IDEA Birmingham – the business think tank led by Birmingham City University – has brought together a group of influential business leaders to promote great brands and products using the campaign theme – Birmingham Made Me, the Original Design City.
Posters like the one above will adorn 200 billboards across the city advertising a Design EXPO and Awards to be held at The Mailbox in June. There’s more info here.
The designs being championed included the Land Rover Defender, AGA Range cooker, Pashley Clubman bike, Brooks England saddles and the Jaguar C-X75 concept car.
A little gloss has been added by the involvement of Alasdhair Willis, one of the founders of Wallpaper who is now, according to Tatler, “a high-octane creative consultant for brands such as Estée Lauder, Adidas and David Beckham”. He can now add Birmingham to that list.
Queen & Crawford:
are a Design and Fabrication Workshop based in Birmingham, UK.
Recent projects have included the design and fit out of a canal boat for Ikon Gallery, the Design & Fabrication of a modular wall system for Eastside Projects, the fabrication of a giant kite for Heather & Ivan Morison .
And here’s a very lovely film about that kite, called Little Shining Man.
Little Shining Man from Queen & Crawford on Vimeo.
Black Country Atelier is a 3D prototyping workspace. They also take design and architecture commissions and have just moved to the Jewellery Quarter.
I like the sound of their 3D printing workshops.
Fay Newman is an illustrator and graphic designer from Birmingham. Aside from these cute hand drawn designs, she also specialises in children’s book illustration and has the odd bit of textiles work in her portfolio.
Aedas have teamed up with BIAD and Triumph Motorcycles for their latest exhibition, ‘Accessories’, which will launch with a preview show on 16 December at Aedas, Colmore Plaza.
The exhibition will feature pieces designed by MA Product Design Students at BIAD, who’ve produced a collection of 18 alternative lifestyle accessories inspired by components from the Triumph Bonneville T100.
‘Accessories’ will be on display until 20 December, and includes designs for cookware, furniture, audio equipment, household appliances and even pet toys. Triumph will also be awarding one student with a work place opportunity at the company
For more information on the exhibition, contact aedaspresents@aedas.com or take a look at this post on Beverley Nielsen’s Design and Innovation WM blog.
I mentioned Dribbble in a talk recently. It’s a site for designers, developers and others to show off small screenshots of the designs and applications they’re working on. Nice idea, terrible name.
Here are the Birmingham people.
Highstreet stores may be filling their shelves with mass produced Christmas cards at the moment, but some of our favourite Birmingham based designers have been busy bees making their own festive designs.
Claire Hartley‘s hand illustrated cards are priced at £6 for a pack of three different designs.
Abigail Borg‘s letterpress cards – ‘Daphne’s Pinecone’ – are priced at £2.99 each, or £7.99 for a pack of 3.
Stephie Says‘ polar bear and reindeer cards are priced at £4 a pack, or £2 each.
Ruth Green‘s hand printed cards come in packs of 5, and has four designs to choose from. Each pack is £5 each.
Night Owl‘s hand drawn cards include four different designs, and can be be bought separately or as a pack for £4.55.
Emma Hardicker‘s silkscreen printed cards come in a variety of designs and colours, priced at £14 for a pack of 5.
Jo Ruth‘s ‘Spirit of Birmingham’ charity cards are £5 and come in packs of 8.
Birmingham & Worcestershire based surface pattern designer and illustrator, Abigail Borg, recently won Best British Pattern in ELLE Decoration’s British Design Awards 2010. Big congrats!
This isn’t new, not by a long stretch, but I’ve only just found it. You may well be aware that Acme, based in the Jewellery Quarter invented the whistle. Or at least founder Joseph Hudson did, back in 1883.
So Acme make whistles. Millions of them a year. For everyone. That’s impressive.
Almost as impressive as this contraption – a two-man flying whistle called the Acme Meteor:
The idea was to drop it from 10.000 feet and have two parachutists pilot it around in a spiral. In the process it would break the world record for the loudest ever whistle.
That was back in 2003. I couldn’t work out whether anyone has ever flown it (and nor could Tom Whitwell when he looked at Acme). Given that there’s some doubt, I think we can assume it hasn’t happened.
I imagine they get a bit of stick over the company’s name, but when they make something that you could easily imagine Wil-E-Coyote riding to his doom then you’ve got to think they bring it on themselves. Which I think makes them even more wonderful.
I’ve often wondered why museums and galleries aren’t using their web presence in more innovative and useful ways. I worked within a gallery for a number of years, and this gave me the unsurprising insight that many factors contributed to this: underpaid overworked staff, simply no capacity (in terms of time) to explore new avenues, gallery staff restricted to working within strictly defined roles with little room for experimentation, and those who do maintain the web side of things being under supported and in need of upskilling. Plus above all, there are many challenges facing gallery collections (from conservation to valuation to interpretation and beyond) that the additional pressure of creating new ways of accessing that information sits at the bottom of anyone’s agenda, particularly when it could just end up as a copyright/intellectual property/Digital Rights Management nightmare.
Finally, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery have been brave enough to tackle these issues head on with the decision to publicly release their world-class Pre-Raphaelite collection, the largest in Europe, becoming the focal point for this work. With assistance from JISC, BMAG appointed Birmingham-based digital agency TAK! after a five way pitch to design and develop a website application to achieve their goal. And the resulting site is a beautiful, delicate and sensitive piece of design. Visitors will be able to access high quality content which will enable schools, universities, and the general public to have a greater understanding of the collection in their own time, and in their own space – which in turn could encourage new visitors and raise the profile of the museum.
“TAK! have helped us create the largest online Pre-Raphaelite collection in the world” concludes Linda Suprdle, Project Manager at BMAG. “It’s a fantastic resource and provides an unparalleled level of access and quality to the works on display. Anyone with an interest in art should visit the site and discover the importance of the Pre-Raphaelites.”
I hope that this project will encourage other museums and galleries to consider making their collections accessible online. They have the opportunity to create such valuable learning resources which could cross so many diversity and access barriers, and it seems a shame that the majority of artworks only ever see the light of day if and when a curator deems them relevant enough. Using online technology, all collections could eventually be available to view regardless of current exhibition theme!
If and when that does happen, I will be interested to see how the role of ‘the curator’ responds to that change. The Pre-Raphaelite collection site already encourages users to create their own personal collections, so how far a leap would it be for people to share those collections and reasons for their choices with other users? Imagine an itunes playlist or an amazon reading list – but for art, complete with personal interpretations, anecdotal thoughts, factual evidence and academic input. THAT would be something I could become obsessive about!
I am extremely pleased to announce that the Created in Birmingham t-shirts and tote bags are now on sale! The items sport a fantastic design – a map of Birmingham’s wards created by Kate Parry. All profits made from the items will be donated to Acorns Children’s Hospice, a charity based in Birmingham that proved popular with you, the readers.
The items have been lovingly hand screenprinted by Kay Stanley at Cut Out Shop, in her WM based studio. She has used waterbased inks which don’t harm the environment printed onto EarthPostive tees and tote bags.
The t-shirts cost £15.00 and the totes cost £8.00. We have printed a limited edition run of only 50 t-shirts and 50 tote bags, and each item is individually numbered.
I wanted to take some swish pictures of the items being modeled, but have decided to let you do that for me! When you receive your tee or tote through the post, take a quick snap of you modeling it and pop it up on flickr, tagging it ‘CiBT’. Huge thanks to Kay Stanley and Kate Parry for all the help and support.
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group is looking to appoint a design services agency to create all publicity material and design work for the 2009/2010 season, looking at the overall brand and design ethos of the organisation and maximising the impact of the communication products.
This initial one year contract will run from July 2009 until June 2010 and if the initial period is deemed a success BCMG will offer a rolling annual contract to the same agency without the need to re-tender.
Birmingham Contemporary Music Group is a very active musical ensemble, performing a year round programme of concerts in Birmingham, touring in the UK, Europe and further a field. BCMG occupies a niche market, commissioning and performing contemporary music by today’s leading composers.
Interested? Find more information here. (Thanks to Dave Harte for the link).
I have just caught up with new work by Currentstate – aka illustrator and designer Jane Anderson (who I briefly mentioned in a post about the ‘Girls Who Draw’ exhibition. Jane’s work is graphic and modern, in a bright and breezy way. She is currently working on these retrotastic illustrations and cards:
Past clients include: BBC, Ten4, Channel 4, NHS, Liverpool Capital of Culture, Connexions and University of Birmingham and exhibitions at the V&A and Selfridges. Her blog ‘Doodle & Waffle’ shows off her wide skill base and experimental, prolific work ethic. You can find Jane in person at the monthly Moseley Arts Market.
A few weeks ago I set out an idea for a CiB charity project involving a design competition resulting in the production of a limited edition CiB t-shirt which will raise money for a Birmingham based charity. Now, two weeks on, I have done a bit of research, taken on-board all of your suggestions and found lots of helpful people who would like to get involved.
We have decided to money raised will go to a popular choice for a Birmingham based charity: Acorns Children’s Hospice.
This is the first call for submissions and here is how it will work:
- Anyone can submit a design entry to the competition, as long as you follow the specifications needed for printing.
- From the entries 20 final designs will be chosen and made into 50 limited edition pin badge sets.
- One final design will be chosen and will be made into 50 limited edition t-shirts and 50 limited edition canvas bags.
- All items will be lovingly screenprinted by hand and sold online by Cut – Out, a fantasic DIY print company based in the West Midlands. All items will be printed with eco friendly inks and on top quality Earth Positive apparel.
The brief:
We want to make a t-shirt that people will really want to wear, so the brief is very loose. The emphasis here is celebrating creative talent in Birmingham and raising some money in the process. You could design something which reflects the creativity of the city, or just your own style, it’s up to you!
Submission guidelines:
- The design should work using one colour, if the image is a photograph it needs to be converted to half tone.
- The design you submit needs to be 300 dpi (usual print quality).
- The design should be no bigger than A3 in size.
Deadline: Friday 6th March 5pm. Send your design as a PDF or JPG file to Createdinbirmingham[at]gmail.com, and hang on to your originals.
Birmingham based band The Destroyers are looking for someone to re-brand their image to co-inside with the release of their first full album. The 15 piece band have recently collaborated on a composition with The Dohl Blasters for the re-opening of Birmingham Town Hall, and have also been commissioned by Flatpack Festival to create new works for a celebration of cinema pioneer Waller Jeffs, to be premiered at the opening of the the festival at the Town Hall.
The Destroyers certainly are an eclectic bunch, drawing influences from a range of traditions: klezma, mariachi, ska, bhangra, Balkan Brass, celtic folk, gypsy jazz, and flamenco. The new branding will need to reflect this.
Interested? Contact Louis Robinson for a full brief: robinson_lja@yahoo.com.
