Not much to show ON the table this week, but let me reassure you - there’s some cool stuff going on here. There’s some work that I cannot wait to get printed. It’s been fairly photo/typo-graphic here the last few weeks and everything is coming together.
I’ve been getting back to basics. Reading lots, learning new things and devising new theories. I’ve been looking at scripts and trying my hand at them.
We’re staring to get some very good work in for our selection at the Created in Birmingham shop. If you want in, then you need to move fast. Email us quick.
And on an entirely unrelated note, I visited my mum this week - who gave me the coolest memory stick ever. Its a surgeon who’s head you have to rip off to access your data.
Some good magazines are out this week. We’ve been mostly enjoying Grafik and Computer Arts - lots to be learnt in both! Grafik even had a very nice poster with it.
And whats this? Ooooh, it’s a secret!
We’ll end todays post with some more LEGO. I got this for my birthday (the Monday just gone) and it’s a coin bank. The mechanism (made from LEGO) sends an octopus out to grab the money. Too cool.
We’ve teamed up with award winning blog Created in Birmingham to curate a section of their upcoming retail unit in Birmingham’s Bullring shopping centre. We will be selecting (and doing some of our own) prints, artwork and other creative goods to be sold through the shop.
Do you want to sell your work through the “SMILE with friends” wall? Get in touch with us ASAP. Email us, call us (0121 773 4851), tweet us, come visit us - it’s up to you how you do it.
The shop is ideally positioned in one of the UK’s largest shopping complexes that has 40 million visitors per year. I’m sure that this is going to make a real impact and there will be a lot of cool stuff going on in the CiB store. We look forward to hearing from you!
Oh and by the way, please spread the word - the more the merrier!
So you’ve seen the paper, now see the finishers and printers.
But before we go on about that, we can tell you that we’ve got a dead exciting project that revolves around genetics. We’re just trying to expand our knowledge on the subject and learning the essentials so we know what we’re on about. Info-graphics ahoy?
GF Smith sent us some wonderful new colourplan book. Shame it doesn’t show you the weights and embossings though. I’m thinking of using mine as a (very sexy) diary/journal.
We’re looking into another foil block job. It’s getting quite complex so we’re looking at some fantastic resources.
I’ve been learning about the process and some of the more advanced things that one could do by combining techniques. It’s all really interesting. Check out the micro-engraving on the third picture!
One of our good friends sent us a bag of goodies including a beautiful booklet for Jonathan Ive’s honorary doctorate. There’s also a nice piece of promo for Kingsbury Press.
It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve completed one of our most exciting projects. We worked with Babs Day on a school website last year. After working with us, she started to talk about this amazing project she had in mind. Shortly after, she asked us to work on the brief.
Now we have completed the project, we’d like to tell you a little bit about it.
Visual Phonics by Hand is a system of handcues for teaching and using phonics with deaf children. Using the two-handed fingerspelling alphabet as a starting point, it capitalises on the ability many young deaf children have. It offers a quick tool to show the phonemes in English speech and spelling. It overlays any published phonics schemes to give greater access for deaf children.
It was developed by Headteacher, Babs Day, who, as a Teacher of the Deaf, created it as a literacy teaching tool for mainstream or special school classrooms. VPbH has good application to Speech and Language therapy situations and home use too.
We loved creating this project. It was a real buzz. Sue got down and dirty with some motion graphics, Matt worked brand-side whilst Nathan coded the website and handled video production. All the other stuff was a team effort aided by coffee!
We also worked very closely with a subtitling whiz. We’ve never seen anyone type so fast! The result was brilliant. We even have the subtitles on the YouTube video! Filming in HD meant that the video is super crisp and we’ve managed to keep the file size down so that any computer can handle it.
Take a look at the website - http://www.visualphonicsbyhand.com
Find out more about the project by clicking here.
