a copy ask Dom nicely and he’ll see what he can do.

Punch Records are running a competition for desginers to create an advert for this year’s BASS Festival “highlighting this year’s theme of The Four Elements of Hip Hop - BBoying, DJing, graffiti, and MCing.”

There will be a cash prize of £500 and the winning design will receive huge exposure by appearing for six weeks on billboards in a central Birmingham location. The artist will also get one month’s exhibition space in a key Birmingham venue, as well as a launch event and PR support. Finally the lucky winner will get two full pages dedicated to their work, the project and their profile in the BASS festival brochure – of which there are 50,000 distributed nationally and internationally.

Full details are in The Punch Records newsletter and the deadline is Feb 28th.

Missed this one, but then I don’t go up to Victoria Square very often these days. Design City 08 is a “celebration of design focussed experiences, bringing alive the rich culture of Birmingham to demonstrate British talent and place the region firmly on the map of national design excellence” that’s been running this week - here’s the What’s On. The above photo is of the Design Pavilion:

Unique design consultancy IntheDetail have been commissioned to demonstrate the connectivity of design in the Birmingham region through their relationships with creative individuals and have worked with the chosen companies to design a showcase Pavilion. The Design Pavilion will be installed in the city centre within Victoria Square fro the duration of the event, showcasing the work of 12 local designers including Scabetti, MRF, Pottinger and Cole, Glass Domain and Guinea Pig Design. The Victoria Square area of Birmingham has significant cultural relevance to the event, due to the locality of the Art Gallery and the newly refurbished Town Hall. The location of the Design Pavilion here, leads into an area of urban regeneration that features examples of the city’s new architectural face.

The Design Pavilion is located at the heart of Design City and focuses on creativity paired with professionalism, aiming to present ranges of Birmingham based creative industries working at the forefront of their chosen fields. Design City not only aims to attract the visitors from Interiors Birmingham, but intends to increase awareness of the local and national creative talent working in and around the city.

It’s been extended until tomorrow morning so if you’re in town tonight do have a look-see.

Heads up from Helen Graham at Guineapig Design who’s “TableManners” is part of the show: “table etiquette for the PlayStaion generation. How to get TV dinners back onto the dining table (and people communicating again) via remote-controlled salt and pepper-pot battle mischief, around correctly laid out place settings.”

A press release through from Marketing Birmingham tells us that TAK! have gotten the tender for the new Visit Birmingham website. I wouldn’t normally blog about such things but this is, I feel, pretty interesting.

1) TAK! is a relatively small web design company, not the sort of operation you’d expect a major City project to go to (unless I’m mistaken).

2) TAK!, in my opinion, really understand the internet and should be able to provide all the “Web 2.0″ stuff required without bolloxing it up. That MB were able to see this in their application is a credit to them.

3) TAK! come, if you’ll excuse the expression, “from the street” as evidenced by their Stickernation project so understand there’s more to Birmingham than the usual tourist stuff (as important as that is). Whether they can get this through to the content of the site is debatable, but their branding of the site should be interesting.

From the press release (Word doc):

“They are clearly experts in their field and had thought about the long term development of the site, not just a quick fix. They incorporated Web 2.0 technologies in their proposals as it is an important way of facilitating user generated content but did not overload on gimmicks just for the sake of it. They also proposed future extensions of their ideas to really add value and ensure that the website will be flexible enough to keep evolving.”

The Visit Birmingham website was created to encourage people to come to the city, make it easy for them to do so and ensure they make the most of what Birmingham has to offer while they’re here. The new design will aim to place Birmingham at the forefront of digital technology. It will be stylish yet simple and will incorporate a fresh look with an innovative content strategy to engage with, retain and guide users.

Best of luck to them!

I don’t like to post about individual gigs and the like for fear of opening the floodgates but this terrific flyer from Coldrice is deserving of wider attention.

Or maybe I’m just a sucker for pulp.

There is a personal side to this too. When I moved back to Birmingham in 2003 after a few years away one of the first things that told me the city had interesting people doing interesting things was going to a Coldrice night at Bar Academy. The funereal oom-pah of Dead Brothers in particular blew my tiny mind. So without them I might not have started this journey of exploration.

via Fused who inform that Steve Copter of Coldrice is also Steve of Newtasty and created that wonderful flyer.

TAK have published a magazine for use as a promo showcase thingy.

Do Want.

Designer Maker West Midlands is running a couple of Seminar Discussion Days at the Arts Council offices on Granville St.

The events are aimed at supporting mid-career makers wishing to engage in discussion on ideas for new work and developing new markets. The intention is to provide an opportunity for debate, the exchange of ideas and the practical working up of plans for new work and new markets.

21st Jan sees “In Conversation with Leading Practitioners” with “In Conversation with Curators and Gallery Professionals” following on 11th Feb. No mention of cost so I’m guessing they’re free though booking is essential as numbers are limited. Full details including speakers. via D’log

TAK! Papercrafts for the festive season for you to download and make!

Newtasty - an illustration / design company to investigate in the new year…

Boxer are a creative design agency based at Fort Dunlop whose web presence is a great example of the sort of thing I’ve been banging on about recently. Their corporate face is all slick and professional while their nascent blog, Soak It Up is a mad pile of bonkers that makes my head spin in the best possible way grabbing inspirational stuff from around the web, linking to useful resources and telling little stories about life in the business.

And then while writing this I come across another designer with the site / blog dichotomy going strong. Mark Murph’s Surely? site is still being constructed but his blog is gaining good traction telling you pretty much all you need to know about where he’s coming from.

To be honest most of the design agencies in Birmingham get the blog thing because they’re in the business of knowing how the internet works. But this can work for you no matter what field you’re in. I’d particuarly like to see Birmingham’s Fine Artists doing blogs like this alongside their portfolios. Let us know what’s happening there, people.

Boxer tip from Jon

Still on the subject of the Plus+ Festival, 383 Project have posted up some photos of their rather impressive stand.

“See how we’ve grown” indeed!

Couple of things from Sam and George at Stereographic.

They’ve released a series of limited edition prints for sale from their site.

And in looking at that I belatedly noticed their video of their fantastic stand at the Plus+ festival is up.

The Graphic Auteur - Expressive Graphic Design is a show at the BIAD Department of Art on Margaret St curated by David Osbaldestin and Paul Slocombe.

The Graphic Auteur presents a diverse range of creative approaches and graphic responses, to contemporary graphic design and politics. Through a series of personal issue-based communications and expressive graphic design. second year students from the BA (Hons) Visual Communication course, become both author and designer, taking responsibility for the ethical direction of their messages, leading to the emergence of a personal style and graphic signature.

The private view is tomorrow evening (Tuesday) at 5.30 and it then runs until the 16th.

Illustration above by Laura Davies taken from this gallery.

My partner in bloggery-crime Stef Lewandowski explains what he’s up to at great length. In short, 3form is now just him and it’s all about the ideas.

Post journalist Joanna Geary is interviewing Trevor Beattie soon and is soliciting questions from the public on her blog. Beattie was responsible for inflicting FCUK on us but let’s not hold that against him. Too much. Questions about branding Birmingham will no doubt occur.