James Griffin is a 22 year old graphic designer working out of this fair city. He’s running a great blog called CMYKern picking up on bits of design that catch his eye, just the sort of blog I have a large soft spot for (they’re great for adding colour to your RSS reader).
The scope of his posts aren’t limited geographically but he does seem to profile some local things every now and again, including this post on Jibbering Art’s recent Shambala exhibition where he makes an excellent point:
Being the second largest city in Britain we need to make the most of this type of event and embrace the cities creativity. I didn’t realize how much stuff there was going on in Birmingham until I moved back here after my studies. Birmingham doesn’t lack creativity, or public space, as is apparent by this exhibition, what it does lack is a medium in which to reach out to people. A medium to let people know what is going on. I stumbled across this exhibition by chance and it saddens me to think that I might not have caught up with this exhibition had it not been for a chance encounter.
Yes! Excellently said. As much as I’d like to trumpet CiB’s efforts in this area, I spend much more time meeting people who don’t read this blog than people who do. There’s much more to be done in making people aware of what’s going on.
Fluid Design tend to fly a little under my radar most of the time. Locally, they’ve done the branding for the Fierce and Plus Design Festivals as well as the upcoming Hello Digital.
Or maybe it’s that my radar doesn’t reach to where they work – their client list includes Sony Electronics, Capcom, UBI-SOFT, Electronic Arts, Coca Cola, Virgin, Parlophone, Chrysalis… the list goes on.
I can’t remember where it was, but someone (love that tenacious reporting instinct) recently made the point that creative agencies in Birmingham are often better at working with others outside the region rather than within it. I wouldn’t know if that’s true or not – if it is then maybe Fluid would be the archetype for that.
Whatever, anyway, what set my off down this tracks was hearing that Jonny from Fluid is starting a new night at The Sanctuary called Bleep Bleep playing techno and such. Here’s the (back of the) flyer:
and if that floats your boat then there’s a Bleep Bleep Facebook group with more info.
I mentioned Winnie O’Brien back in May thanks to a tip off from Supercool but bemoaned a lack of information. I’m pleased to say Winnie’s website is now up and running, from which we learn that she produces animation, design and illustration for an impressive, international client list. What’s more:
Her work has received many awards including a Broadcast Designers Association Silver Award and an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Design and Animation
The theme of this year’s Plus International Design Festival is ‘Hybrid’. It takes place on 5 to 8 November 2008 and, as the folks at Fused have picked up on, a call has been put out for submissions:
The Festival is now seeking exhibitors, speakers and demonstrators to work to the theme of Hybrid, which has been chosen as the focus of this year’s event as it not only aptly describes Britain – which is a unique country that has developed in an exceptional way – but it also expresses the current state of graphic communications.
I didn’t go to this last year and for no good reason. I looked at it, thought it seemed really interesting and then felt daft for not bothering. There’s a lesson there. Anyway, enough mutterings, if you’re a designer then you probably want a link for some more info on those submissions.
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!
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.
