Blood, Sweat & 11 Years. 11-16th September at Dray Walk.

An exhibition of the past 11 years worth of work to come out of the design studio Build.  I can’t wait!

I just couldn’t resist making an Olympic themed post.  I am lucky enough to have a view of the stadium from my living room window, from which we were treated to a fabulous firework display on opening ceremony night, and this week I went along to see the Mens 3m Springboard Diving semi-final in the Aquatic centre designed by Zaha Hadid.  The atmosphere was great, huge roars from the crowd for GB diver Chris Mears, but what I really want to talk about is the venue.

Much has been written already about the design effort for London 2012, and my personal opinion is that it has been a mixed bag.  I’m still not a fan of the logo although it has become less offensive with familiarity, the posters I thought were really weak, the colouring inside the venues however looks great really fresh and clean and I love Stella McCartney’s outfits for team GB. But what really annoys me is that the various design elements just don’t feel like they belong, there is a lack of overriding theme.

But without a doubt my favourite piece of design is the Aquatic Centre.  It is a crying shame about the temporary wings for the extra Olympic spectators but I accept it is practical and at a time of recession I am very pleased to see the government making frugal decisions. The curves of the building both outside and inside are beautiful and the finish on the building is elegant.  My biggest surprise on entering the building was the interior, the sweeping curves around the pool and the sculptural diving platforms cast out of concrete are stunning.  Below is a little snap I took on the day but I recommend checking out the images of the building including how it will look once the temporary seating blocks are removed over on Zaha Hadid’s website.

Splash!

I love the work of Hey a Barcelona based design studio.  Really great bold graphics and use of colour.

Build are without a doubt one of my favourite design studios, and they’ve just updated their website with a new navigation and new work.  http://wearebuild.com

I love the simplicity of and elegance of this work by artist/illustrator Liam Stevens.

I love these photographs made by artist Jim Sanborn.  Light is projected onto a landscape revealing its topography and then photographed at night with long exposures.  The result is something that looks almost computer generated and surreal feeling.

In 2010 Ben Barry created the design work for the Facebook f8 conference with a variety of techniques including generative programming for the projections used during events and at the aftershow party.  The most impressive thing is that he learnt Processing just for the project showing just how easy it is to learn and apply to real projects.

For the 2011 conference the entire graphic system was developed using Processing.

Everyone knows about the limits of web typography and recently there have been several different technologies developed to address this.  Over the past few years I’ve experimented with sIFR and Cufòn, I have been wanting to try out @fontface for some time but had been put off by the need to purchase additional licenses for any half decent fonts.  When looking for a font to use for a recent project I can across this open-source foundry www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com with gorgeous fonts all free and ready to use on the web with @fontface.  While I love the complete flexibility that something like Cufòn provides, there are still licensing issues with some fonts and I found the more fonts I used on a site I started to get a slight loading delay, this isn’t an issue with @fontface which simply uses CSS and an uploaded font file.  If more designers are willing to provide their fonts for free or at an affordable rate I can see this option becoming the web standard of the future.

At university I went through a phase of making monochrome paintings and still love them today.  For me a plane of colour is the purest expression of an enjoyment of seeing.  It’s absorbing and uplifting and not at all limiting.  One of my biggest ‘ah ha’ moments came when reading the thoughts of Belgian artist Marthe Wéry, who said that the more restrictions or rules she placed upon her practice the more options opened up and she was free to be creative within the boundaries. Something that I think applies to most other practices as well, especially design.

I was reminded of my love of monochormes the other day when I came across this series of sky photographs by Eric Cahan.  I hope you enjoy them too.

It’s been a while since the last post on this blog and I like to think I have a good excuse.  Since December 2010 (December the 1st to be exact) I have been otherwise engaged in feeding, changing and generally entertaining my gorgeous baby Alanna.  Incredibly she is now nearly 18 months old and emerging from the chrysalis of babydom into a walking, talking little girl and I am emerging from this intense period of motherhood and have started to make work again.  Most recently I’ve been working on various posters for band BluesMix who just released their third album, Flat Nine, and am currently putting together a new website for painter Daniel Shadbolt – look out for that in the work section soon.  If you have a project and you’d like us to help, please do get in touch – Draw() is once again open for business.

I was simply transfixed when I came across this interactive light installation by creative collective rAndom international. Such a shame it was only on display in Switzerland…

I recently discovered Cufón a text replacement service that swaps out your normal HTML characters and replaces them with whatever custom font you choose (providing the license permits it). It is essentially an alternative to using sIFR which uses flash to replace the characters but can be a pain to set up and often has big delays when pages load creating a rather nasty jumping effect. Cufón I have to say was amazingly simple to use, took only a few minutes to set up and works a treat.  I highly recommend it to anyone else frustrated with being limited to web-safe fonts but reluctant to use lots of images on their site.